ROTFLMAO!

Now that was the funniest joke, I’ve heard all week long considering that we have spent the last fourty years telling the Israelis “Go For It, feel free to take as much of the west bank as you want” and the Palestinians “tough shit”.

Hi, I think we disagree about quite a lot more. For instance, my point about Clark was that you need an explanation for why a smart good man got into a situation you claim was constrained to lead to bad results, and why he continues to disagree with you about the outcome. I don’t ascribe to a great-man theory (indeed, as noted above, I’m actually a radical reductionist) – but any theory which neglects the difference between Carter and Bush fils is nonsensical. And for instance I think the US has done nearly the best possible job for the Palestinians under several admins, given the complex constraints you surely recognize. I don’t blame Clinton for Arafat’s failure to accept a reasonable peace treaty approved by the Saudis of all folks (if only as a framework for going forward). And I feel optimistic that a deal along those lines will be realized in the foreseeable future, with some credit due to us.

As far as monarchy is concerned, my (admittedly shallow) reading in Greek and Roman and later history leads me to believe that it is a superior system when started under good people, but not likely to be stable in the long term, and in any case entirely unsuitable for our current polity. It is well known that democracy has serious flaws, many of which are apparent in our current admin, but until the computers take over it’ll have to do.

In any case, I appreciate your thoughtful reply. I suggest you give Obsidian Wings or Hating On Charles Bird a look – they would appreciate your contribution, I think. Beyond this spasm of blogging here (which I’m now concluding) I won’t be commenting that much, having more pressing priorities – but perhaps we can continue this discussion in future in one of those places.

Rilkefan, my understanding of the dispute between us centers on the level of importance to be attached to intentions/character vs. incentives/accountability. I think that your comments about the unwillingness of people to give substantial sums of their personal income to starving people in the third world actually bears my point out nicely. Yes, you are right about point a.: almost everyone is well meaning and benevolent. But as you yourself point out, there are serious limits to our benevolence; so much so, that many ethicists take the limits of our benevolence to be a fatal flaw of moral theories that require us to give substantial sums of our of personal income to third world countries. (I actually think they’re wrong but for rather complicated reasons.) In any case, given that our capacity for benevolent action is quite limited, why would we expect a government that is (weakly) accountable to us to be able to do operate in the interests of the people of the world? Even leftist politicians have to worry about getting swing voters to vote for them, and I suspect that many swing voters are not willing to acknowledge that we have any obligation to protect the lives of non-Americans, especially when doing so would cost the lives of American soldiers. One of the crucial problems with a humanitarian justification of the bombing of Kosovo was the failure of Nato to use ground troops to defend the lives of Albanians and Serbs. The American public does not want to see its soldiers coming home in body bags, but dead American soldiers (a lot of them, I think) would be the cost of a competent humanitarian intervention, one that did not produce more harm than good. (Just think for a second about the US media’s lack of attention to Iraqi causalities, the US reliance on aerial bombing in Iraq, and the US failure to provide security in Iraq.) Given our limited capacity for benevolent action, any attempt to establish that US foreign policy is benevolent (not merely influenced by fickle and fleeting benevolent intentions but actually competently benevolent) has the burden of proof placed upon it. The assumption that US foreign policy is ruthlessly self interested should, at least, be our starting point.

Your point C. seems to me to just beg the question. And your point B. is massively debatable. Certainly many US policy analysts think that the interests of non-American people routinely has little to do with US self interest. And in cases when the two overlapped, this would demand a kind of far sightedness that is difficult to achieve in American politics. Think, for a second, about the enormous percentage of the American population that does not get that the war in Iraq has damaged the perception of the US abroad. Or think about the pathetic degree of American interest in helping the Palestinians (merely a bunch of terrorists in many Americans’ eyes). This is despite the fact that getting the Palestinians a fair deal would obviously reduce anti-American sentiment around the world and thus reduce the threat of terrorism to Americans. (How it would affect American financial and military interests in the region is perhaps a different matter.)

Concerning Clark, I don’t think that I have actually argued that he has “intentionally made the world worse.” I’m saying that there were huge constraints (no dead Americans, etc.) placed upon Clark and the entire Nato intervention that made a benevolent outcome of this intervention a near impossibility. This, for me, is not a matter of intentions at all, but rather a matter of accountability (and Nato was simply not accountable to the people who they were supposed to be saving). In fact, my biggest regret about Clark as a person is that he doesn’t have his crap together enough to mount a decent campaign for president. Your fixation on character and intentions leads me to suspect that you’re falling into a “Great Man” theory of history. And I suspect it’s our devotion to “Great Man” history that got so many of us up in arms about the Chomsky passage that began this thread. If you believe that good policy is primarily a product of good intentions, I would like to know why you aren’t supporting a monarchy (or dictatorship) for Americans? Surely it would be less of a burden on us if we just had a wise and benevolent king. Perhaps you think Clark would make a good king?

Engels is right, of course—moving towards a genuinely moral foreign policy wouldn’t be all that costly most of the time. A few tens of billions of dollars spent the right way could save millions of lives and it wouldn’t involve shooting anyone. And while there are occasions when we really have litttle choice but to side with mass murderers (Stalin in WWII) , that kind of gut-wrenching moral choice probably doesn’t come up anywhere near as often as our foreign policy apologists like to pretend.

are you living on bread crusts so you can send every spare penny to Bangladesh? Are you sharing your home with battered women and their kids, or street folk, or illegal immigrant families?

No,BOTOH I am not taking food out of their mouths either, nor takingaway their housing and if they are illegals they should not be in the US (wonder if NAFTA had anything to do with screwing up the Mexican Economy and displacing tonns of workers?).

I support a simple foreign policy, Do No Harm (Don’t sell weapons to known Mass murderers, don’t overthrow foreign goverments, don’t run death squads, or train torturers or mass murderers.), if possible do some good, give away vaccines (HIV, Malaria, etc), clean technology (wind mills, solar panels) and the know-how needed to produce them, erase the debt that was aquired under all Dictatorships particularly those that we have supported as Odious Debt.

Are you working at some mindless corporate job to maximize your ability to help?
Actually I do!

Here are a few thoughts about justice, Rilkefan. Think of it as a set of rules which you have to follow. Not a set of polite requests that it would be, like, super if you followed, but don’t worry if you’ve made other plans, darling. It is not something that you can trade off for a faster car or a bigger TV. It includes things like: not invading other countries on the flimsiest of pretexts, not flouting international law, not allowing more than 5 million children to die every year from hunger when we could easily prevent that from happening.

if it means you and your children not starving but living in abject poverty by US standards?

But this is, to use a phrase you used earlier on, “emotional”, as well as, in addition, being simply untrue. If every person in the developed world gave 1% of his income to direct foreign aid, that would have a tremendous, positive effect on the levels of absolute poverty worldwide. I dare say most of us could sacrifice a far higher proportion than that and not see any significant decline in our standard of living. As to the costs of complying with international law and adopting a non-aggressive military stance, I can’t speculate here, except to say that on any reasonable estimate they are far smaller than those in your hysterical rhetorical question, arguably even being negative, but as I said above, non-compliance is not a moral option.

On the other hand, he also continued the Ford/Kissinger policy of supporting Indonesia in its genocidal occupation of East Timor. So Chomsky is at least partly right—there’s something about our system (I don’t pretend to understand the details) which can take even a good and decent man like Carter and turn him into an accomplice in a genocidal invasion.

And Carter is probably a few standard deviations to the right on the American elite decency scale.

Clinton seems more like LBJ to me—basically ruthless and dishonest with a few decent impulses which manifest themselves from time to time. Probably not very different from the thinly disguised Clinton character in “Primary Colors”.

Wheeler appears to recognise that those who identify themselves as Kosovar are usually those who might also be called “Kosovar Albanian” and may identify as “ethnic Albanian”; Serbs, seeing Kosova as no more than a province of Greater Serbia, would usually identify themselves as Serb and not Kosovar (much as somebody from Cheltenham, when asked his nationality, responds English and not Gloucestershirian). Wheeler’s assumption that Kosovar is essentially synonymous with Kosovar Albanian is not particularly sloppy.

The term Kosovar Albanian is not a very good term either: it assumes that the person is really from another country (Albania). Certainly many Kosovars have close cultural and linguistic ties to Albania, but to insist that this group of mostly-Muslim, non-Serb Kosovars call themselves Kosovar Albanians hints of the Serb proganda about outside invaders occupying their (read, Serb) land. So insisting upon this terminology, though commonly accepted by those outside of Kosova who are trying to figure out what is going on, is problematic.

The point is that Wheeler has to deal with a bunch of ambiguous terms; if he is inconsistent, I would rather look to the context to see if his inconsistency occurs at points where there would be too much ambiguity (e.g., generally using “Kosovar” to refer to non-Serbs in Kosova, but using “Kosovar Albanian” in a sentence where “Kosovar” is just too frankly ambiguous). So, I must assume that Wheeler is not here being accused of “sloppy scholarship”.

Glibly taking Wheeler out of context (and here the context requires that one is attuned to various inconsistent, ambiguous and rhetorically-complex assignations of ethnicity) is the real sloppy scholarship.

…Furthermore, we have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships, which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction…
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_F._Kennan#VII._Far_East

We live in the wealthiest country in the world, how many children will go to bed hungry tonite? and how much would it cost to prevent that from happenning?