except apparently to risk other people’s children only in adventures that make Tom and Daisy feel morally superior.
Following on DougJ’s post from yesterday, They were careless people, Tom and Daisy it seems to me that there are some of you out there who don’t seem to get it. Those people continue to hold that there’s some kind of difference between “liberal interventionism” and any other kind of military action. They seem to think that if we don’t have a blindingly obvious profit motive that everybody will love us, and that will make everything wonderful and maybe this time people really will throw flowers instead of Molotov cocktails. Well.
Some of you seem to think that there’s something more morally acceptable about some kinds of interventions or invasions vs. others. Let me disabuse you of that fallacious belief.
When you send American Soldiers and Marines to the other side of the world, some of them will be killed or maimed. Some of them will kill or maim other people. Some of those other people will be civilians. Some of those civilians may actually be innocent. Witness Libya, where the door gunner on a USMC rescue aircraft on a mission to retrieve the flight crew of a USAF F-15E mistook a group of civilians on the ground for a threat and did what door gunners do. There’s a reason they don’t call them “door flower throwers.” The ammunition fired from an American weapon system do not care and cannot distinguish between targets that you feel are legitimate or illegitimate. They are completely unaware of whether or not they were fired on an offensive operation or as an act of self defense by a “peacekeeper.” The bombs dropped by USAF aircraft in Libya did not exclusively kill armed Qaddafi supporters and no one else, completely leaving aside the losses of two rather expensive aircraft, and the costs of all the fuel, spare parts, and munitions expended. Libya by any measure was the cleanest application of US force in a very long time, and we killed between 60 and 800 civilians depending upon whom you listen to and we spent about a billion dollars doing it. One or both of the aircrew may have been medically retired because ejecting from an aircraft is extremely traumatic and frequently leads to lifetime disability. Currently it doesn’t appear that we got anything from Libya for our troubles except four dead diplomats. I hope that ten years later we can say something different.
I cannot make Iraqis or Afghans want Jeffersonian Democracy more than I want it for them, and I damn sure can’t force them to do it in the long term by pointing a gun at them. Here’s a little secret–the moment I stop pointing my gun at them, they’re almost certainly going to go back to doing what they wanted to do in the first place. There’s a reason we still send peacekeepers to the Sinai after all these years. In fact, recent opinion polls in Egypt after the revolution show majority support for unilaterally abandoning the Camp David accords, and this is after both parties agreed to modifications to the accords that Egypt demanded post revolution. Bosnia only worked because the people in that region got tired of killing their former neighbors and more importantly, ran out of money to buy more ammo. The other problems with Bosnia and Kosovo is that it leads to the incredibly stupid idea that American force is the correct answer for everything and that if just convince ourselves or at least part of ourselves that our motives are pure, then everything will work out all right.
You need to ask yourselves the following question whenever you think the US should send troops somewhere for any reason at all: is doing this thing–whatever it is–worth my son/daughter/husband/wife/niece/nephew/neighbor kid coming home in a coffin or a wheel chair? Are you willing to risk your loved one coming home so psychologically damaged that he can’t work or work consistently because he can’t be around people all the time? Because if you personally are not ready to make that sacrifice (whether or not that sacrificial lamb is in fact in the service is totally irrelevant,) then fuck you for sending other people’s loved ones to risk their lives and bodies and spirits. If you’re not ready for your children to become killers and to deal with the consequences of that for the rest of their lives, then you are not ready to make other parents’ children into killers.
Because whatever you tell yourself about your intentions or whatever we as a nation tell ourselves about our intentions, what really matters is what the other people think our intentions are. If they don’t want us there, they’ll fight, absolutely convinced of the honor of their own acts and the intent behind those acts. Most of the Taliban see themselves first as freedom fighters. The bullets they fire, and the IEDs they detonate do not care about the intent of their shooters or their targets (more often civilians than not, btw) any more than do our munitions. At the end of the day, there are things that go on the world that really aren’t any of our business. We do not need to invite ourselves to every shooting war that is going on. Nobody around this blog seems interested in getting involved in Syria for some reason. Why is that? Surely bad shit is going down and innocent and helpless people are being slaughtered. I’ll bet that no one here thinks it either is, or should be in our national values to allow the slaughter of helpless innocents, but there’s been no clamor among the Balloon-juice commentariat to saddle up with John McCain and ride to the rescue. Well I don’t know about the rest of you, but for my part I can’t see anything to be gained for the US involving itself there.
If it’s not in the national interest–if we’re not getting something out of this for all of the treasure and blood we’re expending, and will expend in future decades caring for the broken bodies and spirits among our own, then there is no value to whatever we are contemplating, and it is every bit as wrong as an operation aimed wholly at seizing another nation’s resources would be. We went into Bosnia and later Kosovo not only because we were horrified by what was going on there, but because of the potential economic damage to some of our most important trading partners in Europe. And as truly horrifying as Bosnia was–I guarded a mass grave site about the size of a football field once–it was nothing compared to what happened in Rwanda. But there was nothing in Rwanda worth the expense and effort. The lesson of Somalia was that getting our people killed and maimed for no real benefit to the US was as morally wrong as sending them someplace for wholly selfish reasons. Iraq was mighty selfish when you get down to it, but a lot of people including more than a few liberal hawk types convinced themselves and others that our intent was primarily honorable. I hope the people who do that spend the rest of their lives unable to sleep, wracked with guilt over the suffering they caused, but I suspect that will rarely if ever be the case. Having said that, it is wasteful in the extreme to send our military personnel around the world on missions to uphold our “values” without some critical interest at stake. And values and interests are two entirely different concepts. Sometimes they overlap. Frequently they don’t. It is in our interests that economic activity and trade flow relatively freely around the world. Our values dictate that people shouldn’t hijack ships and take crews and cargoes hostage. So both our interests and our values are upheld by the anti-piracy task force operating in the Indian Ocean off Somalia. It is in our interest that the world oil markets stay relatively stable and the prices stay low enough that our economy can function. Disrupting that is against our interests. Our values dictate however that we should encourage the spread of democracy, with all the attendant instability, whenever we can. So what’s more important to you in the concrete world and not the abstract? People you’ve never met and never will meet potentially electing a government that won’t work with us, or knowing that you can afford to drive to work and the store and still buy food for your children? This, by the way, is yet another reason that Iraq was a horrible blunder in addition to everything else.
If a contemplated action doesn’t advance both stated US interests AND stated US values, then it’s likely something we ought not to be doing and we shouldn’t be willing to risk our loved ones’ lives, bodies, or spirits.
Raven
5X5
Va Highlander
Thank you!
Ahasuerus
Thank you.
cvstoner
The only “intervention” I can support is to help defend a close ally who is attacked on their soil. And even that with strong reservation.
aimai
I was never a liberal interventionist or a war mongering right winger so I’ll just stand over here.
Dave
I agree with 99.9% of this. But I always come back to Rwanda. Isn’t it both in our interest and our stated values not to have millions of people slaughtered for their ethnicity? Don’t we have an interest in showing the world that we won’t tolerate entire nations becoming abattoirs, and destabilizing the nations around them?
This is different than Syria where you have two sides that are now more or less equal in military capacity (chem/bio weapons being the big exception). But even there…if Syria demonstrably uses chem/bio weapons, don’t we have a stated interest in demonstrating to the world that we won’t tolerate those weapons being deployed?
I’m just thinking out loud. I don’t support the “every problem is a nail” mindset by a longshot.
Hawes
I would argue that the difference between Mogadishu and Rwanda was the difference between trying to influence a country (through the killing of Aidid) versus trying to stop an atrocity.
Kosovo and Bosnia stopped ethnic cleansing – which is really just a euphemism for genocide.
And stopping genocide is something we’ve decided IS in our national interest.
We didn’t act in Rwanda because we were gun shy and no one wanted to lead. In Libya, Britain and France were eager to lead.
I have no problem with intervening in Libya, because I never expected a “clean” outcome. Just a much less bloody one.
Luthe
I dislike the idea we should only intervene if it is economically in our interests, but pragmatically I am forced to agree. My bleeding heart liberalism would prefer America to step in and end mindless bloodshed, but morality doesn’t pay for bullets or heal TBIs. Until it does, I’ll have to settle for the marriage of morals and money.
P.S. If we really thought stopping genocide was in the national interest, we’ve have straightened out the clusterfuck in the Congo years ago.
Raven
@Luthe: So, mindfull bloodshed is cool?
SatanicPanic
I don’t get what you’re trying to say here. Do we have to have selfish interest for something to be moral? Why?
Xboxershorts
Bravo. US military intervention should always be the absolutely LAST final ever step. We have grown comfortable sending the American military all over the planet for various purposes and in every single case, from the Philippines to Libya, grievous evil is done in our name, often for nefarious hidden purposes associated with obtaining natural resources at something less than market rates. (Empire..wheeeee!)
I say this as a US Navy vet, ’80-’84, USS Lawrence DDG 4.
And in every single instance, big monied domestic interests have lined their pockets at taxpayer expense.
And now with the emergence of remote Drones, we can now project American military force to “get our way” in a disconnected and sterile fashion.
Making war should never, ever be done cavalierly. Will we ever learn that lesson?
gordon schumway
Righteous!
Tom Levenson
Damn, SG.
I’ll hold your coat while you hit ’em.
On Rwanda — there is actually more US interest at stake there (or was) than you indicate; Central Africa is a conflict hotspot with lots of resources in dispute, some of which we value highly. And mass murder (as opposed to a straight civil war ala Libya or Syria) does have a moral claim, I believe. But at the very least there has to be a minimally plausible route in and out of the action.
But broadly — as you say it, sir.
Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.)
I’ve thought about this a lot lately. I think that in the long run, if we want people around the world to be our friends, we have to be their friends first. That means, among other things, not going to war with them, not invading their countries or killing their leaders or, as some would have us do, converting them to Christianity.
The reference to Ann Coulter’s vile quote makes me think of something else. That dude Coulter and those like her claim to think so highly of? You know what he did when he talked to people and wanted them to listen to him and maybe take his advice? He looked after their needs first. If they were hungry he fed them. If they were sick he healed them. He never ranted at them about how much they sucked and how he was so much more awesomer and if they didn’t listen to him he was going to invade their countries and kill their leaders.
I know that neocons don’t buy any of this. If we want to be safe in the world, if we want everybody to be on our side, we need to make them fear us. Well, that’s bullshit. If you scare half the world and behave like a bully, you may well have some luck cowing a lot of people for a while, but sooner or later, well, some of those people are going to come to hate you enough that they’ll try to fly airplanes into buildings.
The truth is, they don’t “hate us for our freedoms”. They hate us because they believe, rightly or wrongly, that we’re a bunch of bullying assholes. And I know that if we behave like good neighbors to the world, not everybody is going to throw rose blossoms on us. That guy in North Korea? (I forget his name, the new kid.) That guy isn’t going to befriend us, whatever we do. So, too, with people like Assad or other tinpot strongmen. But we could earn an awful lot of goodwill by, well, earning it.
And it doesn’t mean we should shut our eyes to what Assad is doing. I don’t know the answer, but at least we should be leaning hard on him to get out, leaning with everything we have, short of getting into the war.
When somebody hates you, it’s bound to make things hard sooner or later, whether you’re one person or 300,000,000. We need to work on getting people to hate us less. A little humility would be a good way to begin. And telling people yelling that we should get into the war in Syria to go fuck themselves would be a big help.
Zifnab
Sorry, but this seems far too reactionary for my tastes. Rwanda was an easily avoidable genocide and we dropped the ball on it. The Israeli bombing of Lebanon was a massive overuse of force perpetrated by an ally, and we should have done more to rein that ally in. Even Syria could have reasonable received the kind of aid that would make a dictator like Assaid question the wisdom of launching the mass murder of innocent teenage protestors.
If i had kids, i would be happy to see them fighting for the defense of the helpless and innocent. Because there but for the grace of God could have gone I.
Thomas F
Hear, hear, Soonergrunt. I am not sure you will find a receptive audience in this forum. This is, after all, the blog that does somersaults and hoola-hoops to explain how the Obama Administration violating the sovereignty of other countries and butchering their men, women, and children is qualitatively different from when the Bush Administration did so. I am sure you realize you share the front page with people like Zandar and Imani Gandy.
Yutsano
:: applause ::
DPS
Well, except hundreds of thousands of Rwandans who are dead now.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
I realize that you needed to rant, but it really doesn’t sound to me like you are saying anything that most of us say: Not everything is worth fighting, but some things are. Most of us are not isolationists nor all out “save the children of Ethiopia because they are starving” types. The question is when to call it.
As for being willing to put people in harms way, most of the people you are talking to are empathetic enough that we can consider what it’s like sending someone else’s children to fight, or what it’s like to see a US helicopter overhead (is it exactly the same, no, but it’s still far better than the general war-mongers). If you need more credentials: Myself and siblings were in the military, brother-in-law active, father in Vietnam, his brothers in the military, his dad and brothers in WW2.
And this empathy, which I know Obama has, is why I will trust him, or any Democrat, to manage a war and not a Republican.
donovong
Hear, hear! or Here Here! or whatever. Amen motherfucker! Right on! Preach!
Yutsano
@Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.):
Just so you know I saw that. :)
The Moar You Know
Thank you. I said this yesterday. Take the worst humanitarian crisis you can think of. Is it here? If the answer is no, you have my condolences and my sincere hope you can work it out, and that’s all. No American needs to die because you can’t get your shit together.
We got problems of our own. Big ones.
The Moar You Know
@Dave: No.
@Dave: No. Not our fucking problem.
Chris
@Dave:
Actually, what people always come back to there is the Holocaust.
Pretty much everyone I’ve ever asked about it, regardless of politics, says we had a moral obligation to stop the Holocaust. But when you extrapolate that to current ethnic cleansing cases, like, say, Sudan or Burma, support for intervention suddenly drops precipitously.
In actual history, of course, the Axis made the decision for us. But since public opinion seems to be “foreign policy is not missionary work” in the cases of modern intervention, do we extrapolate that to go all the way back and say “no, if Hitler had stuck to within his borders, then outside powers should not have intervened to stop the Holocaust because there was no interest in it?”
(I’m not saying that “no” is an unacceptable answer, by the way. And I have no illusions that in real life, if Hitler had in fact stayed within his borders, the West would in fact not have intervened to stop the Holocaust. And he’d probably be getting the same honor in the conservative blogosphere that they now give to Franco, Pinochet, Pahlavi and all the others).
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
As I’ve said in other similar threads, when we reckon the cost in both human and financial terms of our wars, we have to add to the cost of the so-called “good wars” that they enable and encourage the more obviously bad ones coming up next, by way of the nostalgic haze of moral superiority and a job well done with which we choose to remember them. “Good wars” are the gateway drug for the bad ones. WW2 is the ultimate example, we’re still sucking on that crack pipe 60+ years later, but the smaller examples have had an effect too, IMHO.
Omnes Omnibus
@Dave: @Luthe: I tend to agree with both of you on this.
@Soonergrunt: For an intervention to be worth it, I would say there needs to be a reasonable probability of a net positive outcome. Iraq never had that. Afghanistan didn’t have that from the moment the Bush Admin decided they were going into Iraq – so probably from the get go. My concern about Rwanda was always whether we could effectively do something. I happen to think that halting genocide where we can do so is in our national interest. Perhaps I define national interest more broadly than you or others might. I certainly don’t advocate being a world policeman, but I think there is a role for our forces to play in helping to minimize violence.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): That first sentence should read “realize that you needed to rant, but it really doesn’t sound to me like you aren’t saying anything that most of us say:
Soonergrunt
@SatanicPanic: I’m saying that if you’re not willing to see your daughter maimed or killed for oil, you probably shouldn’t be OK with her being maimed or killed for some abstract idea that doesn’t pay the bills, especially one that won’t get us anything.
See, we tried to do the right thing for the sake of the right thing a couple of times. In Bosnia and Kosovo it more or less worked out, and in Somalia it didn’t, but in none of those cases did we ever get anything but shit from everybody else about being the world’s policeman.
Do you suppose that those good feelings make the parents and widows of the dead from those conflicts feel better about their loss?
Because I’m saying that absent both conditions–easily discernible morally defensible goals and easily discernible concrete national interest–it’s probably not worth the lives, bodies, or spirits of my friends.
Cassidy
Not sure how I feel about this post.
A common promotion board question is to ask which Army Value is the most important. The correct answer is they are all equally important, but I never liked that one. My answer was always Integrity and my reasoning was that it meant you do what’s right even wehn no one is looking. I don’t always do the right thing and don’t pretend to, but I try and most days I succeed.
Sometimes, doing the right thing invovles warfare. I never once felt like Iraq was the right thing to do, but I knew the right thing for me to do was deploy and take care of my Grunts and Tankers. And I knew when I went to Bosnia, I was doing the right thing by intervening in genocide. I would have happily volunteered for Rwanda or the Congo, because protecting people who can’t protect themsleves is the right thing to do.
Dave
@The Moar You Know:
And I disagree. The notion that we can sit at home, ignore the chaos in the world around us and pretend it won’t affect us…that isn’t how it works. Isolationism is just a way to ignore shit until it gets so big you can’t ignore it anymore.
That isn’t saying we should be everywhere doing everything. Not by a long shot. But saying “we have shit at home to deal with” to justify doing nothing at all no matter what…that doesn’t work.
Punchy
“Liberal Interventionalist” makes a great band name.
Va Highlander
@Zifnab:
I am deeply sympathetic but what, exactly, do you think might have been done? Send them a sternly-worded letter?
In the event, Hezbollah explained to them in a way that we could not and would not.
Pinkamena Panic
Didn’t realize RW-style isolationism was a liberal value.
jl
I don’t have a grand theory on intervention, so have no words of general wisdom on when intervention is appropriate and worth the cost in general and when not.
I think Soonergrunt’s examples are not airtight. For example, in Bosnia, our European allies who would suffered damage, have been accused of stirring up trouble in the first place because Yugoslavia was more useful to them broken up than united (though whether Yugoslavia had a good chance of staying united in any case is a good question).
What I know is that the arguments for the Iraq invasion were lies all the way down, so on that score alone, a bad idea.
I think humanitarian intervention in the case of genocide is is a difficult issue, and have no simple rule on it. I know the humanitarian argument for the Iraq misadventure was not just weak, it was also a lie. Hussein was a tyrant, but when he was in the mass violence against his own citizens business in the past, he was our tyrant, so we did nothing. And he as in the process of making huge concessions on the eve of the 2003 invasion, so we may have been able to achieve most of the purported humanitarian aims of the invasion, if maybe not immediately but soon, without it.
War is very costly, very risky. It necessarily involves indiscriminate violence against large numbers of people who are not primarily, or even at all, responsible for the problems war is supposed to resolve. Those are very large costs of war, or any armed intervention by governments, so the benefits must be worth the cost. That is the only general rule I have in my head right now.
Ben Franklin
Why is that? Surely bad shit is going down and innocent and helpless people are being slaughtered.
There is some evidence we’ve been assisting the rebels (free machetes for righteous beheadings)
The law of unintended consequences is morphing into the rule of law. Do we really have any business intervening in other nation’s internal affairs? The Butterfly Effect makes the triangulations for strategies beyond human acumen. When you arrange a blind date for a friend, how does it go? Badly, as a rule.
Soonergrunt
@Zifnab: “If i had kids, i would be happy to see them fighting for the defense of the helpless and innocent.”
Would you be happy (or at least at peace with) them–or better yet people you actually know–being killed or maimed for that? Because unless you can look at somebody you love and say (to yourself, if not to that person’s face) “I’d risk your death or wounding for this thing,” then that thing isn’t worth any other person’s loved one going.
BruceFromOhio
Is there such a thing as “bleeding heart pragmatism” ?
Bar is set.
Thanks, SG.
Corner Stone
@Luthe:
Straightened out how, exactly?
Chris
@Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.):
Well, depends who you mean by “they.” But certainly true of the average person in the street in Iraq, Afghanistan or Palestine.
@Omnes Omnibus:
Most wars, necessary or not (I would accept Afghanistan as a “necessary” one at least in theory), don’t have a high probability of a successful outcome these days, not for the people who live in those countries. Because the will to do the Marshall Plan type of reconstruction that leaves the countries you invade in at least as good a shape as you found them just isn’t there anymore. We as a country love bombing shit, but the idea of rebuilding it bores us.
You could, of course, say “it doesn’t matter if these wars have a successful outcome for the locals, we just need to hunt down the people who attacked us, kill them and then go home.” But since that leaves (in this case) Afghanistan as a corrupt and poverty stricken hellhole and breeding ground for extremism, it doesn’t even solve your terrorist problem in the end.
Anoniminous
Ain’t our job to police the world.
But we have a military-industrial complex to support so we will.
kc
@Thomas F:
Ahem.
Soonergrunt
@DPS: And assuming that we could have prevented that–a hell of a leap that assumes things we can’t possibly know, btw–how many US military personnel would you have traded for that?
How many friends, children, or other relatives would you have traded?
Because that’s the actual question I’m asking.
Ben Franklin
As it evolved, the airlift correlated with shifts in the war within Syria, as rebels drove Syria’s army from territory by the middle of last year. And even as the Obama administration has publicly refused to give more than “nonlethal” aid to the rebels, the involvement of the C.I.A. in the arms shipments — albeit mostly in a consultative role, American officials say — has shown that the United States is more willing to help its Arab allies support the lethal side of the civil war.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/25/world/middleeast/arms-airlift-to-syrian-rebels-expands-with-cia-aid.html?pagewanted=all
Andrey
@Soonergrunt:
I think that’s a pretty shitty sentiment. Seeing someone maimed for the sake of other humans isn’t worth it, but if it “pays the bills” it becomes worth it? Since when did selfish actions become morally better than selfless ones?
RP
I agree with Belafon. I’m not sure what this adds to the conversation.
Corner Stone
Are we citizens of a nation? Or are we all parents?
I personally as a citizen am a non-interventionist, even when it breaks my heart at what events are transpiring.
As a parent I am violently amoral, or anti-moral, and would go societal depraved lengths to continue the existence of my child.
Maude
Bill Clinton’s reaction to Rwanda was Why didn’t anyone tell me about this?
He got his excuse in early. The Clintons tried to make up for this by listening to survivors of Rwanda at the WH. It was pathetic.
Clinton didn’t speak out and that was a problem.
We have troops on alert in South Korea. North Korea has said it will cut off communication with South Korea.
No one knows what the leader of North Korea is going to do.
Omnes Omnibus
@Chris: Well, that is where the “net positive outcome” comes into play. Fundamentally, I tend to agree with the good old fashioned Just War Theory. The six tenets of JWT are a pretty high bar.
SatanicPanic
@Soonergrunt: That’s fair, but, especially in hindsight, it’s hard for me to see how there wasn’t a morally defensible goal in Rwanda. I agree with you in general terms, but in this specific instance I’m not convinced.
Va Highlander
@Chris:
Why?
Soonergrunt
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): Then you get exactly what I’m after because you can visualize that choice. If you can say that “yes, I understand and am willing to take the risk that my loved one will suffer greatly and possibly die for this choice and the outcome I expect is worth that” then you understand what I’m getting at.
That’s the calculus I’m asking people to perform.
Dave
@Soonergrunt:
So dying for oil and dying to save innocents are exactly the same? Good to know.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Soonergrunt: Let’s ask a slightly smaller question: Is it worth two rescuers dying in order to save one child trapped in a raging river? There was an example of this a number of years ago.
I am not a kook
@Zifnab:
Don’t worry about sending your kids off to war, neighbor! You know if *I* had kids, I’d be *happy* to send my kids! Cross my heart! What are you doing with that baseball bat?
Anoniminous
@DPS:
Most of those hundreds of thousands of Rwandans were killed before the US could have assembled, transported, organized, and invaded. And by the time all that could have happened the OAS was already in-country and US participation wasn’t needed.
Andrey
@Soonergrunt: You’re not just asking people to perform the calculus – that part I don’t object to.
But you’re also saying that in that calculus, for some reason, we should discount the value of helping others if we don’t get something back.
Let me put it this way. You said: “Do you suppose that those good feelings make the parents and widows of the dead from those conflicts feel better about their loss?”. Well, do you think the “national interest” makes those parents and widows feel better? Do you think “Johnny died, but at least the US didn’t lose a major trade route” is any more comforting than “Johnny died, but at least he saved a bunch of people”?
Herbal Infusion Bagger
The Clusterfuck in the Congo is a result of not intervening in Rwanda. Because the Tutsi RPF wanted to make sure that Hutu extremists that fled to the Congo didn’t come back and finish the genocide. That’s what triggered the Second Congo War.
As I’ve explained to Soonergrunt, there are sins of omission as well as commission. Iraq is a sin of commission; Rwanda a sin of omission.
If you want to draw the line for Liberal Interventionism at “National Interests at Stake, or Immanent Threat of Genocide or Large-scale Ethic Cleansing”, I’m fine with that. I don’t see a responsible foreign policy as one that repeats sitting on our hands while a Rwanda or Srbernica is repeated.
But neo-con “Spreading Democracy at the End of Gun” should be beyond the pale.
Corner Stone
@Chris:
Sorry. No.
S. Holland
Amen amen amen
Cassidy
@Soonergrunt: Bah. It’s a bullshit question with no menaing beyond grandstanding. The real question is not whether I’m willing to sacrifice my child for a great or grand cause, but whther I have instilled in my children the importance of selflessness and service. Whether I support something is immaterial. Whether my children have learned that some things are worth fighting for is a direct reflection of the values I have raised them with.
And when the rubber meets the road, if any one of my children can say “yes, I’m willing to threaten my own safety because this is important”, then you have to accept that.
Chris
@Va Highlander:
Because the chances of the Taliban turning over the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks were vanishingly small (certainly after AQ whacked Massoud for them – that was carefully and deliberately timed). And the chances of the al-Qaeda people based in Afghanistan desisting from further terrorist attacks was equally small.
Omnes Omnibus
@Herbal Infusion Bagger:
I would sign on with this.
Short Bus Bully
That’s fucking cold, man.
Watching genocide from a distance when you have the potential to stop it is no different than watching a woman get raped on the street in front of you and refusing to intervene.
There are no hard and fast rules with these situations. But to remain human and preserve your soul, how can you just sit back and watch all that shit go down?
PeakVT
Beyond a default position of not intervening, I don’t think an easily articulated rule (or rules) can be developed for the question. There’s always a complex set of risks, costs, and benefits. Weighing them all will never be easy.
Corner Stone
@Chris: And we needed under 500 people to do what was needed in Afghanistan. Probably far less.
Omnes Omnibus
@Cassidy: He is talking about the willingness to give the orders to send someone to potentially kill or die for something. If you would give the order for a nameless faceless stranger to do it but not for someone you know, that says something about your belief.
Va Highlander
@Chris: And how has that turned out, so far, now that you’ve visited collective punishment on an already shattered nation?
Are you even aware of how alQaeda got it’s start?
ShadeTail
This is just as reactionary as the extreme interventionalists, regardless of their reasons for interventionalism. When you have such a simple-minded black and white view of an issue, then you become unable to act properly when you suddenly get confronted with the shades of gray. Because I, apparently unlike some people here, am aware of those shades of gray, I refuse to stake out such an extreme reactionary position.
Maybe interventionalism is justified sometimes. Maybe. I’ll decide on a case-by-case basis, thank you very much, because that gives me the flexibility to actually be correct in those cases where the knee-jerk reactionaries are wrong.
Ted & Hellen
@Cassidy:
Spoken like the mindless cog(s) the MIC relies on to do its bidding. Well done!
You are, by your own definition, a tool.
Soonergrunt
@Andrey: I’m saying that both circumstances–it has to be morally correct AND it must service US national interests (and those two goals are not always aligned no matter how much you may wish them to be) should be the minimum bar for the deployment of US military force.
Or are you willing to grow the Army to 3 million personnel and double the size of the USAF? Because there are a lot of bad things going on in the world if that’s casus belli now.
Chris
@Corner Stone:
Fine. Then you’re arguing that we should’ve attacked Afghanistan with far fewer troops than we did, and, I assume, stayed for a lot less time than we did. IOW, you’re arguing against how the war was fought, not against the war itself.
Cassidy
@Omnes Omnibus: And I’m saying it’s a strawman. For one, I’m not going to send my minor child to fight a war. By the time this becomes a practical question to ask (adult children who make their own decisions), its no longer in my hands. My children will enlist or not enlist based on their own opinons and beliefs and, like any parent, I will be happy if they don’t. That also means that they are making decisions based on the values I raised them with.
Va Highlander
@Corner Stone: And the heavy lifting in Afghan was done with palettes of cash and Viagra, not artillery.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
Plenty of goodwill towards the U.S. in both Bosnia and Kosovo. You underestimate how much intervention to save a people (or liberate them) can persist through generations.
Both Clintons and George Mitchell are *fucking gods* in Ireland, because of their pushing the peace process there over the finish line.
Soonergrunt
@Corner Stone: Then am I safe in assuming that for the most part you are very skeptical of US military intervention under most circumstances?
Xboxershorts
@Ted & Hellen:
Was that really necessary?
Va Highlander
@Corner Stone: Whoops! Rephrasing, and the heavy lifting in Afghan was done with palettes of cash and pen1s pi11s, not heavy artillery. What we did was smash things in order to feel better. That is all.
Cassidy
@Ted & Hellen: Don’t you have some emails to write? I’m telling you John loves that shit with lots of caps.
liberal
@Dave:
The problem is your use of “our”.
Sure, it might be in our interest. But AFAICT states never act out of humanitarian motivations. Because the motives are wrong, the outcome is much, much likely to be what you want.
Omnes Omnibus
@Va Highlander: The chances of things going well in Afghanistan went to zero the moment Iraq was targeted.
liberal
@Herbal Infusion Bagger:
And the Serbs who the Kosovars ethnically cleansed? Not so much.
Andrey
@Soonergrunt: Yes, I would be willing to do that, if I thought they would only be used in cases where “morally correct” is true, which is clearly not the case.
We do not have a problem with interfering too often when it doesn’t serve our interests. We have a problem with interfering too often when it’s not morally correct.
Adding “National Interest” is the wrong thing to do to fix that. If anything, “National Interest” should be viewed with suspicion, because the presence of a national interest makes it easier to rationalize something that is not actually morally correct.
Alex S.
I disagree with most of this post. I realize that this was written through narrow nationalistic eyes, but your post is a rant against any kind of humanitarian intervention, as it is, for example, exercised by the United Nations. Your utilitarian view of the use of force is, in fact, a far more dangerous concept. If the Iraq War really was a war about oil, shouldn’t you support it? One should keep in mind that there is not only a role to play as a member of a nation, but also a role as a member of the human race. I think that the use of force to prevent crimes against humanity are justified. That was what Libya was about. It was executed well, according to international law, with minimal implications for the American standing in the world. The Iraq War has left deep scars on the soul of the American citizenry, because the government misled the people. But the Obama government didn’t. The Clinton government during the Yugoslav Wars didn’t mislead either. War is a dangerous tool in the hands of the wrong people, so we must ensure that the wrong people never get to start one.
Cassidy
@Xboxershorts: It doesn’t know how to control itself.
Omnes Omnibus
@Soonergrunt:
No good could come of that.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
I’m not fond of these sorts of simplified analogies because they remove two essential characteristics that make a decision to go to war very different from almost any other public undertaking.
First, war is a very blunt instrument with huge potential for unintended consequences, almost all of them bad. What if in your example the rescuers decided to rescue the child by blowing up the levees that are holding back that raging river, flooding the town and killing thousands of people?
Second, when we consider going to war our decision making process is tainted by bad information. Our mass news media are overwhelmingly pro-war, because war makes fantastic copy for them. That means the inputs into our moral calculus are full of a mix of facts, misunderstandings and propaganda. For this reason I don’t like the idea of attempting a finely balanced reckoning of potential costs and benefits in the case of a conflict of choice; if you even have to ask the question: should we go to war? the answer as seen in the clear light of day after the facts have been clarified and the fog of propaganda has lifted is probably going to be: NO.
Ted & Hellen
@Cassidy:
How’s YOUR inbox these days, killer?
Va Highlander
@Omnes Omnibus: They were always zero. It went pretty much exactly as I expected, save that the initial advance went smoother and faster than I thought. But then again at the time I didn’t know about the palettes of cash and pen1s pi11s.
Ted & Hellen
@Xboxershorts:
Wait a minute. You’re telling me that given the vile insults lobbed in all directions on this blog every day, that “tool” is a bridge too far for you?
Xboxershorts
@Omnes Omnibus:
I would say the Afghan effort went to hell when we rejected Iran’s active assistance in blocking off the south western border of Afghanistan and Iran.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
Tom and Daisy don’t have to learn a thing, which is basically the problem. Their kids will never have to serve, and if the last 12 years or so are any guide, they won’t even be asked to pay for their folly financially. Besides which, even if they were asked to pay for some small part of it, they’d still be filthy rich.
Soonergrunt
@Dave: Your reading comprehension doesn’t go beyond exactly what it takes to feel outrage, does it? Cause there are a couple of other paragraphs after that one you block-quoted. Like how both conditions should be met before you send my friends to risk death or maiming, and that you should at least try to visualize your child or somebody else you love being among them. I mean, if you consider yourself a moral person, capable of empathy, you could try to feel that for other people (some of whom you know or even be related to) or is it simply more convenient for you to remain in the abstract?
Cassidy
@Ted & Hellen: Filled with spam.
SatanicPanic
@Cassidy: I think the question is- if your kids already signed up for the military, would you be cool sending them off to fight in ______?
To which, I’d mostly answer no, but Rwanda was one case where I’d have probably said yes. Especially knowing what we know now (and which some people may have accurately predicted before it happened).
liberal
@Soonergrunt:
While I’m in complete agreement with you, as far as I can tell, one big practical problem is that people will just construe “national interest” in different ways.
For example, I can’t see how giving aid and support to Israel serves our national interest whatsoever. Yet I’m sure neocon scum will come up with a thousand ways in which it does.
Despite saying that, great post.
Avery Greynold
I understand how “the moment I stop pointing my gun at them, they’re almost certainly going to go back to doing what they wanted to do in the first place”. But if there’s an imbalance of force, such as one side with tanks and artillery, and the other side with old hunting rifles, balancing the force can stop genocides.
When the crazy dies down, and the locals get enough arms to make their killing less profitable, leave.
If you don’t like stopping mass killing because there are no American lives being saved, then maybe we should have two armies: One could be those who need the money and don’t mind being turned loose on corporate errands, and the other army would be idealists who would be willing to die fighting fascism and aggression (yes, we could end up on both sides of the battlefield that way).
And yes, my son was in the military.
FlipYrWhig
Yeah, like a few others have been saying, I’m not getting the vital national interest caveat. If Westia attacks Eastia, and we’re allied to Eastia, so we use military force to counterattack Westia, is that good? Or if the world’s supply of unobtainium is there, we go in, but if it’s just barren steppes, pass? I don’t think either one of those convincingly passes the dead-soldier test. I think stopping a massacre in Eastia is much more higher on the scale of righteousness than “vital national interest” is, because vital national interests are basically just money and the balance of power, and neither of those seems important enough to die for.
But, here’s the main point. What are we down to that _does_ pass the dead-soldier test? Military attack on the US initiated by a sovereign state, maybe? If that and that alone is the idea, I’m not sure we need a military at all, just a militia that can be assembled at a moment’s notice.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
The same applies for the non-interventionist side. If you had (say) a Tutsi or Bosnian muslim friend who called you up and said the Interhamwe or Republika Srpska were two miles down the road and about to round them up, would you still want Madeline Albright to sit on her hands?
Some of us have been on the pointy end of ethnically based conflicts here, and were grateful for the presence of occasionally inept peacekeepers if only ‘cos they kept us from each other throats.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Ted & Hellen: Um, what do you think a soldier is? When they get on the battlefield, they have one job to do, their mission. When we signed up, we gave up our right to go someplace and go, “Oh, wait, I don’t want to be here.” Soldiers and sailors are tools that have a particular ability: A brain. And it’s in their interest to act as a tool. When military leaders can predict their behavior, then can be used effectively and hopefully minimize injuries and deaths.
That’s why, while I don’t completely agree with Soonergrunt’s reaction in this post, it’s good to have this discussion. It’s our job as citizens to control when and where the military is sent. We should be deciding it’s wrong. What soldiers and sailors are counting on is for us to do our jobs.
Andrey
@Soonergrunt:
OK, let me try rephrasing my point, since you don’t actually seem to be directly addressing it.
Imagining that it is my friends and loved ones going to war and being maimed and killed, I am willing to accept that outcome in a war that is fought with zero national interest but strong moral justification.
Why do you seem to think that this is impossible?
fuckwit
You know, these humanitarian disasters and humanitarian missions– stepping in to stop genocide, intervening to keep a civil war from turning into a massive region-wide free-for-all, etc– are precisely the things that the UN was formed to handle.
Let the Blue Helmets do this job. Send US soldiers as part of a multinational force if we need to, to meet our obligations as a member. But to my mind, these kinds of security operations really should be done by a multinational force.
It’s not our place to be the world’s policeman. It’s the world’s place to be its own policeman, and the UN is the correct forum for that work.
Omnes Omnibus
@Xboxershorts: Looking back, I think the Bush Admin wanted the war with Iraq since forever, and as a result Afghanistan never had a chance. A different administration, a concentration on limited goals, and a real effort to rebuild, and who knows? But that was never in the cards in the world in which we live.
liberal
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Excellent comment. I agree—we can’t say “we’ll never go to war,” but the bar has to be set high—very, very, very high—for the reasons you list.
liberal
@Andrey:
It might not be logically impossible, but it’s well-nigh impossible in the world we actually live in.
States don’t wage war for moral or humanitarian reasons.
Andrey
Actually, someone else said it even better, so let me try that tack:
You want us to imagine it is our friends and loved ones dying in a war because the US chose to intervene.
I want you to imagine that it is your friends and loved ones dying in a genocide because the US chose not to intervene.
Ben Franklin
@SatanicPanic:
Rwanda was one case where I’d have probably said yes. Especially knowing what we know now
Hindsight is rarely available in advance. But, even still, do you know how that would have gone?
Somalia is a case in point.
Andrey
@liberal: The “impossible” was not about the chance of such a war happening, but about Soonergrunt seeming to think it’s impossible that I would make such a calculus and be OK with it.
liberal
@Omnes Omnibus:
In terms of actual nation building (apart from just striking back at putative allies of Al Qaeda), it really was hopeless. There’s fairly well established rules of thumb for the size of an occupying force necessary to pacify, which is a prerequesite for nation building. There’s just no way whatsoever we (as a nation) would be willing to foot the bill for a proper occupying force.
And that’s apart from things like Pakistan’s take on it.
MikeJ
@SatanicPanic:
And Kosovo was another for me. And I also thought we had the right amount of intervention in Libya.
Ted & Hellen
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Tell me, in your world, are soldiers ever used to MAXIMIZE injuries and death?
Or is that just an unfortunate collateral effect of all the good that has been done over the last decade in Iraq and Afghanistan? You know, all that MINIMIZING that Bush and Cheney were after.
Jeez.
Corner Stone
@Chris: No, my actual argument is why didn’t we consider “doing nothing in Afghanistan”. That was never included in our toolbox of choices.
My answer to Afghanistan looks nothing like any kind of war. Lots of money, some spooks and a couple JSOC operators, mix in 9 months or so. Done. That’s not a war, that’s an op.
But for those with a hard on to blow shit up, we could’ve provided great visuals and lots of dead folks with about 150 people and under $100M.
Cassidy
@SatanicPanic: I get what’s being said, but it’s a strawman. When I went to war, of course my parents didn’t want me to, my Dad the 20 year Navy vet retired Chief Petty Officer was really upset, but it wasn’t up to them. It was up to me. I went because I said I would and I made that committment. I was raised to defend those who were weaker than me. I was raised to belive that sometimes a man has to fight. Yes, these are outdated anachronisms and sexist paradigms, etc., but my upbringing was a direct reflection on my choice to go to war. I knew our leadership was lying; I wasn’t naive. But I also knew that I was good at what I did and highly trained and people would need my skills.
I get Sooner’s point and understand where it comes from. For most of us, we’re bitter and angry, but it doesn’t change that during our time, at least once, we were the only thing standing between something really bad happenning to people who didn’t deserve it. You take what is given and sometimes that has to be enough.
Comrade Dread
I’m fine with doing everything we can to help people without diving into a shooting war.
So yes, if it is not within our national interest or our national defense than yes, we don’t need to start shooting people. We simply can’t afford the constant costs of getting involved militarily every time some tyrant decides to crack down on his citizens.
And if we do, then maybe we should start taxing the rest of the world to defray the costs of Pax Americana.
FlipYrWhig
@fuckwit:
I support this view, and that military force is best used in this multinational way. (I wanted to write “multilateral,” and then I wasn’t sure that was the right term.) Of course, this function of the UN can easily be kneecapped by countries that make calculations based on their own (perceived) vital national interests, and then we, i.e., the world, is in a sticky situation.
Dave
@Soonergrunt:
I don’t see how I stated things wrongly, to be frank. You are saying both conditions need to be met. That means dying for oil ($$ interest) and dying to save innocents (value) in and of themselves are exactly the same because neither meets your particular standard. And I think that making those two things equal is a crock of shit.
MikeJ
@Corner Stone:
Targeted assassinations! You’re worse than Bush sold us out under the bus!
Sly
OT: Audio and transcript of oral arguments for United States v. Windsor (DOMA) are up.
Soonergrunt
@Andrey: It’s been my experience, actually knowing couple people in that circumstance, that “Johnny died. And for what?! What the hell are we DOING there?”
Because unless you can tell her both that her husband is dead because he did something honorable AND because he did something that made the country stronger, you’re likely to only get questions that you can’t answer about the side of the equation that you didn’t satisfy.
SatanicPanic
@Ben Franklin: No, but I’m skeptical that anything short of nuking them would have made it worse. And the Rwanda Genocide went on for over 3 months. Even if people want to claimed that no one could have predicted, that’s way too long to just claim we didn’t know and couldn’t have acted.
Va Highlander
@liberal:
And given the simple facts of geography — why can’t they read maps, anymore? — you take that rule of thumb and multiply by a a factor significantly greater than one.
Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.)
@Herbal Infusion Bagger:
I think this has it about right. I know it can be tempting to just look at doing nothing as a kind of default, but when somebody or some country or some society chooses not to do something, they really are choosing. I’m not saying that it’s always unacceptable to choose not to help; sometimes any help would come too late to stop whatever atrocity we want to forestall anyway; sometimes there might be other circumstances that keep a country from intervening. But whatever the reason, I think we need to at least acknowledge that whatever we do or do not do, we are choosing to do or not do.
Emma
I believe the United States should only go to war to protect its national interests. Who decides where the national interest lies? In many cases, we (the right thinking ones, of course) won’t be in the driver’s seat.
I believe the proper international police actions should be handled through the United Nations. The same place where we have set up a barrier to their acting when we don’t want them to act at all because we perceive our national interest to be at risk.
The Devil is in the details, isn’t it?
I am not a kook
@Ted & Hellen:
Winner of the 2013 Self Awareness Award.
FlipYrWhig
@Soonergrunt:
Such as? What kind of military action would “make the country stronger”? Like a war to annex Mexico? This does not strike me as good reason to go to war.
liberal
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Utter nonsense. It’s the usual “just following orders” excuse.
I know, I know—jus ad bellum is distinct from jus in bello, blah blah blah. But it’s utter tripe, as Jeff McMahan and others have pointed out. There are of course mitigating circumstances, such as when people make decisions based on lies put out by the state.
You’re either a moral agent, or you’re a paid thug.
Now, apart from concerns of jus in bello as traditionally described, I fully understand and agree with what you’re claiming about acting “as a tool”—a unit full of independent actors is a unit that is likely to get slaughtered, or slaughter civilians, etc.
But that logic simply doesn’t apply before one arrives at the battlefield. When people deployed to Iraq, they were moral agents agreeing to commit a grievous crime, or they were paid thugs. Period.
Corner Stone
@Soonergrunt: In-fucking-deed. I am very skeptical of US military intervention under most circumstances.
The word “existential” seems to have been lost to our collective understanding. Or at least in our leadership’s understanding.
Iran? N Korea? AQ Anywhere?
Yes, they can inflict pain and suffering on us or our allies at given moments in time. And as a human I would want revenge, or vengeance or justice depending on my frame of reference if they caused me or mine to suffer.
But as a nation they simply don’t matter to us. We should account for them and then continue on.
Soonergrunt
@Cassidy: But you still have to make that decision (in the voting booth, for example) yourself.
You have to ask yourself if this is the path you would choose. Of course your children will decide as adults for themselves whether or not to join the service, and will hopefully make that decision taking into account the values and lessons you’ve taught them. But it is part of the societal contract with the armed forces in a democracy that we, the society, don’t squander their service for in actions that do not elevate the country. And I submit to you, Sir, that unless we try to elevate the country both morally AND strategically, we are squandering their service and potentially their lives.
dmbeaster
I strongly agree with this post.
I would add a corollary to the discussion. When you make the decision to commit to use of force (i.e., go to war), please do not undertake some half measure in order to pretend that you are not going to war. My biggest beef with both Bosnia and Libya was that if we are going to do it, don’t pretend that just an air war is enough. War generates tremendous blowback that is unpredictable in nature.
Committing to wars in a half-assed manner is a stupid as having too low a threshold for committing to war. And the wrongheaded belief that a limited war is the way to go also tends to lower the threshold for when force gets committed; i.e., since we are not going to do that much, go for it. In Libya, people who said we should intervene but not send ground troops were, frankly, idiotic. Fortunately, adding the air component to the rebel forces ended up being enough, but there are plenty of times when it is not, and then you have a long protracted ugly civil war resulting in a large number of deaths (which you ostensibly intervened to prevent), all because the war decision was half-assed to begin with.
Our country currently has very screwed up notions about going to war. Even worse, the all-volunteer army has resulted in many treating our armed forces like mercenaries, who can be committed to wars even though the war cheerleaders would never send their own.
liberal
@Va Highlander:
You mean, in Afgh case, the terrain?
I was amazed when I first realized that Afgh’s population is actually greater than Iraq’s. Given the terrainm, it was clear that any nation-building exercise was screwed.
Ben Franklin
@SatanicPanic:
The way we’re perceived changes the outcome. It’s the observer’s effect which changes a culture, as the anthropologist studies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Beirut_barracks_bombing
Colonel Timothy J. Geraghty, the commander of the marines in Beirut during the incident, has said that the marine and the French headquarters were targeted primarily because of “who we were and what we represented;“[13] and that,
It is noteworthy that the United States provided direct naval gunfire support — which I strongly opposed — for a week to the Lebanese Army at a mountain village called Suq-al-Garb on September 19 and that the French conducted an air strike on September 23 in the Bekaa Valley. American support removed any lingering doubts of our neutrality and I stated to my staff at the time that we were going to pay in blood for this decision.[14]
Some authors, including Thomas Friedman point to the use of this naval gunfire as the beginning point of the U.S. forces being seen as participants in the civil war rather than peace keepers and opening them up to retaliation.[15][16]
Comrade Dread
I would agree with this as well.
Soonergrunt
@Short Bus Bully: “But to remain human and preserve your soul, how can you just sit back and watch all that shit go down?”
Would you risk your child, or your brother’s child, for that cause by itself?
Herbal Infusion Bagger
“And the Serbs who the Kosovars ethnically cleansed?”
I have little sympathy with a people how voted 25% for a party whose leader who boasted about “gouging out the eyes of Croats with rusty spoons”.
If we hadn’t intervened, the Serbs would have ethnically cleansed Kosovo, just like they did in the Krajina and in the serbian parts of Bosnia. We’d seen this movie before. The Serbs ended up with 10% of Kosovo, which is roughly what their population share was.
The Serbs majorly fucked up, because the Kosovars were following a peaceable resistance to the Serbs under Rugovar. If they’d put Kosovo on the table at Dayton, Rugovar wouldn’t have lost support to the KLA and Serbia would still have Kosovo.
liberal
@Dave:
But states don’t go to war to save innocents.
Soonergrunt
@ShadeTail: I’m not saying there’s a black and white line between intervene and not intervene.
I’m saying that a necessary component of your decision-making process in these cases to ask yourself if you’re willing to risk your children dying or coming back crippled. Because if you are willing to risk that for your own children, then that might be something worth doing as a country.
liberal
@Herbal Infusion Bagger:
I can’t think of anything more amusing, or perhaps sick, than someone who wants to claim the moral high ground at the same time espousing ideas pretty close to that of collective punishment.
joel hanes
@Soonergrunt:
unless you can look at somebody you love and say (to yourself, if not to that person’s face) “I’d risk your death or wounding for this thing,” then that thing isn’t worth any other person’s loved one going.
This.
Throughout Viet Nam, I opposed the draft.
Then I got drafted.
Then I had thirty years to watch US foreign policy.
Now I favor a draft by lottery, because it acts as a powerful brake on the chickenhawk military adventurism of powerful old men. When the sons and daughters of Senators and CEOs and clergymen will be in harm’s way in any combat, it seems to clarify the minds of the decisionmakers wonderfully. Not perfectly (we did Viet Nam, after all — but I think a major reason we got out of Viet Nam when we did was that the elite was tired of its sons coming home in body bags.)
But I think it would have kept us out of Iraq.
The all-volunteer military is a societal cop-out, a moral escape hatch for our leaders. The trend to using mercenaries and private military-logistics contractors only exacerbates this already-bad situation.
FlipYrWhig
@Soonergrunt:
I’d still like to see an example of a war to “elevate the country… strategically.”
ricky
Given the number of posts devoted to them I think its safe to assume Tom and Daisy probably raised a wry eybrow among themselves when they first spotted a “Visualize Whirreled Peas” bumpersticker.
liberal
@Herbal Infusion Bagger:
No, the idiots who fucked up were the European powers who out of what they discerned to be their own self-interest encouraged the dissolution of Yugoslavia, despite ample historical evidence that secession usually brings with it nasty, nasty civil war.
Xboxershorts
@Ted & Hellen:
I would say that the entire tone of that response was over the top. Regardless of the morality of the leadership of our military, it’s always the grunts and enlisted folks who get shouted down.
Your derision is better directed at the immoral folks at the top who have nothing to lose rather than at the volunteers who use the military (as I did) as a pathway to education, vocation and a middle class life, but who also agree to go in harms way in your name, in exchange for that bargain.
Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.)
Who the hell is this pinhead? I’ve seen this person (guy? woman? I can’t tell from the name) in about three threads so far, and I haven’t seen anything this person has written that’s worthwhile yet. Well, I guess that’s what trolls do…
Cassidy
@Soonergrunt: Heh, that’s a whole ‘nother ballgame. Of course we’re going to vote for people who believe that military intervention isn’t step one in problem solving. And when those we elected do decide to go to war, for whatever reason, we’re going to have eleven billionty blog posts about it, call each other something-bagger and something-bot and only come together in wishing that WATB “I’m gonna email Poppa Cole cuz your mean to me” T&H dies horribly and painfully, preferably involving fire and/ or ants. That’s what we do.
But let’s be real. One day, your’s or my child(ren) may decide to join the military, despite us telling them there are other ways and they’re going to do it because they will remember that when we were younger, we stood 10 feet tall and bulletproof and protected people who were weaker than us. Now that may or may not be the truth; I’m only 6’0″. But we’ll always be the warfighter to them. We raise them, as liberals and Soldiers, to believe in something more important than their own selfish wants. One day, they may just do such a thing.
Soonergrunt
@Omnes Omnibus: This is most likely true for all sorts of reasons, but if we’re going to intervene all over the world whether our national interests are implicated or not as some people here continue to defend, we’re going to have to move the necessarily huge army somehow. Somebody has to fly all the transport planes we’re going to need to buy.
Omnes Omnibus
@Soonergrunt: While I probably disagree with about where that line is, I do think that making a decision to support a military action without contemplating the question you put is moral malpractice. Is it important enough that I would be willing to put some skin in the game?
liberal
@joel hanes:
I agree in principle, but there are two problems: ways for children of the elite to avoid real danger, and the fact that even your scheme (an advance, morally) still has people with power (middle age and old age leaders) sending other people ( the young) off to war.
Dave
I also take some issue with the basic premise here about asking “Is it worth my child dying” Because frankly, if your child dies, regardless of the reason, it won’t be worth it. They could die saving a million children from a nuclear bomb wielded by a madman. And while you could understand it, and maybe even make your peace with it, I doubt you’d ever think it was worth it. Because your child is gone.
Avery Greynold
And how can you send your children knowing that they might end up crippled or dead…
…to go dirt biking? riding in a car to the mall? skiing (lots of dead celebrities)? horseback riding (Reeve)? I could go on all day.
Living is life-threatening. Having fun is life-threatening. Do the parents of dead kids who died in cars or sports say “at least they weren’t doing something stupid, like saving lives of foreigners”?
Corner Stone
@MikeJ:
As long as you stay under that bus my drones, sorry DRONEZ!, may not see you there.
But maybe they will.
liberal
@Xboxershorts:
Obviously those at the top are more morally culpable, by at least a couple orders of magnitude, but what you’re describing is still a form of payment; how does that distinguish you from a mercenary?
Andrey
@Soonergrunt: Yes, I would. And clearly others here would, too. Are you saying we are wrong?
rikyrah
of course, they haven’t learned anything.
Cassidy
@liberal:
We didn’t get paid $150-200K a year.
Keep fornicating with that poultry.
liberal
@Avery Greynold:
I really don’t understand the notion that many are putting forth here that states go to war to save the lives of others.
I assume Soonergrunt’s point about morality is about being a necessary condition to support a war, not a sufficient one.
liberal
@Cassidy:
Yawn.
Cassidy
@Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.): I think you’ve been gone a while. If you remember “spatula” it’s the same vile rape and pedophile apologist with a new handle.
Interrobang
@Chris: If you seriously believe anybody went to war in WWII to stop the Holocaust, you’re deluded. They were interested in stopping Germany from taking over Europe and whatever else he could get, but the actual historical record makes it abundantly clear that at a policymaker level, nobody gave two shits over millions of dead Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, feminists, Communists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. In at least three of those categories, they probably agreed with the Nazi policies, even if they didn’t want to say so in public. (Pretty much everybody at the time hated Jews, gays, and Communists, after all.)
Using WWII as an example of a humanitarian intervention is just flat-out historically ignorant.
Me, I think humanitarian interventions are about the only reasons to ever have a war, but I’m also not an American, and it makes a big difference in this case. (We also tried, and failed, to do anything about Rwanda, and one of our generals — Romeo Dallaire — paid for it with his sanity for a bunch of years. None of this stuff is pretty at all.
Cassidy
@liberal: What? Performance issues? Single chicken not doing it anymore?
liberal
@Ben Franklin:
Jesus, now you’ve crossed the line. What right do they have to bomb our soldiers? All we did was shell their villages.
Andrey
@liberal: Morality is of course not a sufficient condition to support a war. Tons of other things, starting with the basics of “can we actually win”, are also necessary.
Soonergrunt’s position seems to be that “strategic interest” is necessary, and I am arguing that it should not be considered necessary.
Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.)
@Cassidy:
Wow. Can’t say I’ve missed him or her or it.
Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.)
@Cassidy:
Wow. Can’t say I’ve missed him or her or it.
Ted & Hellen
@Xboxershorts:
NO ONE has gone in “harm’s way” in MY name, thank you.
But keep on drinking that MIC Koolaid, chump.
Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.)
@Cassidy:
Wow. Can’t say I’ve missed him or her or it.
I don’t know why this popped up twice. Anyway, I recall that pedophile thread, I think. I can’t recall everything, but it seems like we were talking about Sandusky and that creature was more or less telling us that the kids he raped liked it or something sick like that.
Soonergrunt
@Andrey:
“magining that it is my friends and loved ones going to war and being maimed and killed, I am willing to accept that outcome in a war that is fought with zero national interest but strong moral justification.
Why do you seem to think that this is impossible?”
I don’t that’s impossible. It think it’s the first time you’ve said that straight out.
And while I disagree with you on that point, I accept it as a valid point. There is nothing inherently wrong with the idea that people should risk their lives for moral reasons. I would respectfully submit that there is something wrong with the idea that nation-states should act without cognizance of their interests, and that to do so is to squander their resources–in this case, their military personnel.
@Andrey: I can imagine that just fine. And while I can feel sympathy for those people (and maybe you at a personal level?) I can also see that it’s far more likely that no appreciable benefit will accrue to my country for doing that, and all I’ll have are a bunch of friends who died for people who’ve come to despise them or for people who refuse to get their act together, and are still at risk of killing each other and therefore rendering my friends’ sacrifices moot.
Cassidy
@Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.): We want to miss him. really, really bad. But it refuses to give us the oppurtunity.
Omnes Omnibus
@liberal: I know you are snarking, but I would say they have every right to bomb our soldiers if they perceive us as invaders or for any other reason that US forces might justifiably attack someone. One man’s insurgent can easily be another man’s freedom fighter.
Barry
@Dave: ” I agree with 99.9% of this. But I always come back to Rwanda. Isn’t it both in our interest and our stated values not to have millions of people slaughtered for their ethnicity? Don’t we have an interest in showing the world that we won’t tolerate entire nations becoming abattoirs, and destabilizing the nations around them?”
You’re making this huge assumption that we could have put enough forces in place to accomplish anything. Remember that this was a relatively short period of time (100 days) in a country deep away from any oceans and ports.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_Genocide
Mnemosyne
@Soonergrunt:
Serious question — is there any situation where you think intervention would be worth it? You’ve already said that genocide isn’t worth it, so in your mind is there any situation that could possibly exist where you would be okay with the US sending troops overseas? (I’m assuming self-defense (ie the Chinese land 1 million troops on the West Coast) doesn’t count in your calculation here, only interventions in other countries.)
There were plenty of isolationists who opposed WWII even after we were attacked by Japan, but that attack was followed by Germany declaring war on the US, so there wasn’t much the isolationists could do to prevent war once someone had officially declared that they were at war with us.
Chris
@Interrobang:
Siiiggghhhhh….
Gee, good thing I wrote, oh, exactly that in the last paragraph (keeping it shorter too) and phrased it as a question about what if the war hadn’t gone as it did.
Ben Franklin
@Omnes Omnibus:
One man’s insurgent can easily be another man’s freedom fighter.
And the Players aren’t identified in a program line-up. There’s no way you can predict outcomes in such an environment.
Barry
@Zifnab: “Sorry, but this seems far too reactionary for my tastes. Rwanda was an easily avoidable genocide and we dropped the ball on it. ”
Wrong – read the Wikipedia article.
Mnemosyne
@fuckwit:
Except that even soldiers in multinational forces are at risk of death or permanent injury. So then the question becomes, do we need to refuse to be part of any multilateral interventions as well as not doing our own interventions? Isn’t it equally as immoral to send someone’s child to die or be injured as part of a multinational force as it was to send them to Iraq as part of the US Army?
Cassidy
@Barry: Power projection has us landing/ dropping a full Brigade anywhere within 24 hours. Just FYI. If we had committed to intervening in Rwanda, it would not have taken a ginormous amount of time to do anything. There would definitely have been some logistical issues, but we’re pretty good at adapting.
Turbulence
Technically, we don’t have a choice about whether we should intervene to stop genocide. The US is a signatory to the Convention on Genocide and Congress has ratified the treaty. That means that US law REQUIRES the US government to intervene in order to stop genocide, anywhere in the world.
So, Soonergrunt, do you think we should change the law and withdraw from the Convention on Genocide? Are you arguing that it is a bad treaty that the US should never have signed?
Also, after WWII when lots of people told Holocaust victims “Never again”, do you think they were wrong and we should change that to “Never again as long as US economic interests are at stake”?
liberal
@Avery Greynold:
But if that sounds so good, nothing is actually stopping you from buying a one-way ticket to one of these battlefields. People did it during the Spanish Civil War.
Corner Stone
@Omnes Omnibus:
Well, given that we have no clue who the majority of dead folk are as a result our drone bombing campaign…
Soonergrunt
@Dave: For the last time, I’m saying that either condition by itself, while necessary, is insufficient to go to war. I have never equated the two. I have never said that going to war for strictly selfish reasons was acceptable to me.
liberal
@Omnes Omnibus:
There was more than just perception. We in fact did shell their villages (from ship).
It’s like the outrage about what the North Vietnamese did to John McCain. If tables had been turned, I figure most people commenting here would be quite comfortable having the offending pilot killed in a very slow, painful manner.
Ben Franklin
@Corner Stone:
I’m shocked to be having this discussion, and I was wondering who would bring drones up.
Or are we only concerned with US combat casualties on the ground?
Omnes Omnibus
@Corner Stone: I know where this goes…. And, yeah. It is one of the reasons that I have come to think that the drone program as currently operated is a bad strategy. I don’t think it is illegal, just a bad idea.
Dave
@Soonergrunt
And I think that you are trying to parse your words too finely here. If you are saying that either condition, by itself, is insufficient to go to war, then you are equating them on some level. You are saying that each one is equally insufficient on its own.
And I am saying that doing a moral good, such as saving innocents, is enough on its own.
Ted & Hellen
@Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.):
Like most here, you object to commenters who disagree with your views having the privilege of posting, just as you do.
To which I say, fuck off.
liberal
@Turbulence:
Hmm…how does all this deep–DEEP, I tell you!–moral thought apply to Israel performing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank?
I’ll agree that it ain’t genocide, but …
Omnes Omnibus
@liberal: I understand that it was more than mere perception; my point was that perceiving someone as an invader is enough.
Ted & Hellen
@Cassidy:
Poor assidy. Once again, his repressed rage and guilt at having killed people as a tool of the MIC expresses itself as accusations against other commenters of being things he perceives as being even worse.
Yet, I’m pretty sure I’ve never killed anyone while following orders from a Bush. Or at all, actually.
Soonergrunt
@Andrey: No. I’m saying that any decision to use force without answering that question in the affirmative is, without exception, a wrong decision.
But answering that question in the affirmative is only a necessary, but not (by itself) sufficient step in the decision-making process.
liberal
@Omnes Omnibus:
Agreed. Two arguments are often raised in support of the drone program: (1) legality (it’s even OK to kill civilians, as long as the costs are porportional to the ends (the usual “proportionality” criterion), and (2) utilitarian (drones cost far less lives, even civilian lives).
But even if we agree to those two, that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
liberal
@Omnes Omnibus:
Right.
Soonergrunt
@liberal: “I assume Soonergrunt’s point about morality is about being a necessary condition to support a war, not a sufficient one.”
You are correct, Sir.
Ted & Hellen
@Cassidy:
Actually, John refuses to give you the opportunity. He’s not a delicate flower like you, killer.
Tell us about the people you killed, ok? We’d love to hear it, as a patriotic thing, of course.
liberal
@Dave:
I can’t speak for him, but your logic is incorrect. There’s no reason to conclude that.
Yes, if you’re completely unaware of the historical record and the motivation of nation-states, you might conclude that.
Cassidy
@Ted & Hellen: I’m pretty sure I’ve never killed anyone either. AAMOF, I know I haven’t. You don’t read to well, do you?
You should write him some more emails whining about how I said mean things to you. Go ahead. He’ll enjoy it.
And don’t blame John because you won’t go light yourself on fire. You are denying us our happyness. Will Smith would hate you.
liberal
@Soonergrunt:
Good points here.
I like the “realist” position on wars, but IMHO they’re not quite right, since obviously there could be grossly immoral wars that would satisfy even a reasonably narrowly defined national interest, and that IMHO would be wrong. Your twin criteria for necessity are superior.
Dave
@liberal:
If he says each is insufficient on its own, then they are equal on that level. I am not saying he is equating them morally. But he is making them equal, in his statement, as necessary to commit the US to use force. And I disagree.
Soonergrunt
@Andrey: I’m arguing that they both are necessary, and that neither alone is sufficient.
I suppose that if I were hoping for a foreign intervention to save my life or the lives of my children, I would want for that foreign power to either conclude that said intervention is necessary to them or absent that, that strategic implications are un-necessary, and that they would come and save me and my children.
But a nation-state acting is not the same as a passerby running into a burning building when hearing screams. Nation-states must act to preserve if not to improve their strategic positions with respect to their peers, or they have no real reason to exist.
Mnemosyne
@liberal:
Honestly, I wish anti-drone people would make the utilitarian argument against them more often instead of the “killer robots from the sky are immoral!” argument. There is IMO a very good utilitarian argument that the way we use drones is counter-productive and is going to make it harder for us to reach our stated goals in the countries we’re using them in. But we have to spend so much time arguing about whether drones are moral in and of themselves as a technology that we never seem to get around to arguing about whether or not a particular drone use is wise.
Xboxershorts
@liberal:
You grow up poor or lower middle class and there are very, very few other options available.
@Ted & Hellen:
whether you like it or not, the people who went to Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, did so, in your name.
If you think they did not, then you’ve never been outside the US. Because, I guarantee you, the 7 billion OTHER people on this rock believe that they did. Your approval of their mission is completely unnecessary for them to come to this conclusion.
Mnemosyne
@Soonergrunt:
The question I don’t think you’ve answered yet is whether nation-states working in concert with each other — as with the UN — is equally as immoral. As I said above, a soldier who is killed in a UN peacekeeping mission as part of a multinational force is equally as dead as one who was sent there by the USA.
And then there is the question of alliances. To come up with a random example on the fly, let’s say that China attacked Turkey, which is one of our NATO allies, and Turkey asked for NATO’s assistance. Is it immoral for the US to send US soldiers in support of that NATO effort since it’s not necessarily in the interest of our nation?
ETA: I think you’ve formulated pretty good criteria for unilateral action by a nation-state, but I don’t think you’ve accounted for multilateral action in concert with other nation-states that we’ve formed alliances with.
jamick6000
Great post. I think I’m in the minority here — I don’t think involvment in the balkans was a good thing at all. First, we trained and supported the Kosovo Liberation Army to pressure Yugoslavia during the cold war, so in some ways we instigated the conflict.
We killed a lot of innocent people. By the way, the deaths continue today — all the bombs and depleted uranium shells we used are causing a surge in cancer in Serbia. And there are ***still*** peacekeepers in the region today.
Cassidy
Depends on perspective. The Bosnians were thrilled.
Soonergrunt
@Mnemosyne: I think that any nation, not just ours, that doesn’t take into account both morally justifiable causes AND enlightened self-interest is engaging in statecraft malpractice.
Look, I was as horrified as the next person about Rwanda. But I was also quite aware that Somalia started out as trying to stop a famine and help innocent people from dying, and it became US Soldiers’ dead bodies dragged through the streets by the people we were trying to help.
I know that there are a LOT of things that went into that, but I also know that there were a LOT of things that could have gone into a Rwandan intervention going wrong, too, and a lot worse tactical position from that as well.
I’m not against intervening in bad situations where innocent people need help. I was absolutely behind going to Haiti after the earthquake there, and I’ still think we should continue to do as much as possible there.
But the recent history of US intervention around the world doesn’t speak to me as something we should be doing a lot. I was in Europe before we went to Bosnia. I remember the protests against intervening there that rapidly became anti-NATO and then anti-US protests even when we hadn’t done anything.
As I said, it must be morally defensible AND in the nation’s enlightened self-interest. And if I can’t imagine sending my son to fight, knowing what I know and having seen what I have seen and done what I have done and still say “I think the probable outcome is worth doing that to him,” then I cannot in good conscience send anyone else’s son or daughter either.
SatanicPanic
@Barry: Unironically citing Wikipedia are we?
Herbal Infusion Bagger
@liberal:
Sorry, this is revisionist bullshit. Germany recognized Croatia’s independence six months after the JNA had bombed the shit out of Dubrovinik and cleansed the Krajina.
Maybe if Milosevic hadn’t overthrown the autonomous governments in Kosovo and Vojvodina the Slovenes and Croats wouldn’t have bolted.
Corner Stone
@Mnemosyne:
You are, bar none, the most insanely disingenuous commenter here.
The argument about DRONEZ has always, always been about the policy. Lying, douchebag fucking apologists like you have always, always tried to shift that conversation to the “technology” used. No, we do not “have to” have the technology discussion because it is and has always been irrelevant. God damn I am tired of explaining this to brick wall dense motherfuckers like you.
Fuck you.
Ted & Hellen
@Cassidy:
You are denying us our happyness.
Who’s us, Fatty?
Cassidy
@Ted & Hellen: Everyone here.
Seriously, hands up, who wouldn’t be thrilled if you went away?
Ted & Hellen
@Xboxershorts:
Lots of people believe things that aren’t true. Doesn’t make it so.
This is why I object to the common use of the word “we” around here when talking about national security or anything else. There were millions and millions of us who tried to stop the Iraq War. Don’t try to rope us in with your crimes, my friend.
Mnemosyne
@Soonergrunt:
But the entire purpose of an alliance is that the alliance acts in the interest of any of its individual members rather than having each member act solely in its own interest. So, to go back to my hypothetical example, if Turkey is invaded by China, it may not be in the interest of the US as an individual nation-state to intervene, but it is absolutely in the interest of NATO to intervene on behalf of one of its members. Otherwise, there’s no point in having an alliance if all of the other members are going to say, “You know, it’s not really in our national interest to help out, so you’re on your own.”
Similarly with humanitarian interventions, an intervention that may not be in the self-interest of any individual country becomes (literally) in the interest of the entire world and they act in concert about it. (Obviously, we’re talking about the ideal, not necessarily the politics of the UN as they happen in real life.) So should countries be able to refuse to participate in collective action requested by the UN on the grounds that it’s not in that country’s self-interest?
ETA: And to be clear, I’m going off on this side track because I’m pretty sure I agree with you when it comes to nation-states taking unilateral action. But you have to admit it becomes messy when you start asking individual nation-states to act in concert to do things that may not be in the self-interest of a specific nation-state.
Cassidy
@Ted & Hellen: You tried to do something? Really? Melt some crayons? Of all the vile things you’ve said, I think this is the most laughable. You actually believe you’ve tried to do something. So what? You voted like everyone else. You want a fucking cookie?
Man you’re lucky Cole pities you. If it weren’t for him, all you’d have is jerking off to tumblr porn and the occassional phone calls from kids who feel obligated to pretend you’re alive.
Amir Khalid
I agree with Soonergrunt, more or less, that American military action abroad should advance both American interests and American values. With the caveat that “interests” should exclude seeking profit or power. The former is just acting in the service of corporate greed. The latter is a woefully effective way to build up decades, maybe centuries, worth of bad karma.
I second the comments upthread that America’s military involvements abroad should take place by multinational agreement, and as part of multinational forces. In fact, as I’ve said in these threads before, America might want to think seriously about getting out of the “last superpower standing” business. You have better uses for your young people’s lives and your treasure. Certain of your client states might behave better if they had to deal with their neighbours on more equal terms. Global security is a collective global responsibility, and the rest of Earth should step up to it.
Comrade Dread
@Mnemosyne: I would say that if you have the international community agreeing that an intervention is necessary, then it confers a great deal more legitimacy to the mission than if a single country decides to go off half-cocked and start bombing another nation-state.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
Gen. Dallaire (sp?) saved maybe 30,000 people with minimal forces and rules of engagement that effectively tied his hands behind his back.
If the US had jammed the “kill the cockroaches” radio broadcasts, even, that would have slowed the killing until the RPF arrived.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
@Omnes Omnibus:
Sure, but, I’m wondering why in these hypotheticals only the U.S. soldiers have faces and families.
Xboxershorts
@Ted & Hellen:
You have a lot of anger and are throwing it around at a lot of different people here. Anger is ok, in and of itself. What is not ok is the insults and snobbery and superior airs you put on display. It reeks of an immature soul.
By the way, my crimes involved tanker escort in the Persian gulf in the early ’80s on a destroyer. And yes, I did that for your sorry ass as well as for the benefit of a solid vocational education.
Whether you like it or not.
Ted & Hellen
@Cassidy:
You are, as always, revealing far more about yourself than me with your bizarre comments.
Quite stalking me on FB.
Soonergrunt
@Turbulence: I think that’s a fair question for EVERY country that’s a signatory to that convention.
And if you didn’t recognize that answer for the dodge that it was, I’ll just say this–nation states that do not consider enlightened self interest as a necessary (but not sufficient) component of the answer to a use-of-force question are engaging in statecraft malpractice. The fact that a force in Mali is a hell of a lot easier to support for a western power than a force in eastern and southern Sudan ever would have been doubtless has a lot to do with the reason that there are French peacekeepers in Mali, but NOBODY ever went to the Sudan and many European countries who are also signatories to that treaty fought like hell to keep the Sudanese government’s actions in Darfur from being declared a genocide.
So, to stop beating around the bush (and I know this will disappoint a lot of people) but unless there’s some US national interest directly implicated, then no, I’m pretty sure I couldn’t send my son (and therefore any other American’s child) there.
I’m sorry.
Ted & Hellen
@Xboxershorts:
I just took a shit.
It was for you, whether you realize it or not.
Soonergrunt
@Dave: If the car I want to buy costs $15,000 and I have $12,000 and a trade-in worth $3,000 then both are necessary, but not sufficient to buy the new car. They also are not equal to each other.
Cassidy
@Ted & Hellen: You wish pedobear.
Xboxershorts
@Ted & Hellen:
The idea that you would do this within the confines of your britches for little ol me is gratifying.
Seriously, you have major issues. I’m not one of them, nor is my military service from 30 years ago.
We get it. You hate the American Military Industrial Complex.
Are you mature enough to hate the complex without hating the little people sucked in by it though?
Evidence thus far says no.
Mnemosyne
@Soonergrunt:
So, in your opinion, the US should pull out of NATO, the UN, and its other alliances because by definition an alliance is not going to always act in the national interest of the US?
This is why “no intervention, ever” sounds like an easy choice, but it has a lot more implications than you would think once you start taking into account the various alliances the US is part of. It sounds like you’re taking a completely isolationist view that says we should not have any alliances with other countries because they could drag us into interventions against our national self-interest.
mclaren
You need to shorten up your posts and get in touch with your inner sociopath. Just tell everyone on this blog to die in a fire.
Soonergrunt
@Mnemosyne:
If one believes (as I happen to believe) that strong international organizations are usually in the US’s enlightened self interest, then one most likely would not have a problem with US forces engaging in operations sanctioned by that body–not as an academic question, anyway. That particular instance–the UN supports it–would tend to weigh in my estimation as more likely that the mission is morally correct, and also more likely that it is in our enlightened self interest.
My answer to that is roughly the same. Which is why was gratified that NATO invoked Article 5 of the NATO treaty in September, 2001 and why I was really really leery of the Libya intervention a couple of years ago, but decided to hope for the best while expecting the worst.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Soonergrunt:
It seems to me that when a conflict threatens our national interests, that is a necessary but not sufficient condition for an otherwise not very well informed electorate to start paying attention to the issues at hand and do some homework in the form of gathering facts as best they can and thinking about what we are proposing to get ourselves and others into.
One of the problems with the USA in particular going to war is that our military power and our ability to rapidly project it to far corners of the globe have vastly outstripped the collective geopolitical sophistication of our electorate, so for many new conflicts we have to crack open a map and start learning something about a population and a place and their history that most of us knew little or nothing about before their conflict hit the news media.
For a democracy proposing to go to war by choice, popular ignorance of this sort is an invitation to disaster. There is no way to force people to educate themselves in this manner, but anything that nudges them in that direction will help, and if it is something that we have already been paying attention to before the conflict in question gets hot, so much the better. It seems to me that the loose bundle of ideas as to what consitutes our “national interests” is about as close to this ideal as we are ever going to get.
If it doesn’t touch on our national interest, then almost by definition most people in this nation will be ignorant of the subject and then that leaves everybody at the mercy of whatever it is that gives our broadcast news anchors a tingle up their legs. And that’s no way to run a country.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne: Our national self-interest could very well be to support an ally or to participate in an alliance.
Nerull
@The Moar You Know: A very republican attitude.
I didn’t know “We’ve got ours, so we’ll let you die.” was a liberal value now.
Soonergrunt
@Amir Khalid: Sir,
At your convenience, could you email me at [email protected]? I’ve an idea I’d like to discuss with you.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
Maybe someone who knows a lot more about the Kosovo and Yugoslavian conflicts that you, given the disinformation you gave earlier. I have a bookshelf devoted to the history of the Yugoslav conflict. And am familiar with the witches brew of propaganda, appeal to historical victimhood, self-pity , and gender/sexuality unease (if anyone wants the story of the Serb Kosovar farmer and the bottle) that led to the Serbs going down the rathole of nationalism.
The Kosovar Serbs screwed over the Kosovars for seven years, closing their schools, firing them from every government job, and not taking the opportunities for a peaceful resolution offered by Rugovar who somehow, for an amazing length of time, held a violent response in check.
In the end, the Kosovo Serbs got the KLA and NATO instead of Rugovar. That you reap what you sow goes for other countries as well as the U.S.
Thoughtcrime
From yesterday’s “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross:
During the debate over whether to invade Iraq, or whether to stay in Afghanistan, many people looked back to World War II, describing it as a good and just war — a war the U.S. knew it had to fight. In reality, it wasn’t that simple. When Britain and France went to war with Germany in 1939, Americans were divided about offering military aid, and the debate over the U.S. joining the war was even more heated. It wasn’t until two years later, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and Germany declared war against the U.S., that Americans officially entered the conflict.
But from 1939 through 1941, Americans were deeply divided between interventionism and isolationism.
“It’s so easy, again, to look back and say, ‘Well, all the things that the isolationists said were wrong,’ ” author Lynne Olson tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. ” … But back then, you know, in ’39, ’40 and most of ’41, people didn’t know that. People had no idea what was going to happen.”
Olson’s new book, Those Angry Days, shines the spotlight on the national debate over whether to go to war in Europe. President Franklin Roosevelt led the interventionist charge, while aviator Charles Lindbergh became an unofficial leader of the isolationist movement.
http://www.npr.org/2013/03/26/175288241/angry-days-shows-an-america-torn-over-entering-world-war-ii
Soonergrunt
@Herbal Infusion Bagger: “Sure, but, I’m wondering why in these hypotheticals only the U.S. soldiers have faces and families.”
Because those families are the only ones to whom the US Government is ultimately responsible for the safety and responsible deployment of their loved ones.
Belgians don’t pay US income tax nor vote in US elections as a general rule.
Omnes Omnibus
@Soonergrunt: Wait. Intervening on behalf of the Belgians? Where have I seen that before?
Herbal Infusion Bagger
“But even if we agree to those two, that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.”
If we’d had the drones in 1998 after the embassy bombings and the USS Cole, we’d have been more likely to take out Bin Laden than with the cruise missiles we used because of the faster response and the real-time surveillance.
No Iraq or Afghanistan war, and the neo-cons spend their time urging Bush to get up the nose of the Chinese.
If I could take that alternate history, I would.
Soonergrunt
@Mnemosyne: I can’t ever support “No intervention ever.”
But individual cases must be handled individually. As I’ve said elsewhere in response to one of your questions, the presence or absence of a treaty would tend to vitiate towards the proposed action being taken because it imply that the action is both more morally correct than not, AND more in the nation’s self interest than not.
However, let us not forget that, as I pointed out, no other signatory to the convention on genocide wanted Darfur declared a genocide. They (the Europeans particularly) didn’t want anything to do with that situation. As a practical matter, for the US, the cupboard was bare. We were overextended between Afghanistan and Iraq.
Soonergrunt
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: “One of the problems with the USA in particular going to war is that our military power and our ability to rapidly project it to far corners of the globe have vastly outstripped the collective geopolitical sophistication of our electorate, so for many new conflicts we have to crack open a map and start learning something about a population and a place and their history that most of us knew little or nothing about before their conflict hit the news media”
This.
Soonergrunt
@Omnes Omnibus: I’d like to say I saw that coming, but that would be a lie.
Smartass.
Mnemosyne
@Soonergrunt:
But does it make it worth sending people to die and/or be horribly injured for it? That seems to be the central moral question here. It’s just as possible for an international alliance to do the wrong thing for the wrong reasons as a nation-state.
I lean towards the “OK when multiple countries band together” side myself (which is why I was okay with the intervention in Libya and don’t want the US to do anything unilaterally in Syria), but it’s an interesting moral question. Especially since the Bushies tried to harness that feeling by claiming to have a “coalition” that was mostly bogus. Obviously, they recognized that you need some kind of fig leaf of international cooperation even when you’re acting unilaterally.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
Which would mean a logistical ability to project forces worldwide. Right now, only the U.S. can do really do that: the Brits and French could barely do what they did in Libya.
Is it a more secure world where other nations than the U.S. can project that kind of power, or would we be more comfortable with a world where only we have that kind of capability? Do you really want another policeman on the block?
Soonergrunt
@Mnemosyne:
Which is why I was so terribly disappointed in Tony Blair supporting the invasion of Iraq. Had he said “this is not in Britain’s interest at this time” that would have (I think) destroyed any possibility for Bush to undertake that action because there were a lot of people who felt that if the British were doing it, then there was something to the idea that it wasn’t just Bush doing it for his own selfish provincial reasons.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
Which would be another metric for whether an intervention is warranted or not: “does this comply with and strengthen international law and norms” – the Iraq invasion was tailor-made by the neo-cons for weakening the U.N.’s authority.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
You weren’t the only one disappointed in Blair. I thought that the Brits, having learned how not to do occupations in Northern Ireland, would take the lessons learned there and help us not screw up the occupation Iraq. Instead, we made the Same. Fucking. Mistakes. But. With. Cherries. On. Top.
(Although maybe when you’re dealing with principal actors like Feith, Wolfowitz,and Bremer, no amount of advice from allies would have helped.)
Omnes Omnibus
@Soonergrunt: I do what I can.
On a more serious note wrt this thread, to the extent that any of this was related, even in part, to our back and forth in the Tom and Daisy thread, I don’t think you did a particularly fair job of setting out the opposing view. For example, I don’t think there was a valid LI case for Iraq. People like Pollack simply bought into the neo-con case and tried to dress it up in LI drag. Also, I would not argue that one should intervene anywhere if there isn’t a reasonable chance for it to have a positive effect. In addition, war should never be the default option. One should only turn to it when the other options have failed. And not always then.
Fundamentally though, like I said in an earlier comment, I think we may largely agree, but some of is may define national interest more broadly than others.
Cassidy
@Herbal Infusion Bagger: Hey now, you can’t make a naked human pyramid without naked brown people.
Comrade Dread
@Herbal Infusion Bagger: Yes. I do. I want Russia to handle it’s sphere of influence, I want Japan, S. Korea, and China to handle theirs, I want Europe to handle theirs, Brazil to handle theirs, etc.
And the UN to keep everyone in touch and communicating.
Nerull
I just don’t understand the kind of heartlessness it takes to look at a situation like Rwanda, see hundreds of thousands of people murdered, and simply shrug your shoulders and ask “Well, what’s in it for us?”
Amir Khalid
@Herbal Infusion Bagger:
No, I mean that the international community, as a whole, should be able to provide the resources for major military interventions without depending as heavily on any one nation as it does now. I’m thinking of working towards a global order where security is a collective responsibility, as I said, and the resources to safeguard it are under a collective authority. I do know how Utopian that sounds.
Soonergrunt
@Omnes Omnibus: There are always shades of gray. I don’t believe in absolutes.
” I don’t think you did a particularly fair job of setting out the opposing view. For example, I don’t think there was a valid LI case for Iraq. People like Pollack simply bought into the neo-con case and tried to dress it up in LI drag.”
Oh, I agree. And for that reason, they are every bit as morally culpable as Bush and company.
Soonergrunt
@Nerull: Somalia.
Omnes Omnibus
@Soonergrunt: My point was more that the case for war in Iraq was not a reasonable expression of liberal interventionism and that citing it as such was erroneous. But yeah, fuck Pollack and his ilk. And fuck them especially for giving cover to the neo-cons and the bomb-them-all crowd.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
Well, that should work out well, given the warm relations China and Japan have.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
I know. I was naive.
jamick6000
@Herbal Infusion Bagger:
if you opened one of your books, you’d understand that the KLA was armed and trained by the CIA and European intelligence agencies.
RoonieRoo
That was the most awesome thing I’ve read today.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Soonergrunt:
Thanks.
Basically, going to war is how Americans learn geography and history. Seems to me that it would be cheaper to just fund the damm schools better, but what do I know?
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
This. The Iraq War pushers wrapped themselves in the language of liberal interventionism but didn’t actually follow any of the principles. You probably could have powered New York City with the rumblings coming from Reinhold Niebuhr’s grave as they cited his work for their purported “good war.”
BethanyAnne
Looks like a fine place for this: Robert Newmans History of Oil
Herbal Infusion Bagger
That’s extraordinarily difficult to do, because of costs, differing geopolitical interests, etc. NATO’s probably the most successful collective security organization (and one somewhat in search of a mission), but the cost of it is still overwhelmingly borne by the U.S. See also the struggles and debates in the EU regarding a joint EU defense policy, never mind a collective EU defense force. And EU members have a lot of long-term common interests compared to say, the members of the UN Security Council.
Comrade Dread
@Herbal Infusion Bagger: They may not care for one another, but both sides recognize that war is not within either of their nation’s best interests.
Amir Khalid
@Mnemosyne:
As do I, but not in George Walker Bush style ad hoc “coalitions of the willing”; rather, in action agreed on by some such body as the UN Security Council. It’s far less than an ideal body, true, but it’s what we have.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
Before 1998 and Operation Horseshoe? Sources please.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
I’d have more confidence in that statement if they didn’t regularly argue over small rocks in the China sea. Or if there weren’t a yearly explosions over visits to cemeteries. Or if Japan came clean about the horrors it did in Northern China (and elsewhere) during WW2. Or if the CCP wasn’t doing its best to fan anti-Japan sentiment.
BethanyAnne
@Dave: He’s saying 1 + 3 = 4, and you keep insisting that 1 = 3.
El Cid
There’s a pretty high ratio of broken eggs to omelets.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
@Amir Khalid:
That’s an OK rule of thumb, but at any one time we have at least two permanent members of the Security Council who have asshole foreign policy. And it isn’t always the Russians and Chinese. Frex, the genocidaires in Rwanda were clients of the French. The Serbs were buddy-buddy with the Russians during the Balkan years. So there are going to be times when a resolution to Do The Right Thing isn’t going to get through the UN Security Council.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
@Soonergrunt:
I’ve been arguing against Soonergrunt’s position, but have to concede that he’s right that not all genocides are going to be called such because of the geopolitics and logistics of meeting the treaty obligations against genocide.
I imagine that even if China started grinding up of Tibetans en mass and turning them into cat food in the middle of Lhasa, we’d have several hundred Georgetown-educated PhD’s issuing communiques like “We call on China to revise its regrettable polices on raw materials for Animal Feeds”. Because there’s no f**king way we’d intervene in China for Tibet.
liberal
@Herbal Infusion Bagger:
Yawn. You’re still a moral monster.
liberal
@Herbal Infusion Bagger:
The question here is whether you can’t come to the obvious conclusion—that (as a matter of “is”, not “ought”) nation-states don’t conduct warfare for humanitarian reasons—is because you’re a moral monster, or because your IQ is obviously pretty low, or both.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
I’m not the one who’d have left the Serb paramilitaries and JNA to butcher Kosovars, sorry.
And if you don’t think they would have done, you weren’t paying attention during the 1990s in the Krajina and Bosnia. So I’ll take your condemnation for exactly what it’s worth from a hand-washing Pontius Pilate like you.
Mnemosyne
@liberal:
Arguing in favor of intervening in genocide makes someone a moral monster?
I guess I missed the meeting where you decided that standing by and letting people be slaughtered is now a liberal value.
confusedponderer
That is how history seems to have “recorded” that action, at least for today. We went there to install “democracy”, or something like that. Or mission crept to it. Whatever…
There is something very much wrong with the morals of that grossly distorted narrative, but nothing morally wrong with what we actually did go there to do, and largely accomplished too.
Donut
@FlipYrWhig:
A militia, not a standing army, is exactly what a pretty significant and powerful group of people wanted when the United States wrote a Constitution. Standing armies were not exactly a universally favored institution in post-colonial America.
debbie
Putting interests (read money) at the same level as values seems really wrong to me. In fact, it seems antithetical to our values, period.
While I view war as the ultimate failure of civilization, standing by in the face of genocide is is the failure of humanity. All Rwanda needed was a stronger military presence, a reminder that the world was watching. It wouldn’t have taken battles and American deaths to accomplish that.
keestadoll
Whether we belong here, there, or anywhere for any reason seems quite irrelevant when at the end of the day our country doesn’t have the money to be here, there, and everywhere. It’s like refurbishing someone else’s house when you’re behind three or four mortgage payments on your own.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
But there’s the counterargument that there’s a positive externality us having such overwhelming military force. For example, having Japan with no serious external military capability is A Good Thing For Asia, and lessens China’s incentive to build up its military, and helps keep the China-Japan antipathy to their media and diplomatic realm, but the only way that works is for Japan to have a security guarantee from us.
Also, the fact is that the DoD and VA deliver a lot of social services that this country does not provide elsewhere.
Soonergrunt
@debbie: How many of your children or nieces or nephews would you be willing to see killed or maimed to prevent a genocide on the other side of the world? And how shall we pay for that?
EDIT–are you suggesting that national interests shouldn’t be a part of it? Because I’ve never said that national interest was equal to or more important than the moral rightness or wrongness of a contemplated action.
If you hold that calling both ‘national interest’ and ‘moral rightness’ to both be “necessary but not sufficient” components to a use of force decision to be saying that they are therefore somehow equal, then you fail because that is a logical fallacy that I have not made.
Additionally, if you say that national interest shouldn’t be a part of the discussion, then why don’t we simply rent our army out to other countries or the UN? Heaven knows we’d never have cause to question anyone else’s motives and I’m sure you’d be cool with somebody from a different culture who isn’t accountable to you in any manner whatsoever making life and death decisions regarding your children or the children of your friends.
Corner Stone
@Soonergrunt: I’ve been considering revisiting this thread but thought it probably would not be worth it.
I have to say I found your post littered with false premises and discarded those as there was more to the post I wanted to consider.
But you keep returning to them, challenging commenters with them, in ways that don’t actually advance or defend any argument.
Simply, the argument is never who would you send to have potentially killed or maimed. Because if I have (in the specific) responsibility for the welfare and well being of another then there is no set of circumstances under which I would deem justification to send them into harm’s way.
We can not, and will never be able to, determine a legitimate outcome or set of actions based on your driving question.
My child will always be my child. But one day he will also be his own man. An adult who determines his fate and makes existential choices I would never make. And possibly never agree to. But those will not matter when it comes down to it.
As for sending your child or XYZ’s child into harm’s way the answer is always the same.
Ask a better question, or argue from a better premise.
Soonergrunt
@Corner Stone: My answer to that is simple. You are a citizen of (theoretically at least) a democracy. This democracy has the capability to send people all over the world to do things. Those things may or may not be in what you perceive to be the national interest or to support what you may or may not perceive to be national values. Their salaries, food, weapons, equipment and means of transport are all paid by taxes paid by you and other citizens.
The fact that your child may one day grow up and vote Republican is utterly irrelevant to my point. Members of the US military work for us. They do things with our money, and at our collective direction, wearing our flag, and in our collective name. We have a responsibility to them to use their service in a manner that elevates the country. One could easily argue that we also have a responsibility to the rest of the world in how we use or don’t use our military, and while I would agree with that idea, it was outside the scope of the argument I was making. And the argument is not WHO would you send, but ‘would you send ANYBODY?’ Because if you can’t support sending your own child–if whatever action is contemplated is not worth it to you to risk your own child’s life or health–you shouldn’t be sending my child either, whether he enlisted in the military or not.
I’m not saying that if you don’t want your child to die, you shouldn’t support something, I’m saying if you don’t want to risk your child dying, you shouldn’t support something. The vast majority of people who go to war or police actions or what-have-you come home (physically, at least) intact. There are some things worth risking for. But it’s supposed to be part of the social contract that the leaders whom we elect, and to whom we remit our taxes, at least articulate what they are trying to accomplish when they send our military personnel to various places to do various things. And while the future is unknowable, it is also relatively easy to predict some things, and even if it wasn’t that easy, one can at least make the assumption that the stated goals will be met and then say “this is worthy of my daughter going forth to do this thing and take this risk,” or one can say “even assuming that all of the goals the President claims are reached, this is not worth the potential risk to my son.”
Rational people can make risk assessments. We do it every day, even where our children are concerned.
We agree to let her start driving herself to school when we’ve decided that she’s at relatively low risk of being killed or hurt in an accident because we taught her how to drive and supplied her with a good car, and the upside is that we get a few more minutes to drink coffee in the morning. Or we say that she’s not ready yet and we keep leaving at the same time so we can keep dropping her off.
I’m not sure what false premises you think my post is littered with. I submit to you that as I just discussed in the preceding paragraphs, it’s not WHO would you send, it’s is this contemplated action worth sending ANYBODY.
Because the person that has things for which he is willing to send other people’s loved ones to risk death and dismemberment, but never his own, well, that’s amazingly selfish.
And if you are telling me that for you, the answer is always the same, regardless of whose loved ones are serving, then I don’t think I need a better premise. I think that your answer, if I’m reading you correctly, is that there is nothing for which you would send US military personnel to risk death, dismemberment, and so on in the far corners of the world. That’s a very moral argument, and one that says “I value the lives and physical and psychological well being of my fellow man and not just my own, and that there is no goal that would compel me to change that.”
It’s amazing to me how many people seem determined to find a way around answering a simple question, which you seem to have answered very easily, which is simply “do you, or do you not have certain criteria for which you would support sending a loved one out wearing this nation’s uniform to risk being killed or maimed?” Because if one doesn’t think something is worth the risk to one’s own loved one, then it’s not (if one is a moral being) worth the risk to anyone else’ loved one either, and it’s probably not something we as a country should be doing.
And that IS the argument that people seem to have a problem with.
EDIT–nonetheless, I’ve edited my answer to Debbie at 275 to reflect my answer to what I believe she might have been getting at.
debbie
@Corner Stone:
I really don’t know what the solution is. While I would not be at all happy if my child was sent to a conflict, I also know how unhappy I have been whenever yet another genocide comes to light.
I object to the term “national interests” because of what that term implies to me. In Iraq it was oil; in Central America, it was not-Communism. Look how those national interests turned out and see what damage they inflicted on others. National interests to me sounds like a calculated business decision, when what we should be making is a humanity decision.
I’m older than you; I remember Vietnam and everything since. I have relatives who died in the Holocaust. Maybe that colors my opinion, maybe I’m more One World than most. But if we can’t take care of each other, even at this most basic level, than what kind of species are we?
debbie
@debbie:
Oops. Too late to edit and not enough coffee. Wrong reply button hit.