The falcon cannot hear the falconer

The article is clearly on the right track, and it points (inadvertantly) to a key problem with the pro-invasion position: anyone who had enough sense to have won the war would have had enough sense not to have started it in the first place.

The authors are also correct that, clearly, the main reason for the ‘pro-invasioners’ stand was to distance themselves from Kissingerean realpolitik on the one hand, and the ‘woolly minded’ (or worse) left on the other hand. Nick Cohen amongst others still seems to think this is a worthwhile project and is still keen to hack out a new political space for himself and others like him (and who will lead this movement do we think?). Certainly compare the time that ‘Harry’s Place’ has spent attacking Osama Bin Laden with the time it has spent attacking the (anti-war)’left’ and you get a sense where their real priorities lie.

But the article by Henry seems to me to contain a number of assumptions that are frequently made, which strike me as being dangerous.

Actually no-one serious denies that sometimes military action is necessary and sometimes, even, ‘intervention’ (i.e. de facto invasion) by various parties…..but only if this is authorised by the international community and carried out in defence of and in accord with international law . The problem many of us had with Kosova and then Afghanistan (far more so than with the first Gulf War) was that international law (and the whole concept of the United Nations) seemed to be first sidelined (kosova), then ignored (afghanistan), then actively flouted (iraq).

After all there are already UN Conventions on Genocide (amongst many other things). It’s not as if this was a completely new situation that no-one had ever thought of before.

This seems to me to be indicated by the sentence: ‘They’re effectively discrediting the argument that the US should (where possible) help spread democracy and protect human rights….’.

Well yes. Of course. The US should spread democracy and human rights. But in the same way, surely ALL the democracies should be trying to spread democracy and human rights? If the US, then why not, as well, Germany, Britain, Ireland, India, Brazil, or even (this will drive the pro-invasioners into a frenzy) Venezuela?

What’s good for the goose……if the US should be allowed to ‘intervene’ and promote democracy, then why should’t any (democratic) state be doing the same?

But in practice, mysteriously, this is never the case. Where were the pro-warriors calling for a French invasion of Iraq? Or for Argentina to invade Afghanistan? Or (right now) for South Africa to invade the Congo? Or Sudan?

It is rarely stated, but it often seems to be assumed that ‘liberal interventionism’ (which is a reasonably objective) should only apply to the US and those states that, effectively, agree to take orders from the US.

Using force to build a pluralistic liberal democracy where none existed before could count as a moral justification for war if we had any sense of how to feasibly engage in such an endeavor…

Nuts. Obviously these people don’t learn; they’re the same deranged messianic nuts they were three years ago. They know what’s good for you and they’ll shove into your throat given the slightest chance. Best be locked up in some think-tank and kept busy publishing articles no one ever reads.

Umm….last time I checked Gulf War 1 was approved by the UN. CF also Korea. The idea that it would be China and Russia (and only them) that might ‘block’ the UN is also…um…questionable: remember Clinton and Rwanda? I find the implication that ‘we would do so much good if only these pesky foreigners would stop getting in our way’….questionable.

‘Brazil, India, and South Africa which see anti-interventionism as an important element of anti-colonialism’. Yeah and whatever gave them that idea? Some people! I ask you.

In any case, even without actual invasion, the implication that therefore the UN can do nothing is clearly false (cf East Timor).

I think the Iraq invasion/occupation was/is a disaster and a mistake, but it could have been successful if competent people had been in charge. Suppose Saddam really did have a dangerous nuclear program and the U.S. had been able to convince the rest of the world of it. A coalition the size of the 660,000 troops used in the first Gulf War, a true international commitment to rebuild the country, and an occupation not run by GOP hacks, Halliburton, and Heritage Foundation 23-year-olds would not have brought us to the quagmire we’re in. I understand the impulse to think that if the U.S. couldn’t do it, it’s impossible, but it’s not correct and will lead us to not intervening in future situations where we need to make a difference.

‘So Brendan – you’re claiming that the first Gulf war and Korea were humanitarian interventions then??? Or are you just missing Matt’s point completely??? And I don’t see where in the post you can find any claim, either explicit or implicit that the US should be allowed to intervene and other democracies shouldn’t’

No, I’m simply pointing out that the idea that the UN security council would never authorise military action is false.

Also: I wasn’t quibbling with the post. My point was about the ‘liberal hawks’. Are the likes of Christopher Hitchens or Nick Cohen seriously going to sit down and argue that if France, or India or Brazil had invaded Iraq outwith the framework of international law, they would have been just as keen on the operation? If not, why not?

Steve’s first post is dead on: For liberal hawks, it seems the problem is admitting you got conned – Big Time.

For pundits, its a mea culpa and a hard hour at the keyboard working up the courage to write it out.

But for Dem politicians, how on earth do you make a case that you’re to be trusted with executive power if you have to start with, “I was a sucker”? That’s the bind. You can point to the fact that Bush and the neocons played us all for suckers, but then you’re stuck with, “Well, except for the anti-war left. And the French. And the rest of the damn planet. They saw through the lies all pretty good… but vote for me anyway?”

John Kerry tried this with his “I didn’t think he’d fuck it up” line. You can bet that if that meme had hit a stronger chord with the public in 2004, it would have been the centerpiece of the election. But it didn’t and it wasn’t – and that’s probably the best explanation for why Kerry lost. Given the percentages that supported the war in 2003, Kerry needed to make that argument to war supporters in 2004 and WIN it by a large margin. He didn’t. America was still holding out hope – wasn’t ready to admit it got conned yet. Maybe now we are…

Henry might be right about China and Russia, but the problem is broader–the US has actively sided with countries engaged in mass killing (El Salvador, Guatemala, Indonesia, Iraq, just off the top of my head, so it probably wouldn’t have approved UN interventions in such cases. Israel wasn’t exactly fighting a clean war in Lebanon in 1982, for that matter, with its rather brutal bombing of Beirut that summer. I suppose an interventionist could argue that a few hypocritical interventions stopping some mass killings when it happens to be in our interest is better than none at all. In fact that would be the honest argument. But few people in the US argue it that way. A few liberal hawks arguing in obscure blogs or political magazines might say “Sure, we’ve helped mass murderers ourselves on occasion, not to mention what we did in Southeast Asia once upon a time, but this time it’s in our interest to stop a mass killing so do you really want to prevent this because you’re so mad about all the other times the US got away with murder?” But what gets sold to the public is “US good, others evil.” I’m not arguing against interventionism as such, since I’d reluctantly support it in extreme cases like Darfur. But it’d be nice to have these public debates for the mass media conducted honestly.

On the United Nations:

http://unrepentant.blogspot.com/2005/09/un-us.html

I would emend this:

The US military, as it was then and is now, simply doesn’t have the resources or the will.

… to this:

The US military, as it was then and is now, simply doesn’t have the manpower.

(“Resources” is vague and suggests we could throw money at the deficiency, which we can’t. I don’t know what “will” means here but I suspect that at least some people would take offense at that.)

Not only Iraq is an abject failure from the humanitarian point of view, but bombings of Serbia as well, and Vietnam, and Granada and the bay of pigs and every meddling in Latin America and all of Africa, all of the Middle East, and Korea, and Japan and Germany too – yes, these too are abject failures from the humanitarian perspective as millions of innocent people were killed to achieve one or another geopolitical result.

Rwanda was actually a big success, almost a miracle – nobody killed by American bombs. About 800 thousand Rwandans were killed by about 800 thousand other Rwandans, on average 1 Hutu guy killed exactly 1 Tutsi person. Thank god the westerners refrained from killing millions for the sake of humanity.

“My own feeling is that I don’t really see a situation in which any nation state intervenes purely for humanitarian reasons. I suspect there would always have to be a bottom line. Ipso facto, I think that if there was no bottom line any state including the United States might find a reason to look the other way.”

This is probably right. On the other hand, the US, UK and other NATO states did intervene in Kosovo for what were mostly humanitarian reasons. Precisely because the stated rationale for the war heavily involved humanitarianism, China was opposed to it. Russia was also opposed, in part for that reason and in part out of Slavic solidarity. As a result, garnering UN approval for an intervention was impossible. Some people think that, owing to that lack of UN approval, intervention was illegitimate.

As I say above, I don’t think that “listen to the UN” position is obviously absurd. But it does demonstrate the general dynamic that it leads to — no humanitarian interventions ever.

Some good things would result from a stronger UN. But you would need to radically change the nature and purpose of the UN for it to cease to be the case that China won’t authorize strong anti-genocide measures. Maybe we should give the UN — and, by extension, the government of China — an absolute veto over military actions anyway. It would act as a restraint against against American (and to a lesser extent, British and French) mucking about. But there would be a real cost to this. “Stop genocide but do it through the UN” isn’t a real option barring a drastic change in Sino-Russian thinking.

abb1 — I’m with you that the solution is more liberal hawks at brookings writing papers, less on the op ed page at the NYT – or the Washinton Post, now that the NYT has reduced its credibility to that of the New York post.

The so called reality based community, which is justly critical of Bush-ite fantasies about holding the course, retreats into fantasy mode when it comes to the Dem leadership calling for holding the course — the same course that has brought us three disastrous defeats, and that is now offering us another heeping helping of warmed over Biden-ism. Myself, I just can’t abide warmed over Biden-ism.

What the liberal hawks forgot was the power of the little word, “then.” That’s the sort of little word that pulls narratives together. The little word then gives us a sense of policy choices. If your plan contains incompatibles, then your results will contain a high degree of implausibility. For instance, if the liberal hawks listened to Paul Wolfowitz before the war, they would have heard him say that we were going to pay for the war with Iraq’s oil money. Now, if we were going to both take the only revenue source from a impoverished country AND instill a democracy in that country, then we were planning on giving power to people from whom we were stripping wealth, and the probable then is that they would hate our guts for it and use their previous investment of wealth in numberless automatic rifles and bombs to try to kick our ass. So let’s just say that plan was screwed from the get go. In fact, it has become clear that it was a sham plan, since it might have been hard to convince the U.S. to put 200 plus billion into Bush’s Iraq vanity project.

That kind of thing sorta operates to delegitimize a project on both ends. That’s in the process of happening. I don’t think this will really douse the liberal hawk ardor to move nations around like chessmen on a chessboard, but it will depress them about the American people. In the past, that has lead to a solution a la the Pentagon Papers of just massively lying and keeping things secret from the American people. I imagine we will see more of that if a Dem actually gets elected in 2008.

Abb1: ‘About 800 thousand Rwandans were killed by about 800 thousand other Rwandans, on average 1 Hutu guy killed exactly 1 Tutsi person.’Spurious and ignorant figures: whilst we will never know exactly how many Tutsis participated in the slaughter, we know that the organisers of the massacre both incited and forced as many Tutsis as possible to hack at victims, in a successful attempt at making the entire community ‘guilty’. Probably a good deal more than 800,000 Hutus were obliged or opted to take part in the killing. But you don’t actually care about the facts, do you? For you, Rwandans are debating points rather than people.

Also Abb1: ‘Rwanda was actually a big success, almost a miracle – nobody killed by American bombs.’

Oh, hilarious. You’re actually making a joke about mass murder whilst lecturing us on the evils of the United States. Ever thought of doing your dead nigger jokes for the Ku Klux Klan?

‘Didn’t the French ultimately take the lead in Rwanda?’

The French (meaning the Socialist President Mitterand, the Gaullist Foreign Minister Juppé, their close associates and certain elements in the Quai D’Orsay and the spookier bits of the military) supported the genocidal elements within the Habyarimana regime before and during the genocide- with military training teams, a stonewall approach at the UN Security Council, money to buy small arms and, er, pangas (machetes) and much, much more. When the RPF overwhelmed the Tutsi state, the French finally flew their military in, in Operation Noroit, the chief effect of which was to rescue senior elements of the genocidal leadership. Anyone wanting to shoot their mouth off on Rwanda should read the contemporaneous African Rights reports on the subject, or Gerard Prunier’s ‘The Rwanda Crisis’.

I wouldn’t mind but I have explained this more times than I can remember. Farrell recently delivered his opinion that ‘The French should have intervened in Rwanda’. Henry, do not teach undergraduates about Rwanda until you have learned that the French did intervene in Rwanda, and that was the problem. Someone saying ‘the Germans prevented the Jews from mass slaughter in the Second World War’ would be howled down, but when it comes to the slaughter of a bunch of Africans you don’t need to know anything. This uninformed ‘concern’ about foreigners is dangerous and foolish.

Oh, the classic Abb1 post. The absence of any apology for joking about a genocide. The rigorous reference to clearly defined sources (‘Well, I read somewhere recently’). And, to cap it all, the accurate use of statistics:’they have now indicted 700,000+ people for the 1994 genocide.’

From a March 10, 2005 BBC report:(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/3246291.stm)
‘… some 120,000 people were arrested after the genocide, taking Rwanda’s prisons to bursting point.’

Or, from Amnesty’s 2002 report on Rwanda
(http://web.amnesty.org/web/ar2002.nsf/afr/rwanda?Open )
‘ An estimated 110,000 people continued to be detained’

As explained in the texts mentioned above, although a great many more were involved in the killings, the Rwandan Government have realised that they can’t arrest and try all of them, firstly because so many of them were coerced and secondly because that number of arrests would make the country ungovernable. Which was entirely the genocidaires’ intention.

Not only have you not read any books on Rwanda, you didn’t even bother to google ‘number arrested Rwanda’ before holding forth authoritatively on the number of people arrested in Rwanda.

Does anybody have a word for abb1? ‘Ignorant’ and ‘dishonest’ cover some of the ground, but simultaneously lying and making jokes about a genocide takes things one step further.

Great, I personally have coined the word for Abb1: ‘beyonddense’. That has a pleasing Anglo-Saxon quality to it.

Rwanda is an interesting case, since it is hard to see how the U.S. could have intervened in time even if it had wanted to to prevent most of those deaths. Dan is right about the French — they were definitely on the side of the genocidaires — but the analogy with Germany and the Jews is wrong. The French favored the Habyarimana not because they had a racial prejudice against the Hutus, but because they wanted to maintain their influence in the region — actually, the same political reasoning that lead the Reagan regime to favor Saddam Hussein to the extent of guarding his ships against attack even as he was slaughtering Kurds. I think that Rwanda is a pretty singular case — in the annals of mass murder, more like the breakup of Yugoslavia than Nazi Germany. Minimal military gestures might have caused the government to desist leading lynch mobs at the beginning, but there is an unrealistic time element in that scenario.
In any case, what is the relevance of Rwanda to Iraq? Unless we are making an argument that the time and money spent on Iraq could have been spent more wisely intervening in the bloody Congo War, or in Liberia — more immediate emergencies. I don’t think anybody has made that case. Certainly , Bush did everything possible to discourage the people of Liberia from thinking that American troops were going to prevent massacres in that oil poor state.

Yes, Roger, the ‘regional influence’ bit is largely right, although barmy prejudice about the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ threat (in Africa, where everybody wears horned helmets) also came into it. I suspect that a threat of outside intervention would have been enough to have given many of the senior genocidaires pause – they thought they would get away with it, and in most cases they have. If not, an airborne operation to seize Kigali airport followed by flying lots of infantry into the country would have done fine. Romeo Dallaire, who was in a position to know, thought a few thousand disciplined infantrymen could have ended the genocide p.d.q.

I agree with Donald that discussion of Abb1 is not all that interesting, but frankly the guy is in the habit of leading discussions wherever he wants them to go by pulling facts and figures out of his ass :’Well, I read somewhere recently that’…(entirely made-up stats follow).’ He needed stomping on, and with some luck he might now be cured of squirting his ignorance all over comment threads.

Anybody who can even talk about things like Rwanda without shrieking like a wounded pig, unless they’re pathologically desensitized or something, is to be admired – viz. Lawrence.
Still, there’s nothing in the numbers that automatically renders the events more horrible by measurable degree. It’s how you’ve been trained to react.
More numbers of dead – bad; fewer numbers of dead – less bad, if not exactly good.
Sports and school, and strategies of financial gain, affirm this method of moral judgment – but it has nothing to do with reality.
Certainly your own reaction, moral or intellectual, is greater the closer to your own family tragedy strikes – and the numbers have nothing to do with it.
Someone whose wife died the same day as the Indonesian tsunami is not even remotely conflicted or divided in his grief, and neither would you be.

One notices dan hardie finding no fault with the term “Islamofascist” when it’s being used in posts he actively comments on, though it’s a term that has nearly the equivalence of suffering and injustice of historical racial derogatives.
One notices abb1 using the term “Islamofascist” as a form of ironic accusation here and there, now and then.
Irony holds more of the weight of tragic things than smarmy self-righteousness ever will.

‘One notices dan hardie finding no fault with the term “Islamofascist” when it’s being used in posts he actively comments on, though it’s a term that has nearly the equivalence of suffering and injustice of historical racial derogatives.’

WTF? Are you really going to trawl through every comments thread I have ever commented on and hold me responsible for every word written by others unless I have explicitly condemned them? That’s desperate.

There is a question about intervention and Rwanda that looks relevant to me. And that is what would have prevented the US or intervening military to become a party in the conflict, and how would a military intervention resolve the problem between the conflicting parties?

Take Iraq, where the intervening military was succesful in removing the cause of the humanitarian crisis. But then the conflict changed form, added some participants, the US military became a target of other groups than their original opponents, and the killing hasn’t stopped.

There’s a big gap between achieving a military objective and achieving peace, democracy or any other humanitarian objective.

For me that is one of the fallacies of those arguing for military interventions. It hides the real problem of how to solve those conflicts.

If there is need for peace keeping or peace enforcing actions as part of a cohesive plan that’s one thing. But to start a real war on the assumption that all is going to be well at the end of it, that is asking for failure.

Luci Phyrr above (#25) described the evolving positions of the liberal interventionists well.

Given this quote of Yglesias
“If interventionism is to be saved, it must first be saved from the interventionists.”

and considering war (as in Iraq) as intervention, then that leads inevitably to position #4, namely that it should be an option of last resort. Because the interventionist will always say that the outcome will be positive.

You can say well this time it was wrong. But how do you judge next time, if you admit that this time you judged wrong? To resolve that you’ll need an objective measure, and that will lead to the “last resort” position (self defense, genocide).

Call it the Mother in Law fallacy.

There’s zillions of good reasons to finish her. There are no mitigating circumstances. There’s no possibility of a peaceful solution.

You can afford the largest Ikea Skarpt kitchen knife. She always let’s you know where she is.

The conclusion is inevitable.

And when your life turns out more miserable than it ever was, you can blame it on the fact that you forgot to buy the Aspekt knife sharpener, so she got of with some bruises, and didn’t even bleed. You can blame it on the fact that you couldn’t afford a $500 gun.

But all that doesn’t matter, because the real problem here is that you failed to hold on to the principle of not killing someone.

The thing about wars is that they’re rather like sitcoms; there are very few good ones. They’re also like sitcoms in that everyone has a real favourite one that was really good and thinks about it so much that they forget that the vasy majority of them were really bad ideas. And finally they are like sitcoms in that there are a small number of people responsible for commissioning them, and they always think, despite all the evidence, that the one they’re thinking about now is going to be one of the good ones.

So what I’m basically saying is that, more than nine times out of ten, if someone says “hey don’t go out Thursday night because there is a brand new sitcom on television”, the sensible thing to say is “I don’t really watch sitcoms because they are almost always crap”, and a similar attitude ought to be taken to wars.

(the other way that wars are like sitcoms is that it is impossible to predict who will like which ones. I know for a fact that several of the most furious supporters of the Iraq War were equally furious opponents of Afghanistan and confidently predict that many of the big opponents of Iraq, quite possibly including myself, will sign up for the next fucking great disaster to be sold to us as a humanitarian intervention)

The thing about wars is that they’re rather like sitcoms; there are very few good ones. They’re also like sitcoms in that everyone has a real favourite one that was really good and thinks about it so much that they forget that the vasy majority of them were really bad ideas. And finally they are like sitcoms in that there are a small number of people responsible for commissioning them, and they always think, despite all the evidence, that the one they’re thinking about now is going to be one of the good ones.

(the other way that wars are like sitcoms is that it is impossible to predict who will like which ones. I know for a fact that several of the most furious supporters of the Iraq War were equally furious opponents of Afghanistan and confidently predict that many of the big opponents of Iraq, quite possibly including myself, will sign up for the next fucking great disaster to be sold to us as a humanitarian intervention)

This is great.

I liked “Sledgehammer”. And “Sportsnight”. And Afghanistan.

Shorter Abb1- (Bonus content): There is no way to’decide who are the criminals and who are the victims’ of mass murder. All those Rwandans who hacked themselves to death should be ashamed of themselves, not to mention the Bosnians who jumped into mass graves for a laugh.

‘Shorter Dan Hardie: I am your God, omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient.’

Abb1, that is true, and I could wipe out your miserable existence in an instant. But I have decided, in My mysterious wisdom, that I shall leave you alive, that your perpetual whining may test the charity and perseverance of your fellow man. Don’t all thank Me at once, mortals.

‘The point is that you can’t (wipe out Abb1’s miserable existence in an instant) though…’

I tremble: Abb1 may be close to realising that, in fact, I am not his ominiscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God. Shhh! Nobody tell him. With any luck Abb1 will wander from the Highway of the Freakin’ Obvious to frolic upon the Pastures of Impenetrable Metaphor…

‘you have no doubt that you can go deep in the bush and separate the sheep from the goats there.’

Indeed, a sheep in the bush is worth two goats in the hand.

This seems to me germaine to much of the above: SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK AGAINST HUMAN RIGHTS. Here’s a blurb to give you a sense of the thing:

Alibi for militarist interventions, sacralization for the tyranny of the market, ideological foundation for the fundamentalism of the politically correct: can the ‘symbolic fiction’ of universal rights be recuperated for the progressive politicization of actual socio-economic relations?

I was kind of hoping one of the esteemed members of this here blog would at some point do a post on this, but it seems to have gone unoticed (perhaps deservedly so?). I don’t agree with much of the essay, well if I’m understanding it correctly which given the high academic prose style I’m not sure I am, but it is ultimately worth reading. I think…

Talking about forms of intervention… Recently, as part of the new familiarity between Libya and Tony Blair, the British made the uber-friendly gesture of inviting Qadaffi’s reps to the DSEI, the biggest arms fair in Europe. France, meanwhile, is supposedly competing to build Qadaffi more jet fighters. Now, here is a slow motion mass murder before our eyes, and intervention, here, would be as simple as simply saying no to the greediest impulses in the national economy. Nobody following Qadaffi’s influence on liberia, chad, sierra leone, etc., can doubt that it is highly malign. The mass murdering despots who have descended on the West African coastal countries have consistently been trained in Libya. So how about intervening in our own economies and pulling the plug on this source of blood money? Small steps, as they say in AA

Et tu, Brute? Bummer. Hektor Bim’s rebuke eariler today was shocking enough, and now this…