The relentless urge to action rather than inaction

To start with try this:

http://www.tartarus.org/martin/essays/burkequote.html

Stasis is an unfortunate choice of terms. In ancient Greek, stasis meant “faction, sedition, discord, division, dissent” when used in a political context. Here’s the URL of the relevant entry in the big Greek Lexicon:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3D%2396271

Gary

“The status quo is no worse than the status quo” — providing it doesn’t change, and in particular doesn’t get worse. But often it does get worse. And then inaction lets it get worse while action has a chance of stopping the deterioration.

Daniel, the intervention I support (at least until convinced otherwise) is a more robust version of the peacekeeping forces we’ve seen so far (that is, more troops and more willingness to shoot back), with a mission of protecting refugees, rather than a full-scale attempt to take over the country, or even Darfur. It doesn’t seem, on the face of it, that the Sudan government could do much to stop this – most of the actual fighting in the area is being done by the irregular janjaweed, not the Sudanese army.

Of course, I agree with you about the dangers of war, but the status quo clearly involves lots of people getting killed, so I need more than generic arguments to convince me that nothing at all can be done that would reduce the number of lives lost.

Coming back to China, it’s not clear to me that the Sudanese government would persist in its defiance in the absence of China’s support in the UN – after all, it’s a pretty high-risk option for them.

Many people think that diplomatic efforts are “doing nothing” when they function to give more time to commit atrocities or prepare for the same.

Many people think that diplomatic efforts are “doing nothing” when they function to give more time to commit atrocities or prepare for the same.

I always wondered about the claim that time must have a stop. What’s to stop it? Sebastian has the answer: if diplomacy stops, the supply of time will be curtailed.

Without much hope that they will pay attention, I appeal to the proponents of “intervention” to tell us what they have in mind. Who is to provide the troops, where are they to deploy in order to “intervene” and what objectives are to be assigned to them?

Operation Iraqi Freedom was bad enough: a plan to topple a regime with no plan for the aftermath. But the likes of Sebastian don’t even have much of a plan for taking Khartoum. It’s quite a long walk, you know.

Thanks to anonymous (#1) for the link about Burke. I’ve often wondered where that quotation was to be found.

Soyinka’s remarks are playing not only to domestic politics, but also to a fairly common African conviction that, on the whole, the world pays attention to managing and ameliorating “white” wars (or at least to wars outside sub-Saharan Africa) while ignoring or neglecting African wars. There is something to that, of course, but it shouldn’t be asking too much for Soyinka to trouble to make his remarks at least a little bit accurate.

So now he wants more Western military intervention in African countries? Jeez, make your mind up.

Incidentally, I read the passage Brendan quotes as saying: “The West didn’t stall by quoting UN procedure when it was former Yugoslavia [which I read meaning Bosnia as well as Kosova, and should be ‘Muslims and Croats’ – ie in Bosnia not ‘Muslim Croats’ in Kosova] – in fact, it didn’t even wait for the UN in Kosova – but now look at them, using the UN as an excuse not to act in Africa”.

And the Lebanon ceasefire happened about a month after the start of hostilities. By African war standards, that is “with speed”. Sudan’s been at war for years.

I don’t see how you can classify the American Civil War as a humanitarian intervention, as opposed to self-defence. The Confederates fired first.

“But that wouldn’t be the way to bet.”

Sez who?

In fact I’m not even prepared to grant the first assumption. Who says that the US (because it is, presumably, the US not the ‘international community’ that you are talking about) will have the time, the money, the troops or the materiel to invade the Sudan? And even if they do, who says that they will have the troops, the time (etc.) to achieve their military aims? It’s true that the US ‘succeeded’ in Kosova (and now that one ‘success’ should be considered in terms of what looks increasingly like two ‘failures’ in Afghanistan and Iraq: one out of three ain’t betting odds), but they were then fighting a war on one front (as opposed to three) and they also had public opinion behind them: something that would be much more dubiously the case (at least in the middle east, and on the home front) in Sudan. In other words, if they didn’t succeed in their war aims almost immediately (i.e. within a month) pressure on them to withdraw would be almost overwhelming, not least within the US itself. (cf Israel in Lebanon).

So I don’t even succeed that it should be immediately assumed that US ‘intervention’ would ‘end the war’.

I would however, echo your point that it is at least a possibility that ‘oppression and famine’ might actually end up being worse after an American invasion: and this point would go double if, as seems likely, and American invasion wouldn’t even stop the ‘original’ war.

Soru, you’re missing the point about WW1.

Yes, it’s true that US intervention almost certainly sped up the end of the war. Without it, the war would likely have lasted one more ghastly winter and then ended in the sort of “peace without honor” compromise that had been discussed increasingly seriously in 1917 and 1918. In that sense, it was a good thing.

But its intervention allowed the Allies to impose their terms on the Central Powers. Also, as Margaret Macmillan calls attention to in Paris 1919, it allowed the Central Powers to surrender without foreign armies entering most of Germany, apart from the eastern and western frontiers. That combination of imposed terms without visible defeat set up directly for the “stab in the back” mythos and the rise of fascism. And I would think it difficult to argue that one more year of World War I could have been more costly than the six years of European war that came with Hitler.

One also has to look at the costs of war to the US. In particular, it let the thoroughly racist Woodrow Wilson and his like-minded folks throughout the administration institutionalize a whole bunch of racial segregation at the federal level, letting black people all over the country get the kind of treatment that had been confined to the state level since the sabotage of Reconstruction. The war also gave a big push to the military-industrial economy we’ve suffered from ever since. Free speech and political diversity suffered in a big way, and the idea that America can and should routinely act as the world’s savior gained much favor.

Again, it’s possible that all of this is a price worth paying to avoid a 1918-19 like 1917-18. But I don’t think it’s self-evidently true that that’s so. The reckoning should be demonstrated, not assumed. In the case of World War I in particular, we have the then-secret correspondence and discussion of warring nations’ leaders to show that they were stumbling their way toward a compromise, but felt they couldn’t reach it as long as anyone had something like effective fighting forces left. The exhaustion was coming. It doesn’t seem to me out of line to suggest that the sort of compromise they’d been poking at for a couple of years would have been much better for the world than what we got.

I skimmed for casualties by year for WW1. No luck there. But overall there were about 8.5 million deaths and total casualties of about 37.5 million. Assuming a rising death toll so that it doesn’t seem like I’m fudging things in my favor, say that an extra year of war would cost 3 million deaths and 10 million casualties. That still compares pretty well to World War II and other problems.

I think anyone arguing to kill 3 million now to perhaps save 9 million in 30 years time needs a pretty strong version of historical knowledge.

Apart from anything else, it would be easy to imagine a much worse WWII, for example one that started after 5 years more research into nuclear power, or simply one where the Nazis won.

Oh, some side thoughts.

One thing to keep in mind about a World War I without US intervention is that it would not have ended with the status quo ante returning intact. There’d been mutinies of the troops on both sides, and the frequency and size of them were rising. There were strikes at home, likewise. The evidence suggests (but does not prove, of course) that had the war continued, socialist and liberal groups would have gained more power. For some people that may well be an argument in favor of intervention; for others of us, it’s an argument against.

And even if I’m wrong on all the conclusions I’m reaching – which is possible, goodness knows – the questions I’m asking are the ones that should come up in discussions of intervention. What’ll happen next? And after that? What long-term forces might we be shackling or unleashing? Pro-intervention arguments seem to me usually very weak in this, boiling down to “it’s so right that we shouldn’t think of consequences” or “our hearts are good so no real disaster can ensue” or “what happens later is someone else’s problem and can’t reflect badly on our choices”.

This is all wrong. In fact, the rise of Nazism in Germany and the WWII were easily preventable, except that the Western powers wanted to create a “Drang nach Osten” regime in Germany; they nourished it all the way thru, right to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact when they realized that they can’t control and direct the monster anymore.

The 20th century would have been happier if we’d been slower to plunge into wars.

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?

My understanding was that part of the problem with the WWI settlement was the aim of “self-determination of nations”.

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.

Soru, you’re the one who argued for more war, specifically US intervention. You want to claim that this “more war” led to peace by bringing an end to the war more quickly. The point is, it didn’t succeed – the consequence was an untenable peace that set the stage for more war.

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.

Also:

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.

Less triumphant Allies would have been as good for the world..

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.

Do you think this idea is worth exploring:

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?”