Chip Frontz rightly chastises me for not providing more context to the Milton Friedman quote below. Here’s the rest of the exchange from the WSJ interview with Prof. Friedman and his wife Rose, a distinguished economist in her own right:

Does it disappoint Mr. Friedman that the Bush administration hasn’t been able to roll back spending? “Yes,” he said. “But let’s go back a moment. During the 1990s, you had the combination that is best for holding down spending. A Democrat in the White House and Republicans controlling Congress. That’s what produced the surpluses at the end of the Clinton era, and during the whole of that era there was a trend for spending to come down. Then the Republicans come in, and they’ve been in the desert, and so you have a burst of spending in the first Bush term. And he refuses to veto anything, so he doesn’t exercise any real influence on cutting down spending. In 2008, you may very well get a Democratic president”–(Rose, interjecting: “God forbid!”)–“and if you can keep a Republican House and Senate, you’ll get back to a combination that will reduce spending.”

Mr. Friedman here shifted focus. “What’s really killed the Republican Party isn’t spending, it’s Iraq. As it happens, I was opposed to going into Iraq from the beginning. I think it was a mistake, for the simple reason that I do not believe the United States of America ought to be involved in aggression.” Mrs. Friedman–listening to her husband with an ear cocked–was now muttering darkly.

Milton: “Huh? What?” Rose: “This was not aggression!” Milton (exasperatedly): “It was aggression. Of course it was!” Rose: “You count it as aggression if it’s against the people, not against the monster who’s ruling them. We don’t agree. This is the first thing to come along in our lives, of the deep things, that we don’t agree on. We have disagreed on little things, obviously–such as, I don’t want to go out to dinner, he wants to go out–but big issues, this is the first one!” Milton: “But, having said that, once we went in to Iraq, it seems to me very important that we make a success of it.” Rose: “And we will!”

Of course, it’s somewhat strange to characterize a certain act as “aggression” but then say that we must stay and “make a success of it.” What does this mean? Consider an analogy: suppose I believe my neighbor, a pretty nasty fellow, is stockpiling weapons to use against me, and possibly our other neighbors. And suppose further that I have reason to believe he is terrorizing members of his family. So, I burst into his house, guns blazing, and apprehend the devil, killing a few family members in the process. But it turns out that my neighbor didn’t have the weapons I thought he had. So it seems that I committed an act of aggression, or, at best, a terrible mistake.

Given all this would we say that I must stay and occupy my neighbor’s house, running the household until a suitable replacement patriarch can be found? I think most of us we say I ought to leave, apologize to the family for those who were killed during my act of vigilantism, and perhaps pay them some sort of restitution. To “make a success” of an act of aggression would seem to entail, at a minimum, ceasing the aggression.

So, I actually think Mrs. Friedman has the more consistent position. She refuses to characterize the Iraq war as an act of aggression and believes we should stay there and make a success of it. Deciding whether making a success of it is actually a live option at this point I leave as an exercise for the reader.