Murray Rothbard on civilians and war

But "aggression" only makes sense on the individual Smith-Jones level, as does the very term "police action."  These terms make no sense whatever on an inter-State level.  First, we have seen that governments entering a war thereby become aggressors themselves against innocent civilians; indeed, become mass murderers.  The correct analogy to individual action would be: Smith beats up Jones, the police rush in to help Jones, and in the course of trying to apprehend Smith, the policy bomb a city block and murder thousands of people, or spray machine-gun fire into an innocent crowd.  This is a far more accurate analogy, for that is what a warring government does, and in the twentieth century it does on a monumental scale.  But any policy agency that behaves this way itself becomes a criminal aggressor, often far more so than the original Smith who began the affair.

~ Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty, "War and Foreign Policy," p. 335