Regime Change Doesn’t Work

Chris may be right new Libyan regime for other reasons, but I don’t think the legitimacy of the Libyan resistance movement can be questioned. They put enough of their own boots on the ground to earn it.

More than 40 percent of states that experience foreign-imposed regime change have a civil war within the next ten years.

After its own foreign-imposed regime change, the US was able to manage seventy years before collapsing into civil war.

Another missing point: yes, regime change can generate civil war, but also vice versa.

Take Libya: the externally-imposed regime change would surely not have happened in the absence of existing internal violence. And in Cambodia, the regime change in 1979 came shortly after another violently-imposed and foreign-supported regime change in 1975, which itself followed a long period of, pretty much, civil war between the government and the communists. Iraq had been in a state of civil war since 1991: the Kurdish area, about a quarter of the country, was outside the control of the Baghdad government. Afghanistan too, obviously.
For purely practical reasons, it’s less common for one nation to break into another and overthrow a regime that is widely supported and generally acknowledged as legitimate. (Exception, I suppose, Nazi Germany and Japan). It’s much easier to overthrow a regime if you can rely on the support and assistance of a significant section of the population which is already unhappy with the regime and, ideally, already in armed revolt. So the 40% statistic is a bit meaningless unless you accompany it with “what percentage of states that experience foreign-imposed regime change have had a civil war within the previous ten years, or are having one at the time of regime change?”

Since the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the United States has been the world’s foremost practitioner. Of the roughly one hundred cases of externally imposed regime change in that period, the United States has been responsible for more than twenty.

Russia, in the same period, can claim: Poland, Rumania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Manchuria, Khiva, Bukhara, Samarkand, Afghanistan, Khokand, Germany, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Tashkent, Merv and all the various khanates of the Caucasus. 22 at least and I’m sure I’ve missed some.
And Britain in that period must have racked up at least as many.

I suspect they are using some different definition of “regime change” here.

More than 40 percent of states that experience foreign-imposed regime change have a civil war within the next ten years.

A 60% success rate does seem to indicate that if you make a list of 5 things to not do, and didn’t do them, you’d quite likely drop below the baseline expectation of civil war. I’d probably start with the phrases from the article ‘when states install new rulers in other states’ and ‘foreign-installed leaders’.

It also seems problematic to count the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge as a ‘failure’, simply because there were some CIA-backed holdouts in the southern jungle for a while. Hard to see an alternate outcome that was better for the people of that country.

I suppose it is a matter of perspective. The article comes down to ‘there are cheaper ways to win oil contracts’, which is hard to disagree with. A different article would compare foreign support with peaceful protest, international law petitions, Leninist revolution, urban terrorism, Maoist guerilla struggle, and so on. Not sure I see anything in that list with a demonstrably higher success rate, assuming a non-democracy with no law against shooting civilians.

Downes’s working paper on the same subject sheds additional light: Catastrophic Success.

Alex Downes: “. . . interveners often lack the will or commitment to remain indefinitely in the face of violent resistance, which encourages opponents to keep fighting . . .”

Didn’t we just have a post on the poverty of rationality as an explanatory strategy? Once a political scientist has had a frontal lobotomy and starts talking “will or committment”, it won’t be long, before he reasons that an intervention will have to be perpetual to be successful, and sure enough, right there, in the same sentence . . . idiocy.

Regime change in what we called World War II — when rather a lot of regimes were changed by force — worked out rather well for the victors, by and large. Pretty well for some of the countries involved, as well. Not all, of course. Greece had a very hard time, and Korea. Most of Eastern Europe ended up with communist regimes.

Of course, World War II itself didn’t take as long as the U.S. intervention in Iraq or Afganistan.

Given the quality of the Iraqi reconstruction effort and the virtual non-existence of the Afganistan reconstruction effort, maybe, just maybe, we ought to allow for the causative possibility of sheer incompetence. Might not be a great career move, especially at GWU, to point out that official Washington, at the highest levels, is populated by raving incompetents, who can neither win wars or carry out effective reconstruction. But, telling the truth might justify an appellation of “great piece”.

I pretty much agree with Q. Without defining for whom the success was really intended, it is tough to make any claims. Success for the people of the country being regime changed is rarely in the top-10 priorities once the action has been sold

Is the upshot supposed to be the Cambodia would’ve been better off had the Vietnamese not interevened and taken down the Khmer Rouge?

I ask in genuine ignorance: I know little about that conflict (all I know is Khmer Rouge bad. Very bad.). Is there a plausible argument that things would’ve been better, for Cambodians, had the Vietnamese just let it alone?

The specific argument appears to be that intervention resulted in Civil War. My question is: an the alternative? Non-intervention means no Civil War? Or maybe just a few more decades of slaughter by a psychotic regime?

I’m usually anti-intervention. I’m very suspicious of both neocons and liberal interventionists (R2P!! Send in the Air Force!). And yet, don’t you have to consider all possible outcomes?

Perhaps it is worth mentioning that the regime change in the American South following the Civil War spawned violence and did not last. In fact, one of the terrorist organizations of the time, the Ku Klux Klan, went on to become a powerful political force outside of the South.

Rob in CT:

And yet, don’t you have to consider all possible outcomes?

No you just have to oppose US foreign policy everywhere and anywhere. Because we’re the “bad guys.”

To me at least the Middle East has brighter prospects than it once had. Egypt. Tunisia. Libya. All of these new democracies in the neighborhood will back the Palestinians at the UN. Like democratic Turkey. Saudi Arabia just gave women the right to vote. Just the other day, Iraq’s elected leader al-Maliki said that the Syrian dictatorship should stop killing its protesters. Google it.

I don’t think Cuba fits into this hypothesis very well.

Also, at the Bay of Pigs, the regular Cuban army did not stop the invasion. The local militia did. Embarrassing for both Castro and the United States, so they wrote it out of history.

Maliki only called for change of regime in Syria when his buddies in Tehran realized that forcing him to hitch his wagon to their pro-Assad position was hurting him in other Arab countries. Same for Assad’s pals in Hezbollah. So his own perceptions of the success of regime change are only part of the picture, but it does highlight the unpredictability of outcomes when regime change is attempted.

So what’s the next option for dealing with states like North Korea and the Taliban if “kill the bastards” doesn’t actually work?

Donald, even if there is socialist revolution in the core capitalist countries we will still need to deal with North Korea and the Taliban.

Watson, would it really take a socialist revolution in order to have Western leaders accountable for their actions? If that’s true then maybe it should be a higher priority than what happens in Afghanistan and North Korea.

What is so complicated about this?

Well, see the title of this post? The bit where it says _doesn’t work_ ?

Do you think that is morally relevant? Especially when in fairness you would probably have to exchange ‘often’ or ‘usually’ with ‘definitely’?

Donald, even if there is socialist revolution in the core capitalist countries we will still need to deal with North Korea and the Taliban.

Even if North Korea and the Taliban are “successfully” dealt with (for various values of successful), we still have to deal with superpowers that launch unnecessary wars on false pretexts and then refuse to prosecute their own high-ranking war criminals. Surely you don’t disagree?

Or is it that application of the argument seen so often in marriage counseling “we’re not talking about their problems right now; we’re talking about yours”? With you conveniently delegating to yourself the authority to decide which problems we’re talking about?

ScentofViolets, you are viewing war as repulsive because of its costs. I think the costs of permitting certain regimes to stay in power outweigh those of war. We aren’t disagreeing about anything but facts: I’m asking for a better policy.

No, you’re asking that everyone agree with your valuation of the costs and benefits. I’m just waiting for you or someone like you to invoke some metaphor along the lines of omelettes and breaking eggs.

The government of Iraq is not calling for an invasion of Syria to forcibly depose Assad.

Watson, your evaluation is the opposite of objective. It’s solipsistic – you are denying the human agency and experience of everyone who isn’t you. If you were actually objective, you’d take up the question of rogue Western super-powers and the costs of allowing them to continue on their way. It’s not that you’d need to agree with anyone, it’s that you’d need to show you even acknowledge there’s an issue or any cost involved. But you’ve made it abundantly clear that you only care about costs to you that you choose recognize. This would be sociopathic if it were something forced on you by biology; as it is, it’s just perverse, wicked, and foolish.

47-

Right, exactly. Anyone who says the only criteria you need to use in deciding whether or not to kill another human being is whether you think the world would be better off without them, is either a moral imbecile or a monster.

Bruce, I care about costs to everyone. The question isn’t rouge Western superpowers having their way. Its what are the policy options that lead to the greatest welfare for everyone, what are the rules that I would be happy having everyone live under. Western superpowers that don’t follow this are immoral, as immoral as others who don’t do this. If you think my accounting of the costs is wrong, feel free to provide a better one. And I’ve admitted upthread that military intervention needs some work as a policy option. I don’t think abandoning anyone to tyranny is a good idea however.

Here’s my accounting: the Taliban were responsible during their time in power for the virtual enslavement one half of the population. Anything that is short of that, up to killing ten percent of the population of Afghanistan (not that I want to), excluding the deaths of Taliban who are not innocent, is probably moral assuming it is effective in creating equality. I’ve assumed slavery is over one fifth as bad as death: Patrick Henry would rather we killed all the women of Afghanistan to save them from their fate if we couldn’t rescue them from their captors. But we have data based on escape attempts of Southern slaves: the consequences of capture were death, and the risk of capture were high. I’ve not analyzed it yet, but I think I’m about right: A one fifth chance of death is worth taking to escape slavery. What’s yours?

Lemuel, its empowering me to bomb what I want. I didn’t say the US got to bomb whatever it wanted, just the things that would do more good then harm. If you accept utilitarianism, this follows. Now, I probably shouldn’t be trusted to pick the targets, as I might make a mistake.

Charley, Patrick Henry is volunteering himself to be part of that destroyed village so that another group can be saved. In the destroy the village quote the village can’t be saved because its destroyed. There’s a difference. Patrick Henry is saying death is preferable to his current condition: he shouldn’t complain if someone offers it to him. If you value life without liberty that way, then complaining about dying when liberty is in the offering is a bit odd.

. I didn’t say the US got to bomb whatever it wanted, just the things that would do more good then harm. If you accept utilitarianism, this follows.

Whatever you say, Raskolnikov.

Let’s say it’s 1933, and you have a gun, but you didn’t get there by time machine….

Watson, as a fellow utilitarian, I suggest to you that the most urgent good to work for at the moment is an law-abiding international society, in which the use of force is legitimate only if approved by a body genuinely representative of world opinion, and in which unilateral military action — except in self-defense against actual, ongoing attack — is illegitimate. This was the idea behind the UN Charter, which the great powers — above all, the United States, the overwhelmingly dominant military and economic power for most of the period since the Charter came into effect — have thoroughly undermined.

At this point, it’s no good trying to justify unilateral intervention on a case-by-case basis: no one trusts anyone else’s motives, and quite justifiably. If the US intervenes wherever and whenever it pleases, so will Russia, China, India, probably with no more concern for democracy or human rights than the US has typically demonstrated. This is international anarchy — exactly what led to the two wars that scared the shit out of all the powers that signed the UN Charter and convinced them that another global war would be intolerable and unthinkable, but also inevitable unless nations gave up the right to use force unilaterally.

Watson: “the Taliban were responsible during their time in power for the virtual enslavement one half of the population. Anything that is short of that, up to killing ten percent of the population of Afghanistan (not that I want to), excluding the deaths of Taliban who are not innocent, is probably moral assuming it is effective in creating equality”.

You know, I’ve been accused of being an arrogant sod over the years, but I’ll say this in my defence – I’ve never pronounced a right to murder ten percent of any civilian population, anywhere, and have never proclaimed a right to exterminate any large group of people based upon my estimation of their innocence, in pursuit of an outcome that I think is probably moral, if it achieves some plainly unachievable goals.

Do you have to go to sociopath school to learn this stuff, or what?

Ten percent of Afghanistan is half a holocaust. But the holocaust was going to liberate the entire Aryan race from slavery, not just the women of Afghanistan. So that probably falls within the Ladd-norm.

But we should be honest, and also count other collateral damage in the war. That easily adds another few million people. Let’s say that Hitler had to save somewhere between 50 and 100 million people from slavery to be ethical on the Lard-norm, had he won.

I guess a lot depend on how powerful you think the Jews really were, and if communism counts as slavery too. But given the general consensus on that in the 1930s, I’d say that ‘Utilitarians for Hitler’ would have been a winning slogan.

Apologies, I didn’t mean to write lard there, my phone did that.

Farah: “Germany was almost uncontrollable for a long time. ”

The USA lost 0 (that is zero, zip, nada) troops to any post-surrender guerrilla action.
That’s far from ‘almost uncontrollable’. It was pretty hairy, but please read some history and note that this was in the few years immediately after a 50 megadeath war.

It’s a very freshman argument, but you could turn it around: no, because then the NSDAP would still be around but led by (say) Rudolf Hess, who was a lot smarter and more competent and might actually have led Germany to victory. Note that this is exactly the argument used to justify the cancellation of FOXLEY.

Here’s my accounting: the Taliban were responsible during their time in power for the virtual enslavement one half of the population. Anything that is short of that, up to killing ten percent of the population of Afghanistan (not that I want to), excluding the deaths of Taliban who are not innocent, is probably moral assuming it is effective in creating equality. I’ve assumed slavery is over one fifth as bad as death…

Don’t become an accountant. You’d be liable to end up assuming it’s probably wise to burn a million pounds or something.

Zamfir, Hitler was going to murder all the slavs. Furthermore, he wasn’t planning to free the Jews, and was completely delusional about the Jews. I wouldn’t agree to kill 10% of Afghanistan to save other people, and all I was doing was offering a ridiculously high maximum for the amount of collateral damage that could be tolerated. You aren’t supposed to try to kill them! Its rather “should we try to save these people, knowing some of them will die in the attempt”.

geo, the UN is lead by member governments who have zero desire to have real norms of accountability. Its a fundamentally broken model. When has the UN been capable of effectively disciplining a member state for human rights violations, when that member wasn’t Israel? Even when there are human rights treaties signed, adherence requires letter writing campaigns to enforce.

I might have missed something in the comment thread, but can the referent of Hitler be tied to that of Anwar al-Awlaki? Apparently the US seems to have no problem with committing assassination as a foreign policy tool.

Rich: fair points (the “happened last month” bit was Gaddafi being out of power and on the run after the fall of Tripoli btw).

Conor Foley’s contention was simply a matter of fact: the text of UNSCR 1973 says nothing at all about “let’s overthrow Gaddafi”, it’s pretty much all about protecting civilians, sanctions, arms embargos etc. As you say, people then used that resolution to justify overthrowing Gaddafi.

But despite that, I think that, whatever the authorisation was intended to authorise, it counts as effective action against Libya in response to human rights abuses, of the kind that Watson said didn’t happen except to Israel.

” I think that, whatever the authorisation was intended to authorise, it counts as effective action against Libya in response to human rights abuses, of the kind that Watson said didn’t happen except to Israel.”

But if you say that, you’re really arguing Watson’s more general case, aren’t you? The U.N. made a legal authorization for action to protect civilians, and this was taken by everyone as an authorization for regime change, presented as such by the political leaders involved. And they went ahead and forced regime change, the very thing that the post heading this thread claims doesn’t work.

I also generally like your comments, but I have to say I’m puzzled by the “when its leader began committing human rights violations” phrasing that you’ve been drawn into. Did Gaddafi not commit human rights violations before? Are his replacements not committing them now? Are people in other Middle Eastern countries not committing them now? We’ve already had a reference to Manufacturing Consent in this thread. Do we have to go over this use of a natural connection between “he started committing human right violations” so “we had to stop him” or not?

I’m not really interested in Watson, here. Freshmen conversations about whether we should go back in time and kill Hitler always have existed and always will exist. But the discussion here about Libya, by foreign policy experts, was Very,Very Serious. Let’s not forget about it quite yet.

RP @ 79

I seem to remember Juan Cole saying something like: Don’t reproach me for supporting the Libyan intervention by saying that the UN and NATO’s worthies didn’t respond in the same way to to Bashir al-Assad, or Binyamin Netanyahu’s abominations, or in days gone by, to Stalin’s or Mao’s. We do what we can where we can and when we can, and hope someday that we’ll have the means — and the gumption — to do what needs doing everywhere. The blindness of justice will one day rule us all.

Fond hope, or utter nonsense? Human history being what it is, and the fondness of human hopes having been overturned as consistently as even a casual reading of history will demonstrate, I’m inclined toward the latter interpretation. Geo @ 24 and 59 has the better grasp of what’s going on, and how genuinely responsible people would go about their interventions. We aren’t gods, no matter how much of their fire we’ve already stolen, and how much more we hope to steal in the future. The rest is either ignorance, or, as often as not, self-serving puffery.

“OK, when he started committing massively larger quantities of human rights violations. Mass slaughter using artillery rather than the occasional bit of prisoner abuse.”

All right, this is an unusual theory of human rights violations. One which I approve of, on the whole, but let’s see if I’ve gotten it right. What you’re saying is that civil war is a human rights violation. I invite you to look over the timeline of the Libyan civil war before the intervention or suggest a better source if you think it’s wrong. I see many mentions of protestors taking over military barracks (and executing mercenary soldiers) before the use of artillery by the government. I don’t really know of any government that would refrain from using artillery on civilians in these circumstances, but I agree that they shouldn’t, so I hope that your theory takes off.

It would be nice if it took off for us as well as them, though. Given that we’re routinely launching drone strikes … oh, never mind. Now that I know that when you wrote “he started committing human rights violations” you meant “he responded to an attempt to drive him out of power by engaging in civil war”, we’re right back to regime change again.

I’m baffled by how geo 24 got drowned out but that disgusting Watson Ladd digression. That was the money quote that should have settled the debate.

As long as the United States is committed to providing stability in most of the world, rooting out terrorism, stopping the spread of weapons of mass destruction, curbing human rights abuses, spreading democracy, and pursuing global primacy, frequent intervention is unavoidable.

Seriously.

Piglet, the US is not now committed to those goals, but the US should be. And because it should be we should support actions that its commitments would require it to do and be against those that aren’t. I don’t have a problem with the use of military force in pursuit of those goals. Now, how do we make that force achieve those goals at minimal cost?

everyone likes feeling good about themselves by yelling at some freshman and calling him a moral imbecile or a monster

It’s why I get up in the morning.

re: ‘regime change’, definition of (see ajay @7); link with civil war:

‘Regime change’ seems to involve actually fomenting or at least promoting civil war, i.e. recruiting co-opting or commandeering a large domestic force to fight on the invaders’ behalf against the incumbent regime. That’s not to say that stability is not an aim (though it may well not be a priority, and indeed destabilisation may well be a good second best or even first choice outcome, as Stephen Sniegoski has argued it was to the prominent Likudnik wing of the Iraq invasion hawks).

‘Regime change’ is a term of art denoting a fairly specific kind of operation. First, it’s exogenous: not just a matter of opportunistic intervention in an existing conflict. It’s also not entirely clandestine, covert, or deniable – though elements of it obviously may be.

‘Regime change’ is further to be differentiated from a foreign coup and a war of conquest, and is intermediate between the two.

In a foreign coup, violence is (1) carried out largely by domestic (proxy) military forces, and (2) directed only at decapitating and supplanting the government, possibly including loyal elements of the military. Regime change by contrast involves (1) substantial intervention by outside forces and (2) (prolonged, widespread) warfighting against a domestic force.

A war of conquest involves (1) a full invasion by outsiders without extensive reliance on domestic forces, and if successful (2) a period of rule by the invading force (a governer or or other proxy of domestic extraction may of course be installed at leisure). Regime change involves neither of these elements.

I’d say Libya does fit this quite specific ‘regime change’ template, though it was opportunistic and, thanks to circumstances, much more smoothly done than Iraq.

External influences (i.e. from NATO and proxies) on the escalation from protest to armed conflict and foreign control of strategy were (and still are) reasonably well ‘concealed’. The regime change objective was successfully obfuscated by the humanitarian narrative – despite being consistently affirmed from the start, and all moves to secure a cessation of hostilities ignored or flatly dismissed. The foreign forces, while indispensible and decisive, were mostly airborne (albeit only just in the case of assault helicopters), with actual ground personnel probably only numbering in the hundreds and composed of special forces, ‘advisors’, scouts, logistics etc. The PBI was entirely composed of domestic proxies. The client status of the new regime is also apparently not universally recognised, either.

The primary casus belli propaganda was also smoother than Gulf 2, though as in Gulf 1, while there were at least some kind of facts on the ground, they didn’t actually speak for themselves, and collateral propaganda of the incubator smashing genre was enlisted.

This was primarily stuff about massacres actual and imminent, but also included othe gems e.g. Gadaffi’s viagra-fuelled rape squads, as advertised by S. Rice, the idiot ICC chief, and a grim mocked-up rape film featuring – just for added insane wrongness, as well as confirmation of foreign provenance – Libyan voices and screams/moans(!) lifted from the soundtrack of a well-known Libyan porno. (This could be a straw man op aimed at discrediting the NATO/rebel side, but that’s pretty implausible I’d say).

Also the ‘Gadaffi forces = black mercenaries’ (or as we call them, private contractors) narrative that has done so much for race relations and ungenocidishness in Libya.

The narrative of an entirely endogenous (and spontaneous) armed uprising – in Banghazy and neighbouring cities is not quite disproved, but is certainly suspect, and a key point – aside from NATO’s implacable opposition to any attempt to organise a ceasefire – is that the only proposal before the UN was to send in NATO forces under NATO command and to give them carte blanche subject only to a fairly meaningless caveat about ‘occupation’ (is Iraq or Afghanistan ‘occupied’? Is Cuba? Qatar? Kuwait? The UK, for that matter? I can only think of one place that’s commonly discussed as being ‘occupied’, and that occupation is in formal defiance of the UN…)

The idea that a UN-sanctioned humanitarian intervention should be done by blue-helmeted peacekeeping forces was nowhere in sight, even though if the aim were really humanitarian, this would appear to be the obvious course in order to stop a war.

And very early assistance including supply of arms, was made available by NATO powers, who also worked hard to ensure that ceasefire wouldn’t break out.

Here’s a slightly random sample of the assortment of links I’ve been amassing (no implied – nor, as it’s customary though utterly pointless to add, express – warranty is offered):

Organisers of ‘day of rage’ Washington based:
http://www.hermes-press.com/FR_libya1.htm

Obama offically authorised CIA arming of rebels in late Feb:
http://www.npr.org/2011/03/30/134994729/mazzetti-talks-about-cia-operations-in-libya

-super-resourceful organiser mentions getting $75000 worth of automatic weapons from Egypt right at start of uprising, Feb 18:
http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/libya-unrest-gaddafi-strikes-back-as-rebels-close-in-on-tripoli-87712

The tale of the rapid escalation from unarmed protests a la Egypt – which the official narrative gave the impression had taken place and been mown down, even strafed – to efficient use of armed force (army barracks overrun by using tanks from, er, army base):
http://washingtonexaminer.com/news/world/2011/02/battle-army-base-broke-gadhafi-hold-benghazi

Military advisors on ground, Feb. 24:
http://www.crethiplethi.com/libya-us-military-advisers-in-cyrenaica/usa/2011/

Rebel military chief Younes killed by ‘allies’:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/29/us-libya-idUSTRE76Q76620110729

Younes successor Hifter pretty clearly has CIA background:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/03/26/111109/new-rebel-leader-spent-much-of.html

Libya as model for elective interventions:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/29/world/africa/29diplo.html?_r=1&src=recg&pagewanted=all

Phase 2 plans floated publicly;
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2029013/Libya-war-British-troops-act-peacekeepers-Gaddafis-downfall.html

‘Free Market Future’
http://libyancivilwar.blogspot.com/2011/05/libyas-free-market-future.html

Rich, you’re right to bring up that awful Foley post. Not one of CT’s finer moments. But to be fair, Henry made it pretty clear at the time that he did not agree with it.

Also, I, at least, am reacting differently to geo because I think he’s making a different argument. As I read him, he’s saying that even if you start from utilitarian premises you’ll end up preferring a rules-based framework when it comes to things like war.

Rich @76: Do you—and geo, who wrote a stirring paragraph about the U.N. above—agree with Conor Foloy’s contention that the intervention in Libya was legally authorized by the U.N. to protect civilians, not to overthrow Gaddafi?

This is a good question. I’m embarrassed to say in reply that I didn’t know about the UN resolution and didn’t have any position on what to do in Libya (except that the Obama administration’s claim that it didn’t need Congressional approval to intervene was clearly dishonest). Obviously Security Council decisions can be wrong, even immoral, just as domestic laws or Supreme Court decisions can, and must, like the latter, be criticized on their merits. But the principle that no one is above the law has to apply between as well as within countries. And the assumption that the US is a law-abiding international citizen — which is the very foundation of respectable political discussion in the US, including, it seems to me, Alex Downes’s essay — is so false and dangerous that I feel justified in identifying and criticizing it quasi-obsessively, as I’m afraid I do.

When you recommend a system, you also recommend the immediate and historically evidenced perversions of that system

I don’t see this. Wouldn’t the same objection apply to representative, or even direct, democracy? I would have said that to recommend a system is to insist, by implication, on the necessary preconditions for that system to function properly — in the domestic case, strong curbs on the unequal political influence of wealth and, even more important, the energetic and continued involvement of the citizenry; in the case of the UN, some modification of the Security Council veto (which is another form of the unequal political influence of wealth) and the flourishing of civil liberties and popular sovereignty within the individual members, which again and as always is a matter of the mobilization and self-organization of their citizens. No form of government can succeed if the governed are manipulated, apathetic, or without resources.

Anyways, this is the world where Watson Ladd rules: one where he gets to decide which people “should be killed” and then poof – killed.

Freedom’s just another word for “it’s okay when we do it”.

Let’s say it’s 2011 and there exists a government which claims the ability to assassinate people designated as terrorists, but refuses to provide any details on the designation process. That has argued that habeas corpus is a quaint notion. That has used torture to extract confessions from prisoners. That has an incarceration rate closing in on 1%. That regularly engages in military exercises in foreign countries causing significant civilian casualties.

A common problem with “utilitarian” arguments is that it is always teh self-professed “utilitarian” that gets to assign all of the values.

The piece that Tangurena linked to is hilarious.

But back to serious, um… back to… it’s impossible for me to think of this as serious right after reading that. But geo, I come out of the American-liberal political tradition, pretty much, even though I’ve ended up rejecting most of it. And in that tradition as I understand it, you have it backwards. Systems are only possible if there are ways of correcting them when they predictably go wrong. If those ways aren’t there, then insisting on the system with them as implicit preconditions is a bad thing to do.

Of course, you may be writing for some other basic political viewpoint. But now that I’ve rejected the Constitution and all of the other U.S. nonsense that’s supposed to keep us from becoming what we’ve become, I’m even more distrustful of this line of argument. If there really were “the flourishing of civil liberties and popular sovereignty within the individual members” of the U.N., we’d be living in a different world. Who’s to say what would be right for that world? Maybe those flourishing people would decide on something else.

Meanwhile, in our world, we just had U.N. legalism used as an excuse for regime change, and it’s already going down the memory hole.

we’d be living in a different world

Yes, that’s the point, Rich. If we don’t establish the basic conditions for democracy and world order to function, they won’t. And if they don’t, we’re fucked. So let’s establish them.

RP @ 105

Is it too much to ask? Yes, apparently it is. Geo knows where we want to go, but no one seems to know how to get there in less than a century or so, and then only if conditions are propitious — which they aren’t likely to be, if the likes of Rick Perry, or even of Juan Cole are anything to go by. Maybe we’re fucked will turn out to be the best we can do under the circumstances. Try selling that at the Pearly Gates.

Rich: if a law or other decision (eg, of the Security Council) is unjust, you try to get it changed; or if it’s sufficiently evil, so evil that obeying it would be worse than undermining, in a small way, the legitimacy of the authority that issued it, then disobey it and take the consequences (or evade them if you can). If a political system or decision-making procedure is unjust, you try to get it changed; or if it’s sufficiently oppressive (ie, there’s no nonviolent way to get it changed), then resist and if possible overthrow it. In neither case should you simply disregard the law or system, without trying to change it, and instead just do what you please.

In the present case: by all means keep protesting the Security Council resolution authorizing intervention in Libya (if that’s what it did; as I’ve admitted, I don’t know). If you want to argue that the US and other countries should disregard the resolution, then you must argue that the consequences of obeying it would be worse than the consequences of further undermining the only restraint, however feeble, that currently exists on national sovereignty and unilateral military action, which seemed by the late 1940s to have brought the world to within sight of extinction. I think it’s essential to strengthen rather than weaken that restraint, which can only, like any permanently useful domestic political change, be accomplished from the bottom up, by an active national or international citizenry in the teeth of opposition from national or international ruling classes. But meanwhile, by all means let’s keep protesting individual laws and resolutions. Just because a law or other measure is legitimate — ie, was issued by a legitimate authority — doesn’t mean it’s right.

So let’s work on better. The choices outlined so far suck. My idea for better: by randomly assassinating leaders of repressive regimes we can incentivize them to change for the better. Anyone got others?

Rich, I was accepting collateral damage in my argument! Just war is a teenage fantasy of Hugo Grotius, St. Aquinas, etc.

Now, does anyone have a serious suggestion for what to do with the Taliban? If the answer is “Nothing” we aren’t being creative enough. Every time I read about a dictator dying naturally I wonder why we let that happen.

Dragon-King, the people I am not saving are fucked anyway. I’m not saying we are going to kill 10% of the people of Afghanistan because it doesn’t matter. It does, and we should minimize the casualties of any intervention as much as possible. Maybe military intervention isn’t the best approach: assassinating leaders who don’t achieve certain benchmarks for freedom might be better on the utilitarian calculus. It probably is now that I think about it harder. But at least I’m thinking about how to make people’s lives better.

Everybody should go back and read Ch. 5 of B.Tuchman’s “The Proud Tower” again. That’s the chapter entitled “The Steady Drummer”, and describes the Hague “disarmament” conferences of 1899 and 1907. There we see, more than a hundred years ago, the same aspirations towards disarmament and international arbitration espoused by geo in this thread, and the same disdainful attitudes which at the time were general among the participating Powers and which have been reproduced by some other commenters here. We read there, too, of the pressure of public opinion and what today we would call civil society groups for disarmament and peace. In Tuchman’s story, it was really that pressure, the pressure of public opinion, which prevented those conferences from collapsing ignominiously as soon as convened, and which provided momentum for at least some proposals to get accepted.

It’s easy to be disdainful of the peaceful regulation of Great Power rivalries, but that posture is sterile. Looking back, knowing what we now know, it would have been the better part to support the agitations of those now-forgotten peace groups, no matter how much weight of conventional wisdom opposed them, than to take the easy road of supersophisticated “realism” and denounce peace campaigners as “sentimental”, or “rabble”, or “socialists”, as happened then. Of course, much the same sort of denunciations are heard today, but that just indicates that campaigners for peace and arbitration are still in the right.

Geo, the US doesn’t act the way it does because the elites want it to. They are also constrained by capital. No one wants a recession. In foreign policy I think this is a bit less of a direct connection.

WL@112 “does anyone have a serious suggestion for what to do with the Taliban?”

Does anyone want to take responsibility for creating the Taliban? or the conditions that made the Taliban thrive?

I’m not particularly hostile to the idea of interventions for regime change in principle. I’m sympathetic with, say, the position of Juan Cole on Libya, which seems to be to accept a high degree of messiness and risk all around, in order to put aside the certain misery of Gaddafi’s regime.

But, I’m struck by the extent to which the examples of extreme “evil”, where the case for intervention is presumed to be almost prima facie, are products of interventions. I’m not a foreign policy expert (and I wonder whether anyone is, reading or listening to some foreign policy opinion), so I cannot marshal details to make the case, but it is hard for me to believe that it would not be possible to do things in trade and banking, which would have the effect of building institutions and pressuring elites to do things (other than say, buy more military hardware or sign onto self-destructive and corrupt neo-liberal trade and financial deals that harm their countries).

WL@116: “. . . the US doesn’t act the way it does because the elites want it to. They are also constrained by capital. No one wants a recession.”

Presumably, U.S. behavior is the collective outcome of elite conflict, though many would say that one of the troubling things about U.S. conduct, of late, is that it is driven by too strong a consensus among an elite, which elite no longer includes much of anyone, who thinks of themselves as responsible for representing the interests of a mass constituency. But, of course, the U.S. does what elites want; that’s what makes them “elites”.

Foreign policy of the Western powers, at least since the end of religious wars in the 17th century, has been driven largely by commercial and economic considerations. It was only with the world wars of the 20th century that people started to get serious about reforming political institutions; the collapse of Empires at the end of the First World War might have something to do with the new concerns.

At least since WWII, recessions have been conscious policy choices. Recession may be chosen as a means, not an end, or accepted as the best available short-term course, but recession is a choice. Right now, many, many elite policymakers are clearly acting as if they desire not just recession, but a decade of stagnation and, possibly, depression.

Their failure proves they were right?

No, their failure, and the resulting disastrous consequences, prove that doctrinaire “supersophisticated realists” (I think perhaps he’s cocking a snoot at you, Rich) were wrong to withhold support from those who tried in vain to push their governments into stronger collective security arrangements. Sounds plausible to me.

the UN is perfectly undemocratic … “more democratic” is a category error.

Again, I’m not sure what you mean. Of course someone elected the UN representatives, at least to the extent that someone elected the governments who appointed the representatives. The General Assembly and the Security Council function according to majority rule (the latter subject to great power veto). They’re not apportioned by population, but neither is the US Senate. Like the Senate, they’re imperfectly democratic, not “perfectly undemocratic.”

the current system is illegitimate and … no one should support it

It’s partly legitimate and partly illegitimate. Americans have sharply and increasingly limited but definitely nontrivial amounts of freedom and self-determination. American citizens can, within those limits, give political effect to their opinions, and many, many more of them agree with Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich than with you or me. “Legitimate” doesn’t mean “enlightened” or “moral”; it means “acknowledged by a majority (or plurality) of those it governs as having a right to legislate.”

What do you mean by “no one should support it”? Do you mean that no one should obey any existing laws? Or merely that one should criticize many laws, and the processes of government as well? That one should try to change the laws and the Constitution, or secede, or organize an armed insurrection?

What exactly are we disagreeing about, Rich, beyond our rhetorical styles?

Dragon-King, I don’t think I grasp your primary complaint. If its that I am using my values, that’s not an argument. I think I like the things I ought to like: freedom and prosperity, that people can effectively run their lives themselves. This sounds arrogant, but any moral theory is going to have one set of rules. I have nothing against women choosing to stay inside the house. I have something against those who would force them to. If its that these values aren’t universal, we have nothing to say to each other: birth and circumstance do not determine right and never will.

Your second argument is a good deal more convincing. Still, I’m not sure that just handing the Taliban victory on a silver platter is the right approach.

In the beginning the main goal of the UN was to prevent wars between nation-states, especially massive wars, like WWI and WWII: “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind”. It’s a pragmatic goal. As Rich said, ‘democratic’ has nothing to do with that. But in 1989 the situation changed, and, I think, the thing is now becoming, more and more, simply a tool of western neo-liberalism.

Misery of Gaddafi’s regime – as opposed to what, miraculous transformation into Norway, after a short period of messiness?

Actually, Libya has life expectancy of 75, infant mortality 15 per thousand, 72% female literacy. It’s not Afghanistan, you’d tend to naturally expect it to default to the kind of government that peers like Brazil or Turkey have. Gadaffi looks very much like a historic relic, someone who came to power at a time when life expectancy was 20 years less, infant mortality 10 times higher, and so on.

Over the period of his rule, he does deserve some credit for not stopping that progression. Though not all _that_ much, as few leaders have.

geo @24: The United States is emphatically not committed to rooting out terrorism, stopping the spread of weapons of mass destruction, curbing human rights abuses, or spreading democracy.

It’s committed to several goals (Downes named two other key goals that you omitted, global primacy and stability). Sometimes those goals conflict with each other. The claim is not that the US perfectly and to the exclusion of all other considerations pursues each of the named goals.

Once one accepts that US foreign policy goals are complex, and frequently require compromises in values to obtain, your list of counterexamples becomes not so much a list of counterexamples but evidence of those compromises.

For example, the US is in fact opposed to the spread of WMD in the form of NBC weapons, and expends very large sums of money and effort each day on counter-proliferation. That Israel acquired those weapons anyway is not a counterexample; nor is the US not applying maximum pressure on Israel to relinquish those weapons (which Israel would certainly never do).

Nor is US support of organizations that did some very awful things during the Cold War a counterexample to US opposition to terrorism. It’s another example of compromise. In that case, regardless of our view of the prudence of the act, the compromise was between opposing human rights abuses at all times, and continuing a struggle that (in the view of the US) was for the preservation of human rights, national security, and global primacy, for the long term.

There’s certainly room for reasonable disagreement about the wisdom of those decisions, but they don’t constitute counterexamples to Downes’s claim if you understand that claim to be about the several complex goals a state has in a complex environment that may frequently require tradeoffs in the pursuit of those goals.

Returning to the more substantive claims of the paper for a moment, I think it’s a useful beginning but only a beginning in evaluating whether a given act of regime-change is justified or likely to be successful. His paper will likely prove fertile ground for additional studies – and in some ways, that is the best and most productive kind of research.

And of course, various other important types of interventions and possible interventions (think the Balkans, Afghanistan, perhaps Somalia, and others) don’t really fit into Downes’s analysis at all (no fault of Downes at all, who carefully defines the target of his analysis).

“As far as “the dreams of the mid-20th Century” are concerned, they are older dreams than that, and at the moment are the only dreams worth dreaming. I don’t think you have any better ones.”

You’re willing to cheer geo on because he is a “peace campaigner”. But of course from my viewpoint, he isn’t. For the recent Libyan war — oops, “intervention” — his position, as far as I can make out, was that it was a legitimate decision, and perhaps legitimate but wrong, but that people had to go through extra hoops in order to oppose it, much as they have to if they want to oppose a Supreme Court decision in the U.S.

This is a quite typical form of corruption of discourse of our times. Geo is a “peace campaigner” because he opposes war in the correct way, even though he doesn’t really oppose certain instances of actual war. Other people who merely oppose war no matter what its justification are DFHs, or perhaps nihilists in Bruce Wilder’s rather more upscale formulation. In particular, Geo excuses intervention in the Libyan war because he is wedded to a particularly mid-20th-century conception of the UN as preventing war, and has mixed this with mid-20th-century left dreams of the UN becoming the basis for a more democratic world system. And if I reject these highly time-and-place-contingent institutional commitments, I must be against the eternal dream of peace.

Maybe you should learn to pilot a plane, and fly it into the Juche Tower. That’ll show ’em!

What is a std for successful regime change ?
I think the only fair one is to survey the people of the country involved; anything else is arbitrary and undemocratic.
I didn’t see anything about that in the original article.
my impression, 4th hand via us news, of Iraq is that the avg person is both grateful and angry at the US; grateful for the removal of saddam and angry at the bumbling and repression of the post saddam regime
PS: am i the only one who thinks “normative” is a horrid academic neoligism ? I went and looked at my compact OED; only two citations, both from the 1880s.

Watson, I keep offering the most obvious suggestion: since you’re into it, go there and assassinate whoever you want. And you keep evading, for some reason.

Well, for one thing, who cares whether you’re successful or not?

And if you need resources, go raise the funds. Maybe you can find some sympathetic Saudi multi-millionaire, or something.

I don’t know about Mossad, but the CIA, you see, is responsible for providing national security, not assassinating foreign nationals that Watson Ladd doesn’t like.

we live in a world in which the US and other Western democracies are the only organizations capable of taking action in support of human rights.

You’re the only one here who believes that, everybody else doesn’t. Which means that you are, most likely, wrong (or, I suspect, just trolling). So, being so enthusiastic about “effective deterrent to dictatorship” and all that, you’ll have to organize that deterrence yourself. Get to work, time’s a-wastin’.

WL@131: “Why don’t you go out and help the Taliban by blocking troop transports? That sadly will actually work.”

Al Qaeda’s attack of 9/11, as many commenters have pointed out, was intended to strike a blow, of course, but also to provoke a response. Al Qaeda, in other words, had a strategy. It was the provoked response — the expected overreach by the U.S. — which Al Qaeda hoped would do the most damage, as it, in fact, has. The invasion and occupation of Iraq and the long war in Afganistan and Pakistan have been enormously costly, and damaging to the U.S., and haven’t done much for any of those miserable countries.

Way back @13, I quoted Alex Downes:

“. . . interveners often lack the will or commitment to remain indefinitely in the face of violent resistance, which encourages opponents to keep fighting . . .”

to highlight the debased reason, which drives the American intervention strategy. I thought Downes was flattering the idiots, by echoing their false logic, but Henry @15 read it differently. Be that as it may, as a thesis considered in isolation, it is still an example of idiotic reasoning, combining a fairy (“will”) with perpetuity.

The American military intervention in Afganistan is already the longest war in our history, and has risen near the top of the list, in terms of economic cost. “Will”, “commitment”, intention, these are not enough, not sufficient, either practically, or I think, morally. This is as true of war-mongers as it was gordon’s peace campaigners of 1899, so proud of their own idealistic good intentions.

One of the strongest arguments against intervention, though not much ventured in this discussion, is the evident difficulty of ever ending an intervention. Our political elites and institutions make it extremely difficult to either conduct an intervention competently, or to get out after. “Success” of any military intervention short of conquest requires a quick and timely exit. Yet, the U.S., in the twilight of its “empire” does not seem able to either conquer or exit.

“Will”, “commitment”, intention, these are not enough, not sufficient, either practically, or I think, morally.

A tendency to think entirely in terms of infantile concepts like willpower, force, “Being much nicer than the baddies” and a bovine insistence upon their own good intentions in the face of a mounting bodycount are the defining characteristics of the most ardent interventionists.

The actual results of their schemes are barely even relevant, as far as most of them are concerned. That’s why so many of them have spent the decade insisting that there were lots of good reasons to support the invasion of Iraq, despite the fact that it was a disaster and was always, very obviously going to be a disaster.

Free at last! My long-blocked comment is now up, listed as 120. Required reading for Rich; optional for everyone else.

While Rich is digesting my comment @120 and preparing his thunderbolts in reply, a word in response to his comment @131.

his position, as far as I can make out, was that it was a legitimate decision, and perhaps legitimate but wrong, but that people had to go through extra hoops in order to oppose it, much as they have to if they want to oppose a Supreme Court decision in the U.S.

If a decision is “legitimate but wrong” — for example, the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United — what “extra hoops” do I have to go through to oppose it that you don’t?

Watson: Any claims that the UN derives democratic legitimacy in this way is laughable

Yes, Watson, we all knew about Russia and China (but thanks for the information about Fiji, which I had thought was still in the stage of primitive communism). No, the UN is not a legitimate authority because every government within it is democratic, or even legitimate, any more than the Congress is a legitimate authority because American politics is a model of democracy. The UN is a political body, with a constitution, intended to transfer sovereignty in some external matters from individual states to a collectivity of states, who deliberate and vote. The rationale for forming this organization was and is that anarchic competition among states had led to two global military conflicts in recent memory, and that, given the increasing sophistication of military technology, another global conflict would be unimaginably destructive. Since it’s a maxim of statecraft and common sense that many heads are likely to be cooler than one or two (especially when the many include bystanders who will be fried in the conflict), it was thought that such a body would make large-scale conflicts less likely.

Of course the UN is currently a bad joke, just as the US Congress is currently a bad joke. But that doesn’t mean that either world government or representative democracy is a foolish idea. And if they’re still good ideas — indeed essential to the continuance of civilized life, or even the survival of the species — then the sensible thing is to *make them work*. This is not, pace Rich, equivalent to suspending all opposition to every decision of either body. Why on earth would anyone ever suppose it was?

Donald, I look at Somalia right now and see that no food aid is possible without the correct institutions, and the correct institutions would obviate the need for that aid. North Korea is in a similar. How can Afghanistan develop when one half of its population was imprisoned? Politics matters more then material circumstance because politics can change material circumstance.

Henri, explain why dictatorships last if people can assert their human rights so easily and effectively. If we lived in that world I we wouldn’t have the problem of regimes that act the way they do toward their own people.

Dictatorships last for the same reason the western plutocratic republics or any political arrangements last: because (and for as long as) they correspond well to the underlying economic conditions.

Andrew: a paucity of cases

Are you serious? There’s Haiti, Cuba, and the Philippines early in the century, Nicaragua in the 1930s, Guatemala, Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, the Congo in 1961, Indonesia in 1965, Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 80s. In all these cases, the US armed, trained, financed, and/or advised military forces that attempted to overthrow legitimated governments and establish more investor-friendly ones. Why doesn’t that qualify as “regime change”? I’m sure I’ve left out some examples in my stunned incredulousness at your very strange assertion. And yes, Iran and Chile are perfectly good examples of successful (by the American government’s lights) regime change.

One of these tends to discredit the U.N. as an institution, which is exactly what needs to be done, because the U.N. now only encourages war, it does not discourage it.

I feel completely comfortable saying “I categorically refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of any war that does not receive the unanimous approval of all U.N. countries” and also saying “I reserve my right to refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of any war that has received unanimous U.N. approval, in part because the U.N. makes quite a lot of bullshit decisions, has failed to discourage wars that are patently unethical, has in several instances just provided neoliberal warmongers cover, and might be providing a context in which member states that would otherwise protest are receiving diplomatic pressure and intimidation to keep quiet and consent.”

…but ‘fails to discourage’ is not the same thing as ‘encourage.’ At all. I am not familiar with any cases where the U.N. has actually been the entity pressuring its member countries to go to war. (Plenty of cases where a member country pressured other member countries to let them go to war via solicitation to the U.N., plenty of cases where a member country pressured other member countries via the U.N. to provide material support. But when, in the absence of at least one country wanting to go to war, did the U.N. itself advocate for a war?)

So for the time being, I’m not convinced the U.N. itself encourages war, or even enables wars that wouldn’t have otherwise happened in its absence. (I’ll try to be receptive to arguments in those directions, if you have the time and energy to spell them out.) And so long as the U.N. is a failed institution rather than an antagonistic instutition, I’m willing to entertain and maybe even contribute to attempts to fix it rather than destroy it.

The UN itself is nothing but an aggregate of the member-states; permanent security council states being, of course, more equal than others. If it is less effective in discouraging war, it’s only because the relationships and the balance of power between the five permanent members have changed.

“I’ll try to be receptive to arguments in those directions, if you have the time and energy to spell them out.”

I thought I had, but I’ll try again. Here’s a simple chart of how the U.N. works with regard to war:

Case A: A country wants to go to war, but can’t get U.N. approval.

In this case the country goes to war anyways. See e.g. Iraq and the Coalition of the Willing.

Case B: A country wants to go to war, and gets U.N. approval.

In the case, the country goes to war, and in addition trumpets in its propaganda that the war comes from a legitimate decision of the U.N., even when its actual war aims go far beyond what the U.N. authorized. *This just happened.*

Case C: No countries want to go to war.

In this case, generally, nothing happens.

Therefore the U.N. only leads to more war. If it had the ability to stop countries from going to war in Case A, then it might lead to less, but it doesn’t. It can on occasion seem to stop a less powerful country from going to war in Case A, but this only happens when powerful countries use the U.N. as a signaling method that they’re going to use their militaries to stop it. They could do the same thing through any kind of diplomacy.

So in short, the U.N. whatever its historical or planned functions now serves as a way for warmongers to get a certain form of approval for their wars. They hire people to call this humanitarian intervention, just like any large organization uses a P.R. firm to put their spin on what they want to do.

geo @157: Well first of all, 12 or 13 cases doesn’t strike me as a large number for the purpose of statistical analysis. Second, only a few of those cases constitute full-scale interventions in the sense of an Iraq 2003 or Afghanistan 2001. Again, this is not a criticism of Downes, who very carefully defines his terms. But the data set and analysis is of limited use – only a beginning – in assessing the type of full-scale interventions that have dominated recent discussion in this thread.

@162, Watson, I don’t understand most of your comment, unfortunately. What determinism and why is it false? Are you aware that India had military dictatorship in the 70s? What’s in elections – most dictatorships have election. And what does it have do with being “one of the poorest”?

And lastly this should never deter us from pursuing democratic rights.

Absolutely. You should absolutely pursue your “democratic rights”, whatever the hell it is. That’s what I keep telling you; that’s what this is all about. I don’t think the CIA and Mossad will do it for you.

12 or 13 cases doesn’t strike me as a large number for the purpose of statistical analysis.

Insanity = Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Why do some Americans have such a loathing for the UN?

If you buy into American exceptionalism in its most virulent form — which I would guess some 2/3 to 3/4 of US citizens do — the very existence of a forum in which we can be openly criticized by our inferiors, on our very own soil, no less, is nothing short of maddening.

Salient, we can get into even more and more hypothetical situations if you want to. But basically the reason why the U.N. is more functional as a propaganda organ in our actual, real world is because of leftist nostalgia. People on the left side of the spectrum, however defined, put a lot of work into the U.N. They failed, and the U.N. is now a tool of what they opposed. Rather than admit to this and go on to something else, they make themselves participants in the propaganda, just like the people who can’t believe that Obama is doing all the same things with regard to war powers and civil liberties that Bush did. (Actually, Bush didn’t declare that he had the right to have people assassinated.)

Some scattered other comments: Henri buys into another form of propaganda, that it matters what 200 different embassies say. Try more like 10, except for regional issues.

Gordon asks a passive-aggressive question and Uncle Kvetch answers it without looking at context. I guess the next question will be why so many DFHs hate our armed forces.

I already have my democratic rights

I don’t know what “democratic rights” are, nor am I aware of a single state in the modern world with a democracy a-la ancient Athens.

I’ll note that you having your “democratic rights” is not a very meaningful claim at all. Assuming that you live in Israel or the US, you’re merely pushing your government’s right-wing propaganda line here; advocating assassinations of your regime’s official enemies. That’s not much of a “right”; people living under Taliban enjoy it too. If you were, instead, advocating mass-assassination of your country’s politicians, you would, without a doubt, quickly end up in Gitmo or some Israeli equivalent.

“What do you think the goal of the UN was?”

To oversimplify, I think the U.N. has had three sets of goals. One set revolves around preventing catastrophic wars — a pragmatic goal that might be said to be shared by everyone except the most lunatic parts of the political spectrum. The second set has to do to with the left more specifically, and consists of a number of attempts to promulgate goals of the left through binding treaties that become international law — starting with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, say. The third set has to do with the attempts of powerful countries to gain approval for wars that they want to have, and to otherwise muscle less powerful countries.

When I referred to the left putting in work, it was with regard to the second set of goals. That no longer operates except as lip service, and has been replaced by the third set in the U.N.’s actual business.

As for the first set, I really have my doubts that the U.N. has been an important factor. Still, if it is, that gives no reason to talk about a “more democratic” U.N. The purpose of diplomacy in cases where catastrophic war is possible is not democratic decision-making among the participants.

Ancient Athens was very rich because of its olive oil industry — not to mention the tribute it exacted from other cities. In any case, its democracy did not last long.

Henri, you remind me of the commissar who when asked “Commissar, in America we can walk up to the White House and say Jimmy Carter is an idiot so we are a free country.” replied “Certainly, one can say Jimmy Carter is an idiot in the Red Square also.” I have the right to vote, the right to express my opinions about political matters. I know that I will not be arrested because of what I say, unless I advocate imminent lawless action. Indeed, expressing the desire to overthrow the US in principle is protected speech! Furthermore, in a thousand lesser matters I can read and think what I want. But who in the world of the tyrant knows what is safe to say and what isn’t? I can criticize the laws freely, while in the Taliban’s Afghanistan doing so would get one killed.

chris, the Second Congo War killed 5.4 million people. The Korean War is still ongoing, and 24 million people are languishing in what must be the city of Dis, North Korea. The UN seems to not care. (Although McArthur gets the blame for triggering the Chinese invasion). Furthermore, we could have gotten polio, and ran out of money.

Gene, I read about the olive oil in William McNeil’s The Shape of European History years ago and my memory is a little hazy — don’t remember silver, but am sure you are right.

Henri, those that were arrested, were arrested for blocking a road. They’ve been protesting for weeks without, for the most part, being arrested.

In the US you can certainly advocate revolution, even violent revolution, so long as your words do not pose an imminent danger of criminal action. For all its many faults, US protections of free speech are the most robust on the planet.

It’s a shame this discussion has wandered a bit off the original topic… lots of material there for a great conversation.

As for the first set, I really have my doubts that the U.N. has been an important factor.

I realize post hoc isn’t the strongest form of inference, but two world wars in half a century before the UN, none in half a century after it seems to me like at least enough to require a cogent argument about what other cause might be producing that effect rather than simply dismissing the idea. Particularly when the UN was designed to do precisely what it appears to have done.

The second set has to do to with the left more specifically, and consists of a number of attempts to promulgate goals of the left through binding treaties that become international law—starting with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, say.

Well, that was pretty much always only a pipe dream, so I don’t see how that represents a change in the UN. Or is it only in hindsight obvious that powerful countries aren’t going to take the UDHR seriously as a restraint on their power? The US had dictatorial and terrorist clients for decades even before the GWOT, not to mention its own awful race relations (which were even worse at the time the UN was formed) and a justice system that still produces unequal results along racial lines. The contemporary (and also the current) regimes in the USSR and China were even worse.

Haven’t been following the thread but I happened to see Watson Ladd’s assertion that “the Second Congo War killed 5.4 million people”. Although this figure is widely repeated, it is wrong. The actual figure is considerably lower. The 5.4 million figure comes from the Int’l Rescue Committee study, which underestimated the pre-war average mortality rate in E. Congo, thereby overestimating the number of deaths caused by the war. See Joshua S. Goldstein, Winning the War on War (2011), pp. 260-64.

Watson Ladd sounds like a latter day John Wilkes Booth.

John Wilkes Booth killed the president as part of a decapitation strike to preserve slavery. I’m advocating bringing democracy and freedom everywhere through small amounts of violence: more like Robespierre or John Brown. Does anyone have any better suggestions for ensuring we all live in republics and get to control our own lives? I’m open to ideas.

Well, it did play a role in the 1962 Cuban crisis. Without it, who knows what would’ve happened.

“Regime change” tends not to work mainly because of the kind of regimes targetted, rather than the changes implemented.

Regime change worked with Germany and Japan because their societies were highly functional, indeed over-functional. They only needed a change of mind at the top. They were hard to beat, but once you knocked the bs out of them they toed the line.

Regime change does not work well with the various Arab nations (“tribes without flags) or whole swathe of “Trashcanistans” running through central Eurasia. This is because, well where do you start? You might knock the head off but the body keeps running round like a headless chook.

We should wish the Arab Spring well, but mind our own business.

So I’m sure Tank Man is alive, having just been charged with resisting arrest…. Henri, what part of the Enlightenment don’t you like? The part where people aren’t going to get arrested for what they believe, where the church will no longer control people’s lives? Or the part where freedom is for everyone?

I think this thread should show who the real monster is. Henri isn’t just saying that regimes might be too costly to take out, he’s justifying their crimes. I by contrast am calling for a new era of world freedom and searching for a means.

Henri, you don’t deny the Taliban the right to organize collectively to achieve their aims. You’re calling on me to do something futile, namely single-handledly go up against the North Korean army, instead of agitate politically for a new world political order that makes states like North Korea change. Unless you think Kim Jong-Il should equally be required to meet me in single combat, I’ll argue you are being partisan, forcing me to adhere to a standard that others do not.

Secondly you are arguing that as individuals don’t decide what actions are criminal, by analogy states should not get to define what actions are criminal. But you’re missing something here: when people combine into society they can define what is criminal and what is not. Likewise states can together define what is criminal. Furthermore, individuals are subject to law. In the US if you think I have done wrong you can call the police and inform them, and they will investigate. There is no equivalent in the international system.

Set your own house in order.

Henri, that’s exactly what I am proposing! Stop with this idiotic “why aren’t you there already?” I’m putting forward the case for this cause of action, so others can agree with it and join me.

Maybe Crooked Timber isn’t the best place to drum up new recruits. There are plenty of other blogs where the idea of drumming up more wars that you have no intention of actually fighting in is likely to get a better reception.

I picked NK for a reason: we are already at war with it. Besides, any law that prohibits war while tolerating the starvation and mass imprisonment of entire populations is immoral. North Korea has an ongoing dispute with S. Korea over the maritime boundary, which is adequate causus beli. Your quote does nothing more then assert war is the ultimate evil, which many are sure to disagree with.

I could go to N. Korea, fire a few shots at the border, and get killed. That would do so much, wouldn’t it? You seem to be saying that you can argue for the state to do things that an individual cannot like tax property, and that I cannot.

Uncle Kvetch, its not enough to have recruits. I want to argue for the principle of R2P to a very high degree, that dictatorship should not be tolerated in the 21st century.

“I want to argue for the principle of R2P to a very high degree, that dictatorship should not be tolerated in the 21st century.”

As someone who remembers how R2P was just used to justify killing many people in Libya, I hope that Watson Ladd continues to advocate for it. Actually, I’m kind of sorry that I didn’t make up “Watson Ladd” myself.

As I mentioned before I haven’t followed all the twists and turns in this thread, but I would like to make a couple of points:
– The US and North Korea are only “at war” in the technical sense that the armistice was never replaced by a peace treaty. They are not “at war” in the commonly understood meaning of that phrase. I don’t know if someone here is seriously suggesting that the US navy should open fire unprovoked on NK or is merely trying to be provocative, but the idea is very dangerous. NK is a declared nuclear power. If you want to conduct an experiment on the conditions under which a conventional conflict might escalate to a nuclear one, pls do it on paper at home, in your head. Sit at your desk and read Schelling. Whatever. But don’t do it with real weapons and real people. The people of NK are suffering, but an unprovoked attack by the 6th fleet is not the answer.
– This notion upthread that the UN only encourages war, not discourages it, is false. UN peacekeeping missions have done a great deal to ensure that settled conflicts do not reignite. The evidence of this is quite substantial; see JS Goldstein’s book to which I made reference earlier @189.