The falcon cannot hear the falconer

by Henry Farrell on October 20, 2005

Sam Rosenfeld and Matt Yglesias have written a very important article on the “liberal hawks”:http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=10454, and whether or not the Iraq invasion was doomed from the start. I don’t agree with everything they say – their idea of a liberal internationalist policy seems to me to understate what’s possible. But their main point seems to me to be indisputable. The claim that the Iraq invasion could have worked if competent people had undertaken it doesn’t hold water. The US military, as it was then and is now, simply doesn’t have the resources or the will. When liberal hawks argue otherwise, they’re mistaken at best, and at worst positively disingenuous. I think that the underlying burden of Rosenfeld and Yglesias’ argument is also quite compelling. Liberal hawks, because of their failure to face up to their mistakes honestly, are doing serious damage to the liberal approach to international affairs. They’re effectively discrediting the argument that the US should (where possible) help spread democracy and protect human rights, and abdicating the high ground to pragmatic realists.

bq. An honest reckoning with this war’s failure does not threaten the future of liberal interventionism. Instead, it is liberal interventionism’s only hope. By erecting a false dichotomy between support for the current bad war and a Kissingerian amoralism, the dodgers run the risk of merely driving ever-larger numbers of liberals into the realist camp. Left-of-center opinion neither will nor should follow a group of people who continue to insist that the march to Baghdad was, in principle, the height of moral policy thinking. If interventionism is to be saved, it must first be saved from the interventionists.

This is exactly right.

Also see Matt’s “evisceration”:http://yglesias.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/10/20/105013/21 of a bogus George Will op-ed on health care and globalization; he’s clearly on a roll.

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{ 61 comments }

1

Steve LaBonne 10.20.05 at 12:43 pm

Under the influence of post-9/11 pyschosis, I bought into the the WMD scam. I was not just wrong, I was a f’ing idiot. There, liberal hawks, it’s not so hard to admit, and like me you’ll feel much cleaner once you do.

2

Brendan 10.20.05 at 12:44 pm

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.

3

Patrick 10.20.05 at 12:50 pm

The liberal idea that the war was doomed from the beginning, did have some truth to it. War, is just like a novel, you need the introduction, climax, and conclusion. A plan of attack was implemented but is not complete without a strong withdrawl plan. Lil’ Bush probably didn’t think about it because he wanted to stay over there and have the following President take care of that. If he had his drothers, he would nuke that whole area Iraqi and US military alike, but the threat of global demise is holding him back.
We brought upon war to take down Saddam, among other things (WMD-HAHA! don’t get me started). We took down Saddam, his trial is finally beginning, yet we still have no light at the end of the tunnel for a safe ride home. The fact that our orignal decree of conflict was to protect the world from nuclear and chemical threats. Ever since that was found to be an incorrect theory, the fact that we had no reason to be over there should have set in. You made mention of spreading Democracy. Granted, I do believe that our government and the way that we do things awesome, but it is not utopian. It does not belong everywhere, and to force it onto a country that does not want it imposed is very Russian Communist like. During the Red Era, communism was spread among countries like wildfire. Now whether it was through violent means, I have no idea, but with hearing stories of Stalin, there is a good possibility that it was brought on by force. We have no reason to try to change the world to what we believe is right. For the religous conservatives out there, you always speak against certain things by remarks such as, “we don’t have the right to play God.” I do concurr with that statement, so why should we try to change everybody else to believe what we believe. It is an act of bigotry and extremely narrowmindedness. The different culture, traditions, and government forms, is what makes this world go around. If we all walked the same, talked the same and believed the same, our individuality would be no more. You had made mention also of protecting human rights. I agree whole heartedly. We do need to protect the person, but not only there life, but also the way they live it. Conformity does not protect the person, it destroys it. It brings repression and a demand for revolt among those against it.

We got Saddam, we did our good deed. Now lets get our people home safe and sound. If we do have to stay over there, lets do it to protect the people, not the idea of a utopian democracy.

4

abb1 10.20.05 at 12:51 pm

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.

5

Matthew Yglesias 10.20.05 at 1:11 pm

Well, with regard to the UN and so forth I can see a pretty cogent case being made that humanitarian warfare should only be undertaken with Security Council approval. If one is going to take this line, however, then you need to recognize that this means humanitarian interventions will never be undertaken in practice. The Convention on Genocide is nice, but the reality is that the governments of China and Russia have no intention of authorizing interference in sovereign states’ ability to govern (or misgovern) their own populations. They’re more-or-less joined in this view by several of the big emerging democracies like Brazil, India, and South Africa which see anti-interventionism as an important element of anti-colonialism.

At any rate, I used to think that the “only if the UN says yes” view was clearly mistaken for just those reasons. Nowadays, I think it’s less clear. But people who want to double-down on “legitimacy equals the Security Council” do need to be honest about what the implications of what they’re saying.

6

Brendan 10.20.05 at 1:24 pm

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).

7

JP 10.20.05 at 1:27 pm

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.

I don’t know that this is the case. Didn’t the French ultimately take the lead in Rwanda? And the Australians in East Timor? I don’t think anyone has had a problem with other countries jumping on the bandwagon in the event of real humanitarian crises.

8

Morpeth 10.20.05 at 1:31 pm

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.

9

JP 10.20.05 at 1:32 pm

Cross-posted. OK, fair points. I just don’t get the impression that anyone would have complained if, say, the Europeans had taken the lead in Kosovo.

The goal, from my point of view, is to have a foreign policy in which Iraq is discredited but Kosovo is allowed. The fact is that we never would have intervened in Kosovo if UN approval had been considered absolute. And I don’t buy the idea that Kosovo put us on a slippery slope to Iraq.

10

Henry 10.20.05 at 1:37 pm

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.

11

bob mcmanus 10.20.05 at 1:41 pm

The purging has begun, early enough to ensure a catastrophe in 2008 and a new improved Democratic Party of irrelevance and impotence. Lord, what a flashback to the early seventies I’m having. Deja vu all over again.

Doesn’t matter. The Social Democratic Welfare State is on the march! It’s inevitable.

12

Brendan 10.20.05 at 1:44 pm

‘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?

13

Henry 10.20.05 at 1:52 pm

But Brendan – Matt’s point is pretty straightforward. He doesn’t claim that the Security Council won’t authorize _military action_. He claims that the Security Council won’t authorize military action aimed at _humanitarian intervention_. Which, given China’s touchiness over Tibet, democracy etc, and Russia’s touchiness over Chechnya, seems to me to be more or less inarguable. Russia and China won’t authorize interventions aimed at correcting the ways in which states conduct their internal business, repress minorities, kill citizens _en masse_ etc, for fear of the precedent they might set.

14

Silent E 10.20.05 at 1:53 pm

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…

15

Uncle Kvetch 10.20.05 at 2:02 pm

An honest reckoning with this war’s failure does not threaten the future of liberal interventionism.

True…and more’s the pity.

16

Donald Johnson 10.20.05 at 2:28 pm

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.

17

Joel 10.20.05 at 3:16 pm

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

Well yeah, but their motivations in doing so were shall we say suspect. But would a state intervening in the affairs of another for the ‘wrong reasons’ be generally acceptable if it had the postive effect of ending an ongoing atrocity? Say for example, the invasion of Cambodia by the Vietnamese in 1978. I don’t think anyone would argue the Vietnamese invaded for humanitarian reasons, but it did put an end to the Khmer Rouge (for the most part).

18

Louis Proyect 10.20.05 at 3:18 pm

19

Slocum 10.20.05 at 3:49 pm

Again with the ‘failure is not only assured but already complete’ meme. Sigh. I’m reminded of the ‘bring out your dead’ scene in Holy Grail except this isn’t funny.

If, at some point, the Iraqi government falls and the country fragments into warring splinters or a new tyrant grabs power, or Iran invades from one direction and Turkey from the other, or all of the above, then it will be time to analyze the failure that has occurred. But picking over the bones of a ‘corpse’ that not only isn’t dead yet but is showing many signs of pulling through…well, I’m sorry, that to me is just not evidence of progressive thinking.

And the worry about setting proper guidelines for humanitarian interventions? Get a grip. Security Council or no Security Council, these things happen only when the U.S. pushes hard, and I think it’s pretty iffy that another president will bet his presidency on an intervention the way Bush has on Iraq and Afghanistan. And the EU? It has not the means, nor the will, nor the will to develop the means for this kind of work.

The only chance I see for a future for humanitarian interventions is if Afghanistan and Iraq end up being perceived as successes, in the U.S. at least. Otherwise, it seems likely to me that Republicans will return to sneering at nation-building while the Dems will return to ‘firehouses in New York not Baghdad’ thinking.

But this thread (and others like it) seem to have the goal of trying to assure that Iraq is perceived as an abject failure regardless of the ultimate outcome. If that ends up being the conventional wisdom, it will be death of humanitarian interventions for the foreseeable future.

20

alkali 10.20.05 at 3:53 pm

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.)

21

Brendan 10.20.05 at 3:53 pm

‘ He doesn’t claim that the Security Council won’t authorize military action. He claims that the Security Council won’t authorize military action aimed at humanitarian intervention.’

Well fair enough, but surely, more the point, the American and British people wouldn’t buy it either? It’s certainly true that part of the reason Bush and Blair pushed the ‘Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction’ was to get it past the security council (and of course, ironically enough, it failed). But the other reason was to ‘sell’ the war to their own people.

If there had been no fuss about weapons of mass destruction, niger, ‘links with Al-Qaeda’, etc, and this had gone past the security council and the security council had said ‘nope sorry we don’t do humanitarian’ then that would be one thing.

But that’s not what happened. Instead we had the farce of all the above and the security council said ‘sorry we’re not convinced’ and, as we now know, they were right not to be convinced.

It’s an interesting hypothetical point, whether the Security Council would ever authorise ‘purely’ humanitarian intervention for, for example, genocide. However the best example of it right now would be Sudan, and, despite some sabre rattling, the Bush (and Blair) administrations don’t realy seem to want to intervene, however humanitarianly, either.

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 isn’t anti-Americanism btw, just a wry comment on the way i think things are.

In any case, call me old fashioned, but I think the best way forward for the world community either pragmatically or morally is to strengthen international organisations (specifically the UN) not working out ways to weaken them.

22

abb1 10.20.05 at 4:21 pm

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.

23

Robin 10.20.05 at 4:22 pm

“Didn’t the French ultimately take the lead in Rwanda?”

Well yeah, but their motivations in doing so were shall we say suspect. But would a state intervening in the affairs of another for the ‘wrong reasons’ be generally acceptable if it had the postive effect of ending an ongoing atrocity? Say for example, the invasion of Cambodia by the Vietnamese in 1978. I don’t think anyone would argue the Vietnamese invaded for humanitarian reasons, but it did put an end to the Khmer Rouge (for the most part).

They were effectively protecting the genocidaires as they RPF was closing in. Not quite the right kind of intervention. (As James Scott once quipped, for the French, as long as they’re “assassins” and not “murderers”, it’s OK.)

I can think of 3 interventions which probably had non-humanitarian reasons that were good things, even if there was a humanitarian crisis: the Vietnamese in Cambodia, the Indians in what is now Bangladesh, and the Tanzanians in Uganda. Motives seem less important than predictable outcomes.

24

Matthew Yglesias 10.20.05 at 4:24 pm

“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.

25

luci phyrr 10.20.05 at 4:26 pm

Position#1: Yglesias, Drum, Klein, Marshall – almost all of the leftie blogs – NYT, TNR, etc., supported this war as part of the “remake the Middle East” initiative. They backed off that, retreating to

Position#2: “We didn’t factor in the *incompetence*, it might’ve worked if not for that!” This is currently where all cowardly democratic politicians are positioned. Nice fence-sitting there: “criticize the process, not the aims”. Allows one to nitpick the war’s implementation (with unfalsifiable, counterfactual speculations on strategy) while avoiding taking an actual *moral* position on a controversial question.

Opposing the war was unpopular, but not anymore. So now, these “contrarian” pundits wanna challenge the convential wisdom (which came from where again?) and say,

Position#3: “Hey, the war could never have accomplished its goals, even assuming competence.”

Oh those Kewl Kids. So edgy!

Wake me up when the dangerous pundits’ arguments reach their next level of evolution:

FuturePosition#4, hopefully: the war, even if it could, and perhaps will, accomplish its goals, was wrong! It’s immoral. You don’t go to war, for self defense or humanitarian intervention, unless imminant threat exists.

You don’t kill people preemptively on a gamble – the future is too unpredictable. Under an imminant threat, it is highly likely that harm would come in the absence of action. Arguments for competence become secondary too.

Just War Doctrine spells it out pretty good. How smug, cocky and deluded these “deep thinkers” from the left media must be to discount it.

26

roger 10.20.05 at 4:45 pm

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.

27

Donald Johnson 10.20.05 at 4:50 pm

I don’t know, abb1, Rwanda might be one of those extremely limited number of cases where Western intervention might have killed fewer people than what actually happened. In general, though, if we’re so all-fired eager to save the lives of innocent people, we could be making heroic efforts to fight malaria and AIDS, which kill vastly larger numbers of people than genocidal thugs. But it’s unglamorous and doesn’t involve blowing things up, and Hitchens doesn’t get to strike heroic poses as the Orwell of Our Time, so interventions which would save far more lives at much less expense (even allowing for some waste and fraud) just don’t have the cachet of the kind that involve cruise missiles and macho posturing.

28

Dan Hardie 10.20.05 at 5:19 pm

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?

29

abb1 10.20.05 at 5:22 pm

Well, I read somewhere recently that they have now indicted 700,000+ people for the 1994 genocide. This means, again, that basically each one of these people killed one of his or her neighbors – or am I missing something? But if it did indeed happen in this fashion, sort of a large-scale St-Bartholomew Night incident, how do you stop something like this?

30

Dan Hardie 10.20.05 at 5:25 pm

‘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.

31

abb1 10.20.05 at 5:26 pm

Well, Dan, sorry, but this is what’s being discussed here. If you can’t take it, don’t read.

32

Dan Hardie 10.20.05 at 5:45 pm

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.

33

Dan Hardie 10.20.05 at 5:51 pm

Well, Dan, sorry, but this is what’s being discussed here. If you can’t take it, don’t read.

You are beyonddense. ‘What is being discussed’ is, in part, Rwanda. You have a) expressed pleasure at the deaths of 800,000 Rwandans (a joke, so that’s okay); b) quoted false figures about the Rwandan genocide which I have corrected. No, boy, you stop reading your own damn comments on the web and do not post on the murder of 800,000 Africans without even having the honesty to check your own ‘facts’ on google.

I don’t like accusations of racism. But you are not only making things up about 800,000 murdered black Africans, you are joking about them. Your behaviour is a shocking example of racism.

If anyone thinks I am being harsh, just read this filth: ‘Rwanda was actually a big success, almost a miracle – nobody killed by American bombs.’
Substitute ‘Treblinka’ or ‘Belsen’ for ‘Rwanda’ and the sentence is just as ‘true’ and just as disgusting. You scum.

34

Dan Hardie 10.20.05 at 5:52 pm

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

35

Donald Johnson 10.20.05 at 8:54 pm

Abb1, I understood what your point was–you think American military intervention would have caused millions of deaths and that nearly a million deaths is preferable to millions. But putting it the way you did leaves you wide open for someone to choose to interpret the remark as racist. It’s a risky sort of rhetorical device anyway, the kind of thing I remember being very fond of when I was a teenager, where I’d try to make my point in the way calculated to shock people the most. I’m not totally free of that now, come to think of it, but it’s a bad habit.

Besides, what might have been an interesting discussion on when American intervention will be the lesser of two evils is now turning into a discussion of your wickedness and other shortcomings. Sorry to break it to you, but a less interesting discussion I can’t imagine.

I recently saw a case of T.E. Lawrence joking about mass killing–speaking of Britain’s 1920 Iraq War and writing in opposition to it, he said, quoting from memory, that “we’ve killed 10,000 people already and can hardly be expected to maintain that rate, since Iraq is a sparsely populated country.” Kind of funny, that. But it’s hard to pull that off.

Now, if I can manage to get past the snooze-inducing parts about your wickedness, I’m on dan hardie’s side. Bad as American intervention usually is, I just don’t think it’s likely that it would have been worse than the murder of 800,000 people in a few months. That’s a much higher death rate than the US inflicted in Vietnam, where it took many years to cause 2-3 million deaths. ( I’m coming close to insensitive irony with that one.) So it’s highly unlikely a US intervention would have been worse, I think. And stopping the partially coerced murder of those people–well, I think having a large number of foreign troops around would have saved at least some of those lives,and maybe most of them.

36

roger 10.20.05 at 9:49 pm

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.

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abb1 10.21.05 at 2:09 am

Hmm, racist, don’t see anything racist. The opposite position – that wise westerners have a right (and, perhaps, an obligation) to parachute into far-away lands with their guns blazing to stop stupid savages from hurting thmselves and fix everything (and install ‘liberal democracy’, of course) – certainly is suspect for being racist.

OK, case in point: Somalia 92-93, peacekeeping operation. No genocide there, purely a police action – what could go wrong? Result: killed in one day, in one battle: 18 god-like western creatures and about 1000 – a thousand! – Somalis, 3-4 thousand injured. How can anyone deny that this is a fallacy?

Case in point: the 1992 LA riots. If you are so sure you could intervene and save Rwandans, how come no one intervened right there in LA to save that truck driver and the rest of dozens of people killed? I know why: no free-fire zone in LA, it’s expensive to shoot US citizens. But why is it OK to shoot uncounted Iraqis and Somalis for their own good?

38

Dan Hardie 10.21.05 at 3:47 am

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.

39

abb1 10.21.05 at 4:18 am

761,000 accused in Rwanda

Associated Press in Kigali
Tuesday March 15, 2005
The Guardian

The secretary general of the Rwandan justice ministry said yesterday that at least 761,000 people should stand trial for their role in the country’s 1994 genocide.

General Johnston Busingye claimed that nearly a 10th of the 8.2 million population had been identified as having a role in the 100 days of violence in which more than 500,000 minority Tutsis and Hutu moderates died.

40

rollo 10.21.05 at 4:29 am

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.

41

Dan Hardie 10.21.05 at 6:17 am

Abb1, what you wrote was ‘I read somewhere recently that they have now indicted 700,000+ people for the 1994 genocide.’ Which is untrue. Pointing this out, I wrote ‘although a great many more (than the 112,000 arrested) were involved in the killings, the Rwandan Government have realised that they can’t arrest and try all of them’- which was indeed Kagame’s reaction to the demand for more extensive trials. Abb1 makes a precise but false claim (700,000+ indictments) and refuses to back down when it’s proved to be false.

As for this rant- ‘wise westerners have a right (and, perhaps, an obligation) to parachute into far-away lands with their guns blazing to stop stupid savages from hurting thmselves and fix everything (and install ‘liberal democracy’, of course)… this certainly is suspect for being racist.’

Where do you start with a cretin like this? The racist terminology ‘stupid savages’ was not used by anyone here but Abb1, who assumes that anyone wanting to prevent the murders of several hundred thousand black Africans was thinking in terms of the racist language he himself uses. This is grotesquely dishonest.

As it happens, acts of mass murder have been committed by white Europeans, and I’m guessing that Abb1 would not have supported, say, intervention to prevent the slaughter carried out at Srebrenica, despite the unimpeachably white skins of the killers. Anti-racism, in a Rwandan context, would have meant preventing the slaughter of Tutsis by Hutus- a slaughter in large part enabled by white Frenchmen.

Abb1 has the lunatic belief that preventing mass-murderers from killing is a form of racial prejudice, should the killers be black. He ignores the fact- probably he is unaware of it- that black Africans, including all the Rwandese Tutsis capable of communicating with the outside world, begged for a military intervention in Rwanda. He ignores the skin colour of the victims of the Rwandese genocide: these people are just joke fodder for him. It’s time for this ignorant monomaniac, with his schoolboy sniggers at other people being murdered, to crawl away in shame.

42

Dan Hardie 10.21.05 at 6:27 am

‘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.

43

abb1 10.21.05 at 6:48 am

You don’t use racist terminology, but the implications are quite clear – we have the sense to have our ‘liberal democracy’ and they don’t. We have the sense not to massacre people we hate inside our country (we keep them in prisons and in urban ghettos) and they don’t. We are the civilized fellas and they are the savages, half-devils-half-children, who will make a bloody mess unless we come and sort things out for them.

And I wouldn’t mind it at all if you wanted to help Bosnians and Somalis, I only object when you assert your right to kill them. A killing is a killing.

44

Luc 10.21.05 at 7:18 am

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.

45

Dan Hardie 10.21.05 at 7:37 am

Shorter Abb1: Racism consists of believing that neither Bosnian whites nor Rwandan blacks should be murdered by heavily armed criminals. Anti-racism consists of agreeing with those Rwandese or Yugoslav citizens who assert that they have a cultural right to commit mass murder, and ignoring those who don’t.

46

Daniel 10.21.05 at 7:44 am

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)

47

Dan Hardie 10.21.05 at 7:56 am

‘The thing about wars is that they’re rather like sitcoms…’

Sure- just with a bit more mass death and mutilation, and stuff.

48

Silent E 10.21.05 at 8:00 am

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)

This is great.

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

49

abb1 10.21.05 at 8:03 am

Yeah, Dan, you’re the one who gets to decide who are the criminals and who are the victims. You’re the judge, the cop and the executioner appointed by god.

You should talk to the Serbian guy who sits next to me here about ‘heavily armed criminals’ asserting ‘that they have a cultural right to commit mass murder’. He’d say that’s you, Dan.

50

Dan Hardie 10.21.05 at 8:15 am

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.

51

abb1 10.21.05 at 8:38 am

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

52

Dan Hardie 10.21.05 at 8:48 am

‘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.

53

abb1 10.21.05 at 9:00 am

…I could wipe out your miserable existence in an instant…

The point is that you can’t, though – and we may be sitting in the same building on the same floor right now. Yet you have no doubt that you can go deep in the bush and separate the sheep from the goats there. Oh, well.

54

Dan Hardie 10.21.05 at 9:12 am

‘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.

55

soru 10.21.05 at 9:20 am

Question for Abb1: what’s 2 + 2?

Can you give an answer, or would doing so be an arrogant assumption of Godlike authority, and probably racist?

soru

56

Joel 10.21.05 at 9:23 am

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…

57

abb1 10.21.05 at 10:20 am

OK, Soru, you tell me: why didn’t thousands of national guard troops move into LA with their machine-guns blazing when the riots broke out in 1992? Why did SWAT teams were wating for 6 hours before entering the Columbine school in 1999? Did they know what 2 + 2 is?

58

roger 10.21.05 at 10:23 am

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

59

Walt Pohl 10.21.05 at 10:30 am

Dan: Everyone else ignores abb1. I suggest you do likewise.

60

abb1 10.21.05 at 11:31 am

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

61

Brendan 10.23.05 at 1:42 pm

‘Huge majority of Iraqis want coalition to go

Ned Temko, chief political correspondent
Sunday October 23, 2005
The Observer

The government has been dealt an embarrassing double blow in its battle to convince the public it is beating insurgency in Iraq and the threat of terrorism at home, according to confidential reports leaked to today’s newspapers.
One claimed nearly half of all Iraqis sympathised with violent attacks against British and US coalition troops; another said that at home, Tony Blair’s high-profile strategy to counter the terrorist threat was proving disjointed and ineffective.

Downing Street, while saying it would not comment on ‘allegedly leaked reports’, told The Observer last night that Britain remained firm in its commitment to stay in Iraq until the elected government felt it was ready to take over security responsibilities.
The figures on Iraqis’ views about attacks on coalition troops came from a nationwide opinion survey, commissioned by the Ministry of Defence and leaked to the Sunday Telegraph

According to the report, fewer than one in 100 respondents felt the presence of American, British and other allied troops was improving security in the country.

Forty-five per cent countrywide were said to believe that the attacks on the troops were justified – a figure that rose to 65 per cent in the Maysan, one of the provinces policed by the British.

No fewer than 82 per cent, according to the report, declared themselves ‘strongly opposed’ to the presence of coalition troops.

The findings prompted the Conservative shadow defence minister, Andrew Robathan, to call for a review of Britain’s role in the country.

‘I am not advocating a pullout,’ he emphasised. ‘But if British soldiers are putting their lives on the line for a cause which is not supported by the Iraqi people, then we have to ask the question “What are we doing there?”‘

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