Lew, it is indeed a huge disappointment to see Rummel on the dark side. I would never pretend to have anything on his excellent accomplishments in scholarship, however I have for a while had an intuitive skepticism of the "democide" school of thought, especially as it relates to foreign policy.
Democide is death by government – excluding war, usually. This presents problems. First of all, many governments that have done the most in the realm of outright murdering "their" own people, have also been less warmongering, as Rothbard has shown. On the other hand, relatively "civil" societies, such as Britain and the United States, frequently have much less in the way of extermination programs and forced starvations, and yet can be remarkably violent in war. Millions of foreigners and hundreds of thousands of Americans have died because of US warfare, but to focus on democide as wholly separate from war-caused deaths can, though does not necessarily, serve to implictly advance the notion that being murdered by your own state is qualitatively much worse than being killed as "collateral damage" in a bombing raid, or as a conscript for empire. Liberventionists, of course, believe this, and imply that when a small dictatorship kills its subjects it's on a whole different level of moral repugnancy than when a superstate such as the US carpetbombs villages and cities.
Secondly, war itself is often a direct, or at least indirect, cause of democide. Democide occurs frequently in wartime situations, and thus democide done by foreign regimes historically is often less a case for foreign intervention than it is one against it. The liberventionists have often dubiously used the facts of democide to make their case: instead of realizing the evils of US government warfare, they point out that "democide" has been a bigger problem than war (even though the two cannot be totally separated historically) and therefore "we" should tolerate x amount of US-caused "collateral damage" in order to preempt x+y amount of foreign democide. I know a liberventionist who even argues that if state A commits less aggression against its own subjects than does state B against its subjects, state A therefore is allowed to commit more aggression, presumably up to the differential, against state B's subjects than B is against A's. This is exactly the kind of rationalization of mass slaughter that Rothbard warned against. It basically means that people who live under governments that severely abuse their rights don't have any rights against foreign aggression done by the "good states," since it's not like they'd be free and safe anyway.
Also, the "democratic-peace theory" relies on numerous theoretical problems. Whereas Hoppe has done much to point out the problems with democracy, the democratic liberventionists would argue that democracies never wage war on each other. And if you come up with a counterexample? They simply say "that's not a democracy! Look how brutal it is!" So they qualify and define "democracy" in a circular manner: to show democracy guarantees peace, they essentially end up defining democracy as the type of regime that is peaceful. The idea that Iraq will be one of these Jeffersonian democracies that respects the individual rights of its minorities and does not, categorically, aggress against other democracies is almost certainly a total fantasy. Also, if a "democracy" aggresses against a non-democracy, I still think that's wrong, though the liberventionists don't.
