Karole: I see what you mean. I think that most of the distance between us relates to my imprecise use of language. I’ve got a lot of time for Eric Posner’s view but (this is implicit in my last CT piece on “Anti Which War When”) I have not wholly given up on the idea of humanitarian intervention in cases of imminent disaster; I’m not enough of a libertarian to be able to bring myself to believe in the wholly pessimistic view of the limits of government force.

To be honest my heart sank when I saw that “Clinton-era officials” were shooting their mouths off, as these are the wonderful people who brought you Somalia and Kosovo. They also don’t appear to have read anything about Darfur in the last month; in a number of places they talk about things that happened in August in the present tense. It looks like exactly the sort of sabre-rattling megaphone diplomacy that Malloch Brown was pleading against, and would certainly and definitely result in hundreds of thousands of deaths as it doesn’t contain any consideration of what to do with the refugee camps after the aid organisations were forced out – just bombing Khartoum and blockading Port Sudan is the exact opposite of a plan, it’s rather like suggesting that we should have solved the Lebanon war by bombing Damascus. It’s useful though, in that it shows exactly how catastrophically wrong I was four years ago to believe that the Democrats could be trusted to handle these wars sensibly.

Daniel, thank you for your considered response. I was incorrect it seems in claiming that “no one” was advocating a full-scale invasion of Sudan. It would be more accurate to say that I don’t advocate that, and I don’t believe it’s even remotely on the cards. I agree with you that arguments in favour of intervention must be premised on it being “possible to put together a plan which will have that effect”. Clearly that is correct. The closest comparison, in my mind, is with Bosnia. That was mostly carried out (correct me if I’m wrong) by air forces and had the effect of forcing the party carrying out the ethnic cleansing to come to the table and agree terms. Would you call what happened in Bosnia an “invasion”? It isn’t an invasion in the traditional sense – i.e. what happened in Iraq – although in a legal sense sovereignty could be sense to be ousted or invaded. But if I understand you correctly your objection is not based on a defence of sovereignty but on whether an intervention would have worse consequences than alternative courses of action. I have to say though that the prospects for diplomacy do not look good, given that the June ceasefire seems not to have been worth the paper it was written on.

I don’t put forward a detailed military plan because I am not an expert in such matters.

Do you believe, as Eric Posner wrote Sunday, that so-called humanitarian intervention is in the end a “myth”? (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/29/AR2006092901435.html) Or is your argument based on the praticalities of the Darfur situation?

Second, two Clinton-era officials, and a Democratic congressman, have put forward ideas on how a campaign could be carried out. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/01/AR2006100100871.html)

Third, you’re right that efforts must be made to stop neighbouring states becoming destabilised by what is going on in Darfur.

Doug Brooks, president of the International Peace Operations Association, a trade group representing 27 private companies, offers another take on a role for a private peacekeeping army in Darfur.
The Sudanese government refuses to accept U.N. peacekeepers because it fears a repeat of what happened in Kosovo, which gained de facto independence from Serbia through a U.N. intervention, Mr. Brooks said.
“What about a private company working under Sudanese law?” he asked.
“You’d have to have some safeguards, but in essence, you would get effective security. It would be neutral, so it would protect against both the rebels and the [government-backed] Janjaweed militia. It would pay taxes to the Sudanese government.
“You’d have to have safeguards to make sure the guys aren’t thrown into some kangaroo court for every alleged offense. But it’s something that they might be willing to look at.”
Mr. Brooks said his organization is attempting to broach the subject with the Sudanese government.
“We’ve had some informal contacts through go-betweens to see what they think about it and haven’t heard back,” he said. “But who knows?”

I think this is the result of unclear expression rather than anythign else. “Better or worse” ought to be “better to act or not to act”. I think it’s clear that the underlying test is a consequential one.

Thus if – hypothetically speaking – some sort of NATO-backed force had gone in two years ago, the situation might well not have deteriorated to the point it has today.

I don’t agree with this at all. What geopolitical fact about Sudan would have been different? Since the option of intervening two years ago is not open to us because we are not Doctor Who, I’m pretty sure I don’t quite understand your point here, but on the factual question of whether a credible case for invasion (as opposed to any other kind of action) could have been made in 2004, my opinion is it couldn’t.

No one is suggesting that outside forces take Khartoum and oust the Sudanese regime.

Would that you were right. I went through this in a Guardian article. A number of the groups attached to the Day for Darfur were explicitly in favour of decapitation and several more to a constitutional solution for Sudan which would see it no longer existing as a unitary state.

What is being argued for is the application of military force to prevent and deter

Sorry, stop right there. I know this seems rude but I keep on quibbling about the use of “success-words” by the pro-intervention party because I think it’s the central flaw in their reasoning.

You aren’t allowed to use words like “prevent and deter” unless you can give some credible reason to believe that it is possible to put together a plan which will have that effect. My point is precisely that no such plan exists because it is more or less impossible. Everything we know from Somalia, for example, shows how difficult it is to stop violence.

Furthermore, I have a problem with “application of military force” here if it is meant to mean something different from what I bluntly refer to as “invasion”. Since the government of Sudan controls most of the territory of Sudan, you cannot put troops in Sudan without either a) getting the consent of the government or b) having a fight against the Sudanese army. If b) is the option, it is not possible to simultaneously carry on anything like the current humanitarian effort. It might be possible to carry out a substitute humanitarian effort by the military, but I haven’t seen this plan yet. I’m not particularly motivated by concern for the integrity of the Westphalian state here, more by the fact that this kind of operation has a really bad track record (even the big success story in Afghanistan owes a hell of a lot to luck with the drought and appears to be turning sourer by the day).

My understanding wasn’t that the problem was that the Allies were triumphant – it was that they weren’t thinking about the sum of their agreements.

Like if you wander through the supermarket tossing things into the trolley and then get a nasty surprise when the checkout operator tells you the total. I’ve done that a couple of times and from memory I wasn’t feeling triumphant when I was throwing stuff into the supermarket, I just wasn’t keeping track of the total.

The Allies didn’t intend at the outset to do so much harm to Germany. They just fell into it, in part as a result of Woodrow Wilson’s idealism and his right of self-determination of peoples.

Not every political mistake results from being overly triumphant.

And better negotiating skills would have been a far cheaper solution to avoid WWII than another few million dead if the war had continued another year.

1. If the US had instead demanded a compromise peace …

2. it’s the height of irresponsibility to demand “action” without saying what that action might be…

Making a demand is intervention, that’s the difference between a demand and a request.

No, I’m attempting to argue against the solipsistic viewpoint, expressed in #6, that a war is not a war if the US is not involved in fighting it.

The generalised point ‘US involvement in a war tends to be a bad thing’ may or may not be true, but it is a different point from ‘war tends to be a bad thing’, and is not a logical consequence of it.

It’s not even clear, BTW, that the war would have lasted longer in the absence of US intervention. If the US had instead demanded a compromise peace “without indemnities or annexations”, Britain and France might have been forced to go along with it.

The Allies negotiated separately with every group wanting bits of land carved out of Germany, and were deeply surprised when they added it all up and realised how much land they had agreed to remove from Germany for one reason or another, and how many other costs they were applying to Germany. But no one had the will to go back to the groups they’d negotiated with earlier and negotiate them back down to something smaller.

Another possibility apparently would have been to place the Kaiser’s grandson on the throne, who was only 2 years old at the time so no one could believe he was responsible for Germany’s actions in WWII, and create a constitutional monarchy which could have offered some continuity and more respect to the new democracy in Germany.

So quite possibly Allied troops occupying Germany was not the only outcome to WWI that could have avoided WWII. Better negotiations by the Allies that placed less of a burden on Germany might have been able to avoid WWII as well.

Well, that’s not true, at least not in the immediate aftermath. Mitteleuropa, Germany aside came out pretty good.

I think that it is interesting that you are advancing that claim by means of an argument that explicitly rests on the idea that war is, all things equal, better than peace, resolves situations in a way that peace doesn’t.

If more war was the preferred solution to the German problem in 1918, wouldn’t it also have been a preferred solution in other times and places?

Goldin, Claudia, and Frank Lewis. “The Economic Costs of the American Civil War: Estimates and Implications.” Journal of Economic History 35 (1975): 299-3