I’m not sure at what point Arthur Silber became unhinged; when I started blogging he was an interesting guy who linked to smart topics; he was one of the first bloggers who reached out for and got public support, and I helped steer a little his way; and then he re-emerged with a chestbeating rant against the war, and now has written the pluperfect bodice-ripping essay about the situation we’re in. The war is ‘the genocide in Iraq’; ‘Most Americans don’t care about the destruction of liberty here at home…’ (I noted in my earlier response to him that if that were true, dissent like his wouldn’t be written on the Internet or in agate type on page A3 of the New York Times, it would be spoken in broken voices in the courtyards of Pelican Bay); he cites with approval an essay that describes the totality of American history thus:
No one should be surprised by the cultural proclivity for violence, of course, because Americans have always been a violent people in a violent land. Once the Europeans had committed themselves to reside on this continent, they undertook to slaughter the Indians and steal their land, and to bullwhip African slaves into submission and live off their labor – endeavors they pursued with considerable success over the next two and a half centuries. Absent other convenient victims, they have battered and killed one another on the slightest pretext, or for the simple pleasure of doing so, with guns, knives, and bare hands. If you take them to be a “peace-loving people,” you haven’t been paying attention. Such violent people are easily led to war.
Here is Silber in full throat:
To return to intervention and its lethally destructive and uncontrollable effects: although an attack on Iran represents the gravest threat facing us in the immediate future, it is a serious error to think that the U.S. and Iran exhaust the list of significant actors in this deadly drama. That list is now much longer than you might think. For this is one of the disastrous consequences of intervention over a period of many decades — and in fact, the Western powers’ interventions in the Middle East have gone on for more than a century: the possibilities for catastrophe multiply in every direction, and the routes to what may literally and finally be a war to end all wars can barely be counted. More than one hundred years of unjustified, unnecessary and uniformly disastrous interventions have brought us one hundred routes to hell.
The West intervenes on the passive objects that make up the populace of the Middle East; history begins a hundred years ago with the Western dismantlement of the Ottoman Empire (I’m assuming); it’s enough to make a fella swoon.
You have to read this. And you have to wonder how it is that ideas like this are so firmly rooted in so many people’s minds who ought to know better.
The sad reality is that – as I’ve said before – thinking like this empowers the ‘nuke Iran now’ crowd, because it drives out sensible thinking about what we might do that is neither insanely self-hating nor insanely belligerent.
fixed typos
Let’s not pussy-foot this one.
This is a perfect essay in Politicism (linked to many other such essays) in which moral categories are replaced with political abstractions like “interventionism”. Traditionally understood concepts of good and evil are hysterically ridiculed as simplistic and dangerous, leading to the dreaded “black and white” world-view that people like Silber associate with religion – and BushCo, and America, etc.
But the political abstractions, however ambiguous and dependent on context they may be, are rendered in perfectly black and white terms, as if they were inherently “good” or “evil”. (So “intervention” – which Silber will allow only in “self-defense” – is always disastrous in the extreme and insane, leading to criminal catastrophe and monstrous genocide.) Politics does not only replace morality and religion, it replaces logic and common sense as well, and this is almost always done in the name of some superior understanding of “Reason”.
Secondly, there is a perfectly psychopathic viewpoint being expressed here, to the extent that one takes it seriously. Silber expresses the belief that the people around him (or at least the ones who don’t agree with him politically) are dangerous persons who are liable to kill each other with knives for the simple pleasure of it. If he’s serious, he suffers from a severe lack of empathy and an anti-social personality disorder. Such beliefs themselves can lead to violent behavior. If he’s not serious, he suffers from a tasteless and unserious mind.
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with an unserious mind, but deadpan misanthropy mixed with violent imagery is not very funny. And I don’t think Silber means to be funny; he’s much too unhappy for that.
Thirdly, Silber’s world is as starkly monochromatic as the caricatured world of his enemies. But in Silber’s world, the Evil is far more potent than the Good. To believe otherwise is Evil itself. Good exists only to the extent that it alienates itself from a world where Evil rules. (If you follow one of the many links you’ll find his plan of action for confronting Evil, and it’s weak soup indeed. Take out newspaper ads warning of an impending attack on Iran, insist that politicians disavow an attack on Iran in all public statements, stop all “propaganda” against Iran, and so on.)
I don’t want to hit this point too hard, but I can’t help being reminded of Lee Harvey Oswald passing out “Hands Off Cuba!” leaflets on a street-corner.
Finally, Silber’s attitude towards his country and his countrypersons is arrogant, condescending, and hateful. As is his attitude towards the history of the liberal and democratic West. Such attitudes are compatible with fascism, but not with a respect for liberty, democracy, and intellectual freedom.
AL, “The sad reality is that – as I’ve said before – thinking like this empowers the ‘nuke Iran now’ crowd, because it drives out sensible thinking about what we might do that is neither insanely self-hating nor insanely belligerent.”
This is the saddest attempt at salesmanship (of what exactly I’m not sure, but it has to do with sucking up the party line) I’ve ever seen.
Don’t criticize the administration because then they’ll do something really crazy.
Wow! It’s almost like the thinking of an abused wife. She allows the abuse out of fear that if she protests or runs she’ll get killed.
“…and the he re-emerged with a chestbeating rant against the war….” wow! how dare he??!!??
And you call yourself an American? Go find a country with a fascist goverment. You could easily find yourself a job in its polit bureau. Seriously.
Sound judgement in my opinion
“You have to read this. And you have to wonder how it is that ideas like this are so firmly rooted in so many people’s minds who ought to know better.”
And, just out of curiousity, are you prepared to materially and logically dispute the facts and perspectives laid out by Silber, or are you simply crying foul because you don’t like the argument and then pandering to your base for support?
“…if that were true, dissent like his would be written on the Internet….”
Isn’t that where it is written? Presumably you mislaid a negative. But even in that case your reasoning is weak. If Americans are apathetic, as Silber claims, there is really no need to suppress the inevitably ineffective opposition.
This thing sounds just like Jim Rockford, except he’s chosen different villains.
J Thomas beat me to one of my two points. The other is that there is a reason that the D in BDS stands for “Derangement.”
And avedis, whatever that was, it wasn’t an “argument” in any rational sense. Not only that, but by equating the administration with the “Nuke Iran Now” crowd, you seem to have missed that if they were the same, and given that the administration has actual control of the nuclear arsenal and needs no authorization to use it, we would already have nuked Iran. Go back and try again: if you were trolling, it was tepid and uninteresting; if you were serious, you weren’t serious.
Jeff, there can be little question that Cheney is in the Nuke Iran Now club.
“….and given that the administration has actual control of the nuclear arsenal and needs no authorization to use it……” Really. What a perverse understanding of executive powers you have, Jeff. Even this unitary executive crowd wouldn’t simply push a nuclear button without some form of OK from other powers.
Yes, I read the Silber article too, and was struck by its paranoiac delusion. But since he’s turned comments off–another symptom of madness, the inability to tolerate contradiction–I was unable to point out the striking conclusion to his screed. In which, after countless paragraphs dedicated to universal pacifism, he denounces the desire of America’s ‘ruling class’ (CFRs? Bilderburgers? The Clintons?) to rule the world and prescribes a ‘savage beating’ for such bullies.
This to me encapsulates the conundrum of modern liberalism; despite the agenda of completely demilitarizing our relations with the rest of the world (to the extent of abandoning such allies as Israel and the Kurds) in the name of a pacifistic humanism, hostility toward any critcs of such a philosophy is expressed in the cruelest, most bestial and violent terms.
This raises another interesting psychological possibility. We have known for over a century that sanity is defined in terms of social context. In other words, humans adapt their views and public utterances to the reality in which they find themselves, and the discipline with which we repress our private thoughts in public determines to a great degree the judgement of our fellows regarding our mental health. The internet has, for the first time in history, eliminated all physical consequences for the free expression of our thoughts, no matter how trivial, solipsistic, or irrational they may be. As bloggers are rewarded for increasingly extreme positions on political issues, they tend to attempt to create logical, yet personalized, belief systems to consistently contain all of their disparate statements. In time this ‘belief-bubble’ can replace all outside reality (whatever that may be in each individual case), until at last the blogger inhabitants a mental universe made up entirely of his own beliefs and opinions. This is what has happened to Silber; he now lives inside a belief-bubble of his own devising.
Did you notice that the essay made NO mention of 9/11? No mention of Saddam’s legion atrocities – just the American “genocide” of Iraqis. Never mind the indisputable fact that Saddam’s was one of the worst police states in the modern world. Never mind our attempts – however troubled – to install consensual government and to *reduce* the killing. Never mind that the vast majority of innocents killed in Iraq have been at the hands of a *truly* fundamentalist extremism that opposes the very idea of consensual government: it is *still* our fault.
Silber’s essay is filled with sly intimations, extremist language and an appalling disdain for other people’s real motives in favor of strawman fantasies. In Silber’s view, even WWI was a morally corrupt “intervention” with no mention of the events that led us into that war.
What is so disturbing about Silber’s essay and Avedis’ defense of it is that the language is so apocalyptic, the moral casting so manichean, the hate so palpable that reasonable people worry that, should they capture the imagination of a critical mass of the American people, they will lead inspire a bloodbath of unimaginable proportions
AL and others of us that point this out explicitly declare our readiness to hear another perspective, to enter into dialog, to determine the truth. I defend the open, liberal society and the sometimes raucous debate that goes with it. Silber (and those he approvingly links) are simply done the debate. For them, it is time for the hate.
Avedis has requested that someone point out why the essay is wrong or misleading on the facts. Well, I mention a few things in the first paragraph.
Want more? Silber declares that Bible thumping fundamentalists are a mortal threat to America’s future and declares them unable to gain a “rational” perspective on America’s crimes. Never mind that Americans have always read the Bible and that many of the American ‘crimes’ he decries have occurred as the proportion of church-goers has plummeted.
Silber declares that biology can’t even be taught in our schools any more (which is certainly not true). Never mind that, despite a fair number of fundamentalists, America is the cradle of the world’s most advanced research biology.
Silber declares that Europeans slaughtered the Native Americans and bull-whipped the Africans. Never mind that European contact with Native Americans was guaranteed to result in mass death simply because the disease vectors to which the Europeans were immune caused arguably the greatest plague in the history of man. After the initial exposure – and before the Europeans had the political and military might to pursue the ‘extermination’ of native peoples – some 90% of natives had already succumbed to European diseases. What was once a thriving and sophisticated land suffered an utter collapse and descended into chaos. Among the remnants, many of the native American tribe-states had their own politics into which the Europeans often stepped: one tribe allying with the Europeans to gain an advantage over a local rival. This does not make it right – more on this below – but it should give pause to anyone who thinks of Europeans as acting upon passive and unsophisticated dark-skinned people (of course, lots of Leftists practice the soft bigotry of viewing non-Europeans as lacking human agency and sophistication).
More to the point, declaring European displacement of native American cultures a unique evil in man’s history is simply wrong: throughout human history, population displacement and moral horrors are the norm rather than the exception. What IS unique is that, in time, as our political values matured, America has come to understand and regret the nature of the great horrors inflicted upon native Americans. But Silber would have us conveniently forget all of that: after all, he has an ideology of hate to construct!
With respect to African Slaves, Silber makes NO mention of the FACT that “bull-whipping” others into slavery was an established practice across virtually every major civilization in human history. It took England and American, defending the principals at the root of the Anglo-Saxon worldview, to put an END to this practice. It was WRONG. We – alone among the peoples of world history – recognized that it is wrong and acted to correct the crime.
Indeed, Silber decries the wars we’ve fault without ever telling you that these have uniformly and explicitly been pursued to free others from the yoke of oppression. Is North Korea really better under the Kim dynasty? Were the South Vietnamese murdered or sent to reeducation camps really “liberated” by the invading North Vietnamese? Would Europe really have been better under Nazi rule? Silber ignores all of this because, after all, he has his hate to spread. Why let a realistic and accurate perspective on America get in the way of a rousing screed?
Want more? No mention of the FACT that Lincoln actually suspended habeas corpus or that Roosevelt incarcerated an entire race of people – it is BUSH that is “trashing the Constitution.” Never mind the fact that the drug war is responsible for the great bulk of the erosion of the rights of privacy and property – people might notice that this started under a Democratic administration. Never mind that the people that you *really* worry about – the Gitmo prisoners – are not American citizens and that nearly all of them would, given the chance, slit Silber’s throat for deviating from their extremist views. They MUST be cast as poor unfortunate victims of the American war machine.
No nation is perfect. There is much work to be done to improve America’s political and social practices. But Silber, Avedis, and their fellow travelers are doing *nothing* to advance the state of debate.
_Never mind that the vast majority of innocents killed in Iraq have been at the hands of a truly fundamentalist extremism that opposes the very idea of consensual government:_
I want to point out that this is unknown. We are not collecting or publishing good statistics about how many people are killed or who they’re killed by.
The best we have are the Lancet studies, and there may be some minor methodological flaws with them. Anyone who feels they understand these flaws really ought to design a better study and propose it to these guys so they can do it right.
JT – it may be unknown, but I think we can say with some assurance that it’s true. When we start carpetbombing villages a la Soviets-in-Afghanistan, you’ll have a counterclaim. But are you serious?
A.L.
JT is serious. So is Silbur. So is Avedis. And all three living proof that you can be serious about a subject and laughably silly all at the same time.
And I am curious when did Cheney announce his nuke Iran plan. I’m not Cheney’s biggest fan. Still, I don’t seem to recall that. And JT would you begin indicting American soliders in Iraq for the genocide Silbur claims they have committed now or wait until and do it as they are rotated home? That last is a serious question JT. It is hard to allege genocide without having a perpetrator in mind.
Sure, Silber is a bit over the top. However, I guess I’m having a hard time understanding why he is more more “unhinged” than so many here and other pro-war blogs that are into hyperbolic concepts of war without end (or at least “multi-generational”) wherein our very existance hangs in the balance…..blah, blah blah……wherein torture is a good thing, extraordinary rendition is a good thing, laying waste to middle east country after middle east country is a good thing, consolidation of power under a unitary executive is a good thing, where exercising US “hegemony” by military might and causing the world to bend to our will by threat of destruction is a good thing…..
Actually, Silber’s rhetoric reads tame by comparison.
And Wildmonk, maybe you should go to some reservation – try Pine Ridge or White Mouintain Apache (a couple I’m familiar with) – and explain to the residents how it was all a just biological accident that they ended up there (Oops. no hard feelings, right). Then, if you survive, you can go to center city Detroit and explain how bull whipping really isn’t a big deal because – after all – lots of cultures did it.
Good luck!
_”What a perverse understanding of executive powers you have, Jeff. Even this unitary executive crowd wouldn’t simply push a nuclear button without some form of OK from other powers”_
So the theory is that the bloodthirsty cabal in the WH has the desire and will to nuke 50 million innocent people, but is held in check by its reverence for constitutional niceities? The guys want to commit the greatest genocide in the history of the world but their conscience wont allow them to do it without Congressional approval? Do i really need to expound on how silly that is?
I agree there are over the top folks like this on both sides, but i’m starting to feel there should be a rule for civilized discourse- anyone the attributes malevolence to the action or desires of their fellow Americans of differing political stripes should be ignored. When its not enough that the opposition is foolish, unwise, incompetant, naive or all of the above, but must be thought of as EVIL, something well beyond reasoning is going on. Its pure emotionalism and illogic, and we really shouldnt nurture that kind of self agrandized nonsense.
The Case for Bombing Iran by Norman Podhoretz
This sick nut, whose entire world view apparently arises from playground embarrassment at the hands of “Negroes”, is the principal foreign policy adviser to the frontrunner for the GOP Presidential Nomination.
Is there an Iranian version of Commentary that calls for the immediate bombing of the United States—or even Israel—”as soon as it is logistically possible”. Which, exactly, is the great culture that has fallen under the control of demented fanatics? To me, as to Silber, the answer is not so clear.
_it may be unknown, but I think we can say with some assurance that it’s true. When we start carpetbombing villages a la Soviets-in-Afghanistan, you’ll have a counterclaim. But are you serious?_
Yes. You have no reliable data at this point to compare numbers killed by US versus numbers killed other ways. You don’t even have reliable data for numbers killed.
The best we have at this point are the Lancet studies, which give a rather high death rate and put most of the excess on US bombing.
Our bombing is more effective now than it was in vietnam/cambodia, with the result that we can kill more people with fewer tons of bombs.
We could be killing a lot of people that way. The best public data we have implies we are. Not genocide levels, but the largest source of extra deaths. Our info isn’t very good.
If you want to say that AQI or ethnic cleansing is killing more iraqis than we are, you’re welcome to try to support that. I haven’t seen any evidence one way or another that I’d firmly stand behind, but what we have doesn’t look good.
Actually, Andrew, much of the actual leadership of Iran – not the intellectual quondam advisers to the leadership – has called for the elimination of Israel and supports ‘death to the Great Satan’ – which would be us.
Have you missed all that?
A.L.
JT –
I’ve been through this before in “dealing with Juan Cole”:http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/008910.php – absent cluster bombing or area bombing, it’s unlikely that we’ve killed hundreds of thousands of people from the air. JDAM’s are designed to level individual houses (see various AQ leaders who are no longer with us) and kill dozens, not hundreds.
So far I’m missing the B-52’s dropping ‘area denial’ bombs in Iraq – when you find them, I’ll certainly believe there is plausible support for your position.
A.L.
Actually avdeis – it’s interesting. I got involved in Native American cultural stuff in college (the grandma and all that) and chatted some with various folks about their take. An interestying dichotomy. The Boomer cohort – the ones that had read Fanon – saw things much as you suggest. The older folks saw it, simply, as “they won, we lost, tragedy”.
It’s an interesting notion; that until you have the colonial consciousness you really can’t get too outraged.
And because a few uneducated people are outraged doesn’t make the truth of the point any less valid. Slavery wasn’t invented by white Europeans; it was around long before there were white Europeans. Suggesting somehow that it’s a unique ‘burden’ for them is PC nonsense, and demonstrates historical and moral ignorance.
A.L.
_Never mind that the vast majority of innocents killed in Iraq have been at the hands of a truly fundamentalist extremism that opposes the very idea of consensual government:_
This person is not talking about US fundamentalist christian extremist in the US armed forces. That’s a given.
“We are not collecting or publishing good statistics about how many people are killed or who they’re killed by.”
_And JT would you begin indicting American soliders in Iraq for the genocide Silbur claims they have committed now or wait until and do it as they are rotated home? That last is a serious question JT._
I wouldn’t indict US soldiers for genocide unless we get evidence they’ve been committing genocide.
And I want to point out again that this claim that the vast majority of casualties are due to people other than americans, has no support yet. It may be true. It may be completely backward. The data we have points the other direction.
It certainly isn’t anything I’d charge genocide over. I think Silber is going way beyond the evidence.
AL, show me the place the Iranians make the specific threat to bomb the US or Israel “as soon as it is logistically possible”. Podhoretz has moved from abstraction to a cognizable, imminent threat. A threat to start bombing an American school “as soon as it is logistically possible” would be, I think (IANAL), criminal incitement unprotected by the First Amendment under the “true threat” exception. Unpleasant as the Iranian government may be, I don’t think its rhetoric has moved to this level. I repeat: why is Podhoretz not the chief crazy here?
_absent cluster bombing or area bombing, it’s unlikely that we’ve killed hundreds of thousands of people from the air. JDAM’s are designed to level individual houses (see various AQ leaders who are no longer with us) and kill dozens, not hundreds._
We were doing a large but (last I heard) still unannounced amount of cluster bombing in 2003. I haven’t heard of it happening at all since the war ended.
JDAMs level individual houses, and sometimes a few individual houses each — depending on how far the houses are from each other, and how well they’re constructed. When they happen to kill dozens instead of hundreds, then the question becomes whether we drop ten times as many of them. If the casualties per bomb are a 1:10 ratio, then ten times as many will kill the same number. Actually more — the old bombs often missed entirely.
So, how many bombs have we dropped on iraq? How many tons of bombs? I don’t have those numbers but both are claimed to be large. How could we find out?
JT – cites on the cluster bombing?
A.L.
Andrew, no, they haven’t – but they have suggested that building nukes would be a good idea, and that nuking Israel would be OK, because Iran would survive the response (they’re wrong, but that’s irrelevant). Both of those have been reported widely. And the people saying those things in the Iranian government are closer to the centers of power than Perle et al.
They concealed a nuclear program for a number of years, and are still dancing around coming clean about what it’s for.
I’m very concerned about Iran – both about what they will do, about what we might so as we increasingly play chicken with them, and about what Israel may do if they are convinced that we’re backing off.
I’d love to see Obama bookend his willingness to fly to Tehran with a clear statement that if all else failed – and he’d try a long list of else – force was clearly on the table. To be that would be the ideal position to take (see my post on Iran some time ago). Sadly, he’s not taking it.
A.L.
_JT – cites on the cluster bombing?_
The reports were 2003. We announced that we did no urban cluster bombing but there were a publicisable number of urban child casualties etc from urban cluster bombs. At the time I wrote it off as not really significant. A bunch of photos of children missing feet and such, but it looked consistent with us having a policy not to use cluster bombs in cities and then messing up occasionally. We did a lot of cluster bombs around iraqi army troop concentrations away from cities. No big deal there, right?
If it’s important to you I’ll do a search and look for those 4-year-old reports. I’ve been doing more of that than I like recently and I want to confirm that it’s worth the bother first.
avedis –
I’ve been to the Lakota Pine Ridge reservation. It is perhaps the only place in the country where it is ILLEGAL to burn an American flag.
Don’t go bitching to the courts or the ACLU, either, because the tribe is sovereign.
As is well known, natives have the highest rate of military service of any group in the country, and at Pine Ridge they honor their serving men and women with annual powwows.
The Lakota warrior is exemplified by the five W’s: Wowasake, woyuonihan, wowitan, wowicala, woksape – Strength, Honor, Pride, Devotion, and Wisdom.
Not exactly the philosophy of despair, defeat, and resentment that Silber subscribes to, so maybe he should go there and learn something.
A.L., Silber’s essay is indeed disturbing because it is so far from reality. The great harm in this warped world view is indeed the core problem that you identify, that by either believing or pretending to believe such bizarre ideas, these people take themselves out of rational debate and either cripple debate because of their absence or end it altogether by ending rational communication.
But more disturbing is how many people can’t follow that simple observation and, while making noises about the view being “extreme”, nonetheless applaud it and can’t understand its harmfulness.
I seem to be missing something here.
Here’s Armed Liberal in #18
bq. Actually, Andrew, much of the actual leadership of Iran – not the intellectual quondam advisers to the leadership – has called for the elimination of Israel and supports ‘death to the Great Satan’ – which would be us.
Then A. Lazarus in #22
bq. AL, show me the place the Iranians make the specific threat to bomb the US or Israel “as soon as it is logistically possible”.
Folllowd by this reply by Armed Liberal in #25
bq. Andrew, no, they haven’t – but they have suggested that building nukes would be a good idea, and that nuking Israel would be OK, because Iran would survive the response (they’re wrong, but that’s irrelevant). Both of those have been reported widely.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but this seems like a major retreat on the part of A.L. when asked, reasonably, to provide evidence for his statements about Iran that, absent such evidence, amount to nothing more than inflammatory paranoia.
For one, I completely missed the “widely reported” statement by any Iranian Leaders that “nuking Israel would be OK”. Then again, I can’t possibly catch all the news.
I too cannot recall any statements from Iran wherein there is a pronouncement of a desire to nuke or carpet bomb Israel or the US (or any country). I would be very interested in seeing a cite. As pointed out by others here, saddly, the same cannot be said of the US. Many prominent rightwing personalities – some in or potentially in seats of power – are calling for the bombing of Iran and the violent overthow of its government (as well as that of Syria).
There is no evidence that Iran’s nuclear develpment is for weapons. Does anyone have a cite proving otherwise? I wouldn’t bet that it ultimately isn’t, but so what? Delivery systems are the key and they have nothing that could reach the US. Furthermore, even if they did somehow someday develop a long range delivery system their arsenal would still be dwarfed by that of the US and our allies; meaning that if they fired on us, they would experience a retalliation that they could not survive. Iran would cease to exist. Obviously they know this. So what are they going to do with nuclear weapons? Probably nothing accept use them as a deterent to invasion (i.e. not use them unless all was lost due to foreign invasion anyways). Given rhetoric from the US it is hard to blame Iran for considering a defensive nuclear strategy.
Would the weapons be passed to terrorists? Doubtful. Again, there would be payback in spades. Nuclear armed terrorism could only orginate in a few places and those would be targeted immediately for severe retaliation. Nuclear material can be traced to source. The Soviets did not pass nukes along to their proxies like N. Vietnam. True, nukes were positioned in Cuba, but only after we positioned nukes in Turkey. This was gamesmanship. We pulled back our Turkey based nukes and they pulled back theirs out of Cuba. The Cuban nukes were not given to Castro. They were controlled in all aspects by the Soviets. Otherwise no nuclear country has passed along a weapon to non-state actors like terrorists. There is no reason to suspect that Iran would be different. The “they’ll pass it along to terrorists” argument is a canard.
Glen, your misunderstanding of reality re; Native American attitudes is of typically staggering proportions. Yes, several of the nations have fine warrior traditions. Yet, this is not a counter to stifling poverty and sense of hopelessness experienced by many. Just look up alcoholism and suiide rates, etc. I knew a fine Navaho Gunnery Sergeant who served 2 combat tours in VN with distiction. He took to drinking, was eventually drummed out and died in a knife fight in Shiprock. I know a few others that more or less went that way and a few that did better. Having drank and talked with a few and become good friends with a couple I feel I have a fair grasp of their take on the whole colonial thing. They may serve the US, but they unanimously feel that they and their ancestors got screwed by the white man. The smartest of them realize that they still have to get on with life and try to move past all that, but it doesn’t mean they forget or forgive.
avedis:
Alcoholism and suicide on the reservations? Stifling poverty? No kidding?
If that wipes out all the positive things, and all hope for the future, and renders all the people who take pride in their lives as unrepresentative and irrelevant – if that is so, then I guess you and Silber are right.
avedis, are you kidding?
A.L.
No, he is not kidding.
None of them are kiddng. Not Avedis. Not JT not Silbur. They mean it. They mean every word of it.
AL, You have been provided with links to US wingers’ statements about attacking Iran. Many more can easily be provided.
You have failed to do the same concerning your allegation that Iran has advanced plans to atack the US.
The best you can come up with is, “Are you Kidding?”.
Are you kidding? Yours is a reasoned response? You would attack a sovereign nation on a hunch? Care to actually address the issues I andothers have raised? WTF? over……..
You too Corvan. Just what exactly is the insinuation you are making in #34? You seem apalled by the concepts we have presented. What? You just “know” better? Care to make a reasoned fact based refutaion?
#34 from corvan:
It looks it. And this is normal now. And all the people I know who went in this direction did so permanently and vote accordingly. There is no room for the word “kidding” to have meaning in this context. Your vote is your vote.
“Link”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad_and_Israel#.22Wiped_off_the_page_of_time.22_translation
A little preemption on my part.
It seems that at best all you can say is that Iran is for the removal of the current zionist regime, but not the obliteration of Jews (there is a Jewish community that thrives in Iran, you know. Odd that with all the alleged Iranian Jew hating this community hasn’t been killed off).
Iran would like to see a one state solution where Arabs in Israel have the same voting rights as Jews and would, therefore, presumably vote the current regime out of office. Weirdly democratic notion, no?
Another tactic has been funding existing terrorism against Israel with the goal of toppling “zionist” control – though I don’t personally see how that is supposed to work. Still no mention of obliterating anything nore than a political hunta; not a race.
Iran specifically denies wanting to destroy the physical country of Israel or the jewish people. I can find no evidence contrary to this.
I can find no mention anywhere of Iran expressing or implying a desire to attack the US.
So I eagerly await the evidence that fuels your perceived need to expand our (already overstretched) military adventures to include Iran.
David Blue, “It looks it. And this is normal now.”
Enough already! Just what is it that is getting all your panties into such a knot?
What is normal now that you so disdain? Not wanting to rush into unnecessary wars? Using reasoning? What? What?
“And all the people I know who went in this direction did so permanently and vote accordingly.” Good. Maybe there’s hope for this country.
There are plenty of people who bend over backwards to give murderous, totalitarian, terrorist societies—and especially the murderous, totalitarian, terrorist, thugs who lead them—the benefit of the doubt.
While lambasting the US (and its allies) and its leaders at every opportunity.
Nothing new here.
It’s what makes the US such a great nation.
“What is normal now that you so disdain? Not wanting to rush into unnecessary wars? Using reasoning?â€
avedis,
Clearly the people you are asking are not disposed to answer, so I’ll tell you what I think it is they find objectionable. In a word, it’s empiricism. You ask for evidence. That betrays a lack of faith, which is disturbing. The reality-based community is held in contempt for its lack of vision and its weakness, its willingness to be swayed by mere facts.
I may be wrong of course. That too is an empirical question, since I have no disciples. The obvious way to test my theory is to examine any responses you may get and see whether they falsify it.
avedis:
There were 80,000 Jews in Iran, members of a community that had survived there for 2700 years, when the Iranian Islamists overthrew the Shah. A number of leading Jews were executed for being Israeli spies and “enemies of God”, and of the rest more than half have fled to other countries.
Kevin Donohogue:
Yeha, right. That and the fact that you don’t know what the word “thrive” means.
Chris Floyd responded to Armed Liberal (check his website). I have to say, I agree with Floyd.
Is Silber over the top, unhinged, paranoid? Don’t think so. You’re misreading anger and frustration for those adjectives. Anyone who is paying attention ought to be pissed as hell. How anyone can’t see this run-up to an attack on Iran as _Iraq II, the Sequel_ (with far more dangerous consequences) is beyond my comprehension.
“LINK”:http://www.sephardicstudies.org/iran.html
I don’t know where you get your info, Glen; Straight from Ledeen or some such I’d imagine. You really need to do more global searches of data and then use your own powers of reasoning to deduce reality. I’d say “thrive” is reasonably accurate from a relative point of view. They’re certsainly doing at least a well as say a Palistinian in Israel (or an Armenian in Turkey).
And Barry, “There are plenty of people who bend over backwards to give murderous, totalitarian, terrorist societies—and especially the murderous, totalitarian, terrorist, thugs who lead them—the benefit of the doubt.” This is a true enough statement, but remember, Barry, it’s a big club and chickens do come home to roost. The Shah of Iran springs to mind.
But, anyhow, what are you going to do about? Righteously invade every country that has a murderous dictatorial regime? You do know that some of our valuable allies are on that list. Where would the military resources comke from?
Your “morality” rings hollow with me and your reasoning is empty.
I did not say the Iranian regime is a good regime or that they are nice guys. I am saying that we do not have reason to bomb, invade or otherwise violate its sovereignty at this time. I am further saying that doing so under any circumstances would be extremely costly and would have reprecusions that we are scarcley prepared to deal with.
Again, it’s the reasoning thing that you don’t get. You cannot just dream your way through military interventions (e.g. see Iraq). These things have to be planned out carefully and all must be readiness. Benefits must exceed all costs incurred. What those costs are must be carefully considered and calculated. If not, you don’t jump off; even if “they” are nasty people. Get it?
AL, I’m still looking forward to your reasoned response and informative cites/evidence (#35)
Just to clarify.
Is the speech by Ahmedinijad (or other comments from him) linked by avedis, above, the only evidence available supporting A.L.’s original claim?
Because the word “THEY” appears in Armed Liberals claim, implying that more than one Iranian spokesman or individual with political power and influence contributed remarks to this.
Kevin: funny
An aside: On another thread, demands were made to supply evidence that “Bush lied”. Now, I don’t seem to recall that the only response was “Are you kidding”, even though that, in my view, would have been more than appropriate. Instead, commenters worked to support their claims, and an interesting and productive conversation ensued.
Contrast that with this thread, where a reasonable request to provide substantiation for a very strong (and politically charged and dangerous) claim is met with sneering dismissal, and implications that those requesting proof are somehow delusional.
If this isn’t the perfect example of the nature of our current Liberal-Republican discourse, I don’t know what is.
Yes, yes, America has committed a genocide in Iraq. The jews in Iran live in, well if not a paradise, certainly a better situation than jews deserve.
The regime in Iran, though not “nice” is certainly more deserving of resepct and its “soveriegnty” than the Bushitler empire….
The spirit of Walter Duranty lives. And works feverishly to spin his poisonous magic in the middle east.
This is a Liberal-Republican discourse? I thought it was a prayer breakfast for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
Actually, when my “morality” rings hollow with certain people, I feel entirely reassured. Call it intuition….
But the question does remain: When the going gets complicated, who gets going? And in which direction? And why?
On which side ought one err? On which side is it “morally” permissable/advisable/warranted/preferable to be mistaken?
Yes, yes, we know. War is not the answer. We’ve been there. And done that. (Churchill, as is well known, was a war monger. And WWII was hatched by the Jews.)
Alas some believe, with all the moral certitude that they can muster, that certain countries (a certain country?) are not allowed to pre-empt, but must wait to be attacked and overwhelmed. Why? Because there’s no actual proof that they will be attacked (words and threats obviously don’t count)—until they actually *are* attacked. And even if/when they are actually attacked, then one could say—with all the moral certitude that one can muster—that those countries are themselves responsible for having been attacked, have created the conditions for those attacks to occur.
Policies, you know. Chickens coming home to roost. Etc.
As for me, I’m not at all persuaded by those clamoring “morality,” and am afraid that Spengler (Norman Podhoretz’s love child, no doubt—and therefore JPod’s long lost half brother?!) is “on to something.”:http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IJ30Ak09.html
On the other hand, Spengler was wrong 100 years ago and may be wrong again: maybe the Iranian regime is really not so bad, basically harmless, even relatively benign (after all, not all of Iranian Jews have felt the need to flee—as was absolutely correctly pointed out above; and the Bahais are, of course, still living in Iran in significant numbers, I suppose one could say). Yes, perhaps Iran is merely misunderstood by a West manipulated by loose canon, neo-cons and a pernicious Israel Lobby….
Oops, I forgot one…Holocaust denial..it’s a good thing. Impeach Cheney!
From the extensive commentary #10
The ground on which Lincoln suspended habeas corpus was in stark contrast to the current administration. Though I cannot support suspending it in any case, I can see where because of fears of riots and bride-burning in Baltimore, the president made that decision.
In the Ex Parte Merryman this was countered by Chief Justice Taney, who declared that
1. The President under the Constitution and laws of the United States, cannot suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, nor authorize any military officer to do so.
2. A military officer has no right to arrest a person, not subject to the rules and articles of war, for an offense against the laws of the United States, except in and of the judicial authority and subject to its control ”and of the parties arrested b the military” it is the duty of the officer to deliver him over immediately to the civil authority, to be dealt with according to law. (from All the Laws But One)
That point is null, on grounds and nature of enforcement of the writ. Lincoln did not try to deceive congress, which is supposed to have the power to suspend it, in order to avoid going against the authorities. The interpretation of the constitution on this issue is yet again somewhat unclear.
#17 said “Our bombing is more effective now than it was in vietnam/cambodia, with the result that we can kill more people with fewer tons of bombs.”
There are many issues with this approach, foremost for me is an ethical one, which I will chose to avoid because it is too argumentative.
Now, the statement that we can kill more people with fewer tons of bombs..
This assumes that we are targeting our enemies properly, which I don’t believe to be the case for a few reasons.
This also goes with the poor expectation that we will be tactical in what we do, where I see few points in our history that we have been. To site a past administration I’m sure both sides of the issue are familiar with, I will use Clinton’s response to the 1998 bombings of American embassy buildings in Nairobi and Dar Salaam.
“the United States retaliated by firing nearly eighty cruise missiles (at a cost of $750,00 each) into a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, and an old Mujahaideen camp site in Afghanistan. (One missile went four hundred miles off course and landed in Pakistan)”
(Blowback)
Your statement there is disturbing to me on many levels. There are more effective, and less destructive ways to go about dealing with threats than bombing. So far as I can see the only reason we continue to use this warfare is because the people who make the most money from it are the ones determining our involvement in armed conflict. We profit heavily from sales of weapons, and there are a few large weapons producers (like haliburton and Lockheed martin) who make an incredible amount of money directly from the Government.
I agree with Arthur Silber a majority of the time. I actually am relieved that there are people like him out there, because if there weren’t, I don’t think I would have much hope for the future of our society.
I see what our nation is doing, and what the citizens are ignoring, and consenting to. (not that they are not being mislead though) He is pointing out something we should definitely be very worried about, in our preemptive policy making towards Iran, and our atrocities (they are atrocities, by the way) against the Iraqis.
sorry that ought to read “bridge-burning” in the first paragraph.
And Taney’s statements part 2 especially, are important more in fighting “homegrown terrorists” and the works of organizations like the JTTF
I find it amazing that Avedis claims “empiricism” as his mantle when he turns my statement about the historic facts of slavery and the depopulation of the North American continent through disease and says “don’t say that on a reservation, don’t say that in Detroit.”
So, may I take this as evidence that you know I am right but figure that you can slide out of responsibility for your position by slyly implying that I might get assaulted for my position.
In any event, you didn’t deal with my essential point: that the Anglo tradition is the only one in which these (historically common) activities were a) stopped on moral grounds and b) recalled with horror and shame. Of course, it doesn’t surprise me that you won’t deal with it given your one-sided view of things and your shiny patina of “empiricism.”
Francina – you make a reasonable point – that Lincoln had more “cause” for suspending habeas corpus than Bush (and certainly a more fragile political situation). However, you seem to have lost the point that Bush hasn’t suspended habeas corpus. There *are* risks afoot as I pointed out and I too worry that rights are eroding as the Federal Government grows into a Leviathan. But A) prisoners of war *don’t have* the right of habeas corpus and never have and B) Bush got his hands slapped for the Jose Padilla debacle. That is, the system is creaking forward with legitimate debates about torture, habeas corpus and the prosecution of another long, ideological war. It is just like any other human venture: filled with uncertainty, power grabs, emotional excess and downright stupidity. However, people like Silber and Avedis look at all of it and, by systematically excising half the story, are left with a worldview in which America is *always* the villain and Bush is essentially indistinguishable from Hitler.
My question is: why do they systematically ignore evidence to America’s credit? Why do they insist on donning the mantle of “empiricism” while avoiding their responsibility to understand context and history? How can they reconcile their self-appointed status as the “rational” actors in this drama while indulging in emotionally charged, often irrational screeds like the one on Silber’s site?
Wildmonk, I appreciate your response,
there are parts I don’t follow you on.
“However, you seem to have lost the point that Bush hasn’t suspended habeas corpus.”
How so? I thought that was exactly what he did, in polices enacted (mostly post 9/11, but written at least partially prior to it). Military Commissions Act, I believe does limit habeas corpus, but there are stronger examples, as well.
“Why do they insist on donning the mantle of “empiricism” while avoiding their responsibility to understand context and history?”
I disagree with you, I think the better your familiarity with our history, and our trends in foreign policy, and their likewise repercussions would support the “mantle of empiricism.” I don’t see it as some irrational delusion that what the United States does is often violently self serving, reckless and controlling. I personally do not know as much as I should about any issue, but I can tell the difference between what historians who value the truth say, versus those trying to promote the American virtue.
to reiterate my standing:
There are consequences to our actions, and to go about without considering those consequences compounds their result. Our interventions in foreign affairs most often have negative effects, because our priority is not to create a relationship with existing leaders, it is usually to dominate whatever aspects we can gain from them. (I look to our actions in Hawaii, and our actions in Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras)
In the weapons and training we provide to groups in other nations (usually to help fight our enemies), it has been very clear, that we encounter these same fighters and weaponry we provided as the powers shift.
Prisoners of war are supposed to have the rights awarded to them in the Geneva conventions correct?
Are we as the united states, in our rendering of prisoners (conveniently to countries that admit to condoning torture), giving our detainees those rights? I don’t think so.
more on this as we go.
Let’s use Glen’s own standards for religious toleration.
How are the Iraqi Christians doing compared to the Iranian Jews? Answer: not so well. Daniel Pipes (an unimpeachable source for this purpose) wrote as far back as 2004
In 2007, Fox News (I’m sure you’ll approve), writing after another wave of assassinations and anti-Christian violence, reported that
The International Herald Tribune (sorry, I ran out of right-wing sources) in a story on the new Iraqi Cardinal that ran last week, said
[Aside: while I don’t hold with executions, period, I should point out that (a) Many Iranian Jews were close to the Shah and I’m sure those who were unable to flee were punished or executed as ‘spies’ and (b) some Iranian Jews confessed to being spies. I, myself, have doubts about these confessions because I think they were obtained under torture, but I don’t see how this reservation is available to the many WoC posters who support torture when practiced by the United States and its allies, and are deathly afraid of the conspiracies that the tortured detainees reveal.]
American Exceptionalism, Bushbot style, refers to repeal of the Goose/Gander principle, whether with regard to justification necessary to wage war or the legality of torture. The havoc we wreak in Iraq is OK, because we are pure, and noble. Our torture is carefully calibrated—only the unpatriotic would compare it to the perverted sadism of The Other Guy. And the clear and present danger Norman Podhoretz and his propaganda machine presents to Iran with his lunatic demands for a wider war doesn’t count, because, well, because I’m not sure… No one has yet explained in any terms other than locative (i.e., Podhoretz plays for our team) why his statements are not more alarming and belligerent than anything out of Teheran.
_There is no evidence that Iran’s nuclear develpment is for weapons. Does anyone have a cite proving otherwise?_
No. The problem here is that the technology for power plants and the technology for bombs shares so much in common that if we let them have power plants and they want bombs, by the time we find out it will be too late to stop them.
We have developed a technology for power plants that is useless for bombs. This technology is uneconomic, and nobody who actually wanted significant amounts of electric power would give it a third thought. Also, we proposed that they use this useless technology in a way that would let them be easily sanctioned. So 20 years from now, we put sanctions on iran and their expensive power plants fail…. And for that matter a small oligopoly of nations would be providing them their fuel, at whatever price the cartel imposed.
So iran definitely wants power plants and we definitely don’t want to let them have them, and the technological fix that would give them power plants and not nukes has failed.
You might particularly notice Barry Meislin’s #48. He says it’s fine for us to attack iran on _suspicion_. By the time we’re sure, they might _hurt_ us. Better to get them first.
There’s something to that.
_So what are they going to do with nuclear weapons? Probably nothing accept use them as a deterent to invasion_
Yes, that’s almost certainly true. But that doesn’t actually change the equation here.
We _talk_ like we only do war to stop dangerous threats to the USA, and to serve as a world policeman, and things like that. But look at the geopolitics. If iran gets nukes it will be very hard for us to get up the enthusiasm to invade them, or even stage a serious attack. American civilians would freak out. So if we’re going to attack them we have to do it before they have nukes. It isn’t something we can just dawdle about, we can’t just wait for a rainy day when there’s nothing else to do. It has to be now.
Similarly, if some of us actually believed that Saddam was about to get nukes, that was a strong argument we had to invade iraq before the nukes worked. Because otherwise we couldn’t do it at all, if for some reason we needed to.
The point isn’t really what iran might do with nukes, the point is we can’t let them make themselves uninvadable. We have to stop them from building an effective defense.
Sure we put nice words on it, we want to overthrow their government so they’ll have a liberal democracy instead, all the usual. But that isn’t really the point. The point is they might someday try to actively resist us, and we have to make sure they can’t defend themselves.
The rest of it is mostly pretty words. Some of the guys here might actually believe those words while others are using them as part of winning the longterm war. But what it boils down to is that there are two kinds of people in the world. There’s us and there’s them. And anything that helps them hurts us by definition. And when you talk like you don’t want to hurt them, it makes you look like you aren’t one of us but one of them. And inside our own country. In the long run there’s serious question whether that can be allowed.
You of course think you deserve rights because you’re an american citizen. But why should you be allowed to remain a US citizen when you talk against america? See the reasoning? It mostly doesn’t get discussed that way in public yet. But see how it follows?
“If iran gets nukes it will be very hard for us to get up the enthusiasm to invade them… So if we’re going to attack them we have to do it before they have nukes. It isn’t something we can just dawdle about, we can’t just wait for a rainy day when there’s nothing else to do. It has to be now.”
Don’t let me get you wrong here J. Thomas.
Are you saying pre-emptive strikes are a good idea?
and here
“You of course think you deserve rights because you’re an american citizen. But why should you be allowed to remain a US citizen when you talk against america? See the reasoning? It mostly doesn’t get discussed that way in public yet. But see how it follows?”
If I have you correctly, you’re saying that people who make protest, and disagree with our government should not be allowed to stay citizens?
If that is the case you’re making, you’re right, it doesn’t get discussed in public, because the extreme fascists and promoters of totalitarianism are few and far between, and so get confined to little pools of their peers, like some internet sites where those types of people congregate.
I seriously hope I have either misinterpreted you, or that you are kidding.
What an interesting perspective. Let me see if I’ve got this straight.
You read Arthur Silber’s essay.
You start the present essay under the pretense that you are responding to the essay by Mr Silber.
Yet what you talk about is not even remotely related to the subjects discussed by Mr Silber in his essay.
Why then have you mentioned Mr Silber, or his essay, if your point was to launch a speech that focuses on Manifest Destiny and America’s right to Empire?
Honestly, your original post and the comments that follow are confusing to me. Maybe I’m the Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer, but I really do not see how your puffed-up pseudo-philosophic writing has any bearing on the subject of Mr Silber’s essay.
You can cite to hundreds of “historic events” and tens of philosophers and none of that will buttress the idea that your original post is irrelevant. It seems to serve only one purpose: self-gratification.
While I realize that such onanism is a facet of human nature, most mature adults with a fairly rigorous intellect realize that writing geared toward a primary goal of self-gratifying is, even at its very best, fairly embarrassing.
So I suppose it’s good that you are writing and publishing from behind the faceless anonymity of a keyboard/computer-driven blog post. In a real debate with fellow humans, where instant exchange can occur and instant response to nonsensical propositions is enabled, your essay could easily be shown to be the naked emperor it really is.
So go on, brag about your new robes of finery.
Just don’t try to convince me that this particular essay has any bearing whatever on Mr Silber’s essay.
Barry Meislinijad wrote
See? There’s no real content there at all. Just the most self-serving affirmations of one’s own great goodness.
Hint: Communists and Nazis also thought the other guys were the thugs and they were the heroes. Civilization means objective standards. But in Bush’s America when those objective standards meet extraordinary rendition, casus belli, waterboarding (has anyone ever explained how it could be a count of a war crimes charge against a Japanese POW guard but not an American?), objective standards have to go. It started with the Florida Election Code and it ended with war criminals running the country.
The Wendigo
I agree with you in the majority of your statement, that this is not a discussion of Silber by any honest measure. If it were, it would probably be more valuable.
But this, my Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer friend (I’ve never heard of that before) is the internet, and so has an ability to be largely based in self gratification. Which makes me sad, because Silber deserves better.
I am not exempt from this, as none of us are.. I participate, and if I were smarter, which maybe one day I will be, I would be able to do justice by authors and commentators who I respect.
“In a real debate with fellow humans, where instant exchange can occur and instant response to nonsensical propositions is enabled, your essay could easily be shown to be the naked emperor it really is.”
I agree with you on this as well. Until that time when I have been able to develop more worthwhile discussions, I will remain here, where my remedial understanding is less likely to disturb the work of those I respect. (Which I think is part of why Mr. Silber turns comments off occasionally)
Sorry, avedis – doing other stuff this morning. But take a look at “my old post on Iran”:http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/007988.php if you want to know where I stand. Not much has changed since I wrote that.
More later.
A.L.
to Francina Larmon —
Yes, it is a very deep shame that such posing, preening, preaching and pontificating can pass for praiseworthy prose. I submit that Mr Armed Liberal’s original post masquerades as “analysis” and instead is closer to something spelled almost identically, but possessing a completely different meaning.
Anal lysis.
You may need to look up the term “lysis,” and I suggest the scientific use as its best definition here.
On the topic of Iran and American Empire, Mr Anonymous Liberal sure seems to have a lot of confidence in his rectitude. I suppose that anyone who takes his “knowledge” from such stalwart sages of foreign affairs as The Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal, Richard Perle, William Kristol, and the like is inclined to think himself absolutely correct in condemning the “non-democratic” regimes in Iraq, Iran, and everywhere else there is oil for the USA to steal by means of force and intimidation. Because really, when big American businesses like Blackwater, Halliburton/KBR, Custer Battles LLC, DynCorp, Lockheed/Martin Marrietta, The Shaw Group and many others can “grow” their profits by “democratizing” such oil-holding nations, then of course they are “non-democratic.”
How such tail-chasing, question-begging, self-justifying “analysis” can be found insightful escapes me.
But then, I’m just an unfrozen caveman lawyer. Not a genius of political theory, like Armed Liberal.
The wendigo.
I would first like to say that I actually got a laugh out of certain parts of that, probably due the more refreshing consciousness it likely originated from. That and I love the biology reference (I happen to surround myself with literature, not limited to an excellent biology text from solomon,berg,martin) but I am going on a tangent..
How such tail-chasing, question-begging, self-justifying “analysis” can be found insightful escapes me.
The question I have to ask you,
as someone interested in improving my understanding of Mr. Silber and my ability to discuss intelligently similar topics..
is what is your suggestion, or your alternative? (bearing in mind my reasons for remaining in the cesspool.)
as a non-genius in political theory,can I responsibly participate, if so how.
thank you.
An open question that does indeed bear upon Mr Armed Liberal’s original post —
If the goal is to create “democracy” in nations abroad, isn’t it hypocritical to tell them they need “democracy” when our own system here is no closer to democracy than theirs?
I have many friends around the USA, in many different states. They come from all points on a linear political spectrum, and not one of them has suggested that there is any sliver of democracy left in America, even assuming we had any to start with.
Perhaps Armed Liberal’s fondness for history is selective. It seems that way to me. A true student of history whose readings aren’t self-justifying would have to note the strange evolution of our government’s organic documents.
When one reads the Declaration of Independence it looks clear that democracy was what they wanted, because what they got from the K of E was nothing resembling democracy. Can anyone forget the rallying cry of “taxation without representation”?
Shortly after the Declaration was signed, the concerned Americans sat down and hammered out a document called the Articles of Confederation. That is the organic document that controlled from 1776 to 1787.
During the Constitutional Congress, there were two well-known factions whose thoughts were published as “the Federalist” and “the Anti-Federalist,” collectively speaking. There were more than one of each side, from an authorial perspective.
What is not well-known, or at least what is not frequently acknowledged when discussing the history of the USA, is the fact that the Articles of Confederation were very similar in tone, intent and theory to the Declaration of Independence, and that the US Constitution was by comparison a very plutocratic, oligarchic document.
You don’t have to believe me, of course. And you shouldn’t. You should research this for yourself. And while so doing, you should pay particular attention to the fact that when the US Constitution was presented and signed in 1787, there were no guarantees of individual rights vis-a-vis the rights of the central government.
This was a primary complaint of those who wanted to keep the Articles of Confederation. However, those supporters were not the most wealthy and powerful among the Americans living and participating in the Constitutional Congress. Their voices were drowned out by the suasion of the “patriots” who urged the more powerful executive, the more plutocratic “Senate” that overshadows the House of Representatives, and the weakened power of the individual citizen.
It took a number of years for the anti-Federalist supporters of the Articles of Confederation to convince the American people that the Constitution wasn’t what the Federalists said it was. The result was the Bill of Rights.
And since those 1st ten amendments were adopted and incorporated, we’ve been laboring under the idea that we have a “democracy,” merely by a grudging grant of minute individual rights.
It’s quite comical that this particular forum talks about liberty. It would seem that the “liberty” under consideration here is the liberty of the centralized government to do what it likes, regardless of what the individual American citizen wants.
to Francina Larmon —
What exactly do you mean, “what is your suggestion”?
On what topic?
My suggestion in general regarding Armed Liberal’s original post is to not use Armed Liberal as a thought-proxy, because his written thoughts are dangerously erroneous, and written mainly to justify a perspective to which he clings with a mighty fervor that reveals no interest in learning the truth or learning any alternative views.
I would suggest educating one’s self by using many sources of information, not just those who help in one’s confirmation bias.
Apart from that, what do you mean?
If possible though I would like to bring it back, to what silber is saying, and how people are inclined to respond.
I agree, with a few of the people who have posted before me, when they say that if the people in this country were paying attention, they would be outraged.
We ought to be mad. Not just at the President, but at everyone who appeases him.
and maybe, I as a non-genius am out of line to say that.
I agree, that no party has done the right thing to limit the power of this administration to commit atrocities. I see that the public is responsible as well, and especially so for trying to silence the people, like Silber who are pointing out these mistakes, and showing the reality that has become of them.
My individual views pale in comparison, to the right we ought to have in dissent. This type of non-analysis, where the issues are not addressed, is worthless.
I would suggest educating one’s self by using many sources of information, not just those who help in one’s confirmation bias.
Apart from that, what do you mean?
basically the above, thanks.
I wasn’t sure whether you were asserting that we should be able to address issues from many angles, or find a new method of discussion, altogether.
to Francina Larmon —
“I wasn’t sure whether you were asserting that we should be able to address issues from many angles, or find a new method of discussion, altogether.”
Well, as compared to Armed Liberal’s “analysis”, viewing the questions from many different angles would be an entirely new method of discussion.
I’m not a fan of George Lakoff’s bogus “framing” concept, mainly because what Lakoff is credited with “discovering” is a technique of rhetoric that goes back to the ancient Greeks who sought to teach through rhetorical questions and analysis.
The point is to gather all the evidence and then make your analysis, and in the course of your analyzing the evidence, you must ask yourself, “who stands to gain from that? and how do they stand to gain from it?”
Those two simple questions are completely missing from Armed Liberal’s perspective as stated in his original post. He assumes that Manifest Destiny is a TRUTH, when it is nothing more than a post-hoc rationalization, a lie obscuring reality.
He also assumes that we are under dire threat from Iran or Iraq. Yet there is no proof of this, when the whole universe of evidence is reviewed. Sure you can slant the “evidence” and look only at the narrow facts of “Iran is pursuing nuclear power,” but then you must ask yourself, why is Iran prohibited from that power when many other nations are entitled to it? The only response from folks like Armed Liberal seems to be, “but the Iranians are DANGEROUS” and then I would wonder where is the proof of that danger and the attendant threat to any of us Americans.
What I submit is “dangerous” about Iraq and Iran is their refusal to let American and British and Dutch oil businesses control their oil reserves and the means to obtain those reserves, refine them, and transmit the products of refining. And by “obtain” I do not mean overt direct theft. I mean by having a government which basically accedes to whatever the UK, US and Dutch oil businesses want.
What really threatens America right now is the threat that oil will be priced on a basis other than the US Dollar. Our economy already is well in hock. The existing value of the Dollar is propped artificially, and doesn’t reflect the value that the massive debt really yields. Objective currency traders would acknowledge this, but some of them may be jingoistic and “patriotic” and would refuse to conceive of a world where the US Dollar isn’t supreme.
There’s also an element of “payback” to Iraq and Iran for all the times they have in the past refused to go along with American desires.
So at the bottom of the Armed Liberal “analysis” is the notion that the USA is entitled to tell other nations how they should conduct their affairs.
And that’s really quite counter to liberty principles. I don’t want Armed Liberal telling me how to run my life. And I don’t want my nation telling Iraq or Iran or anyone else how to run its business.
We have more pressing issues at home, such as the police state and the death of individual rights, and the rampant profiteering, and the consolidation of the federal government – corporate business symbiosis.
Wendigo, if you can’t read well enough to find my name, why in the world should I pay any attention to your misreading of what I’ve written (as well, based on on your statements, of what lots of other people have written)?
I really don’t have the time to deal with people who make the delusional claim that we live in a police state; I’m more interested in dealing with folks who have at least one foot in reality.
But stick around until you get bored, you’re entertaining.
A.L.
This is my opinion, and is not meant for the same purpose as some of my general discussion.
If the goal is to create “democracy” in nations abroad, isn’t it hypocritical to tell them they need “democracy” when our own system here is no closer to democracy than theirs?
I am reminded of a speech by Martin Luther King Jr.
“we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long.”
I see some serious issues with how our current administration defines democracy. Our crusades to bring their “Democracy” to other nations are ridiculous from any angle. We have destroyed democracies in favor of cooperative dictatorships..
so far as I have seen,
I come from a blood thirsty, ignorant country whose “values” cast me along the lines of the devil himself, while they are on a genocidal, exploitation driven rampage from which no group of people can escape.
If democracy means to this administration, availability for exploitation and conquest (among other things) then yes, I believe we are doing everything in our power to spread it.
If this is the case (among other issues), and you are someone who loves Democracy in a different more humane sense, then you have every right to be “pissed as hell,” in fact I wish more people were, because then they might be looking at what is going on.
sorry if I’m being redundant.
Final thought (for now).
Armed Liberal makes a huge, glaring omission when he refuses to acknowledge that any instability and threat that is active or dormant in Iraq or Iran is the product of US foreign policy (via diplomacy, via militarism, via business deals, via State Dept policy, via CIA interference) that has for over 30 years sought to “destabilize” both of those countries as well as every other oil-rich nation that isn’t essentially and practically either a happy partner or a virtual puppet of the USA.
For example, Saddam Hussein’s “evil power” was enabled entirely by the CIA’s original work with him, and the US funding him, training his goons, sending them weapons and supplies.
At other times in history the US has “supported” Iraq.
Iraq is a “threat” now for several reasons.
1. Ahmadinejad is not a puppet of the USA.
2. Ahmadinejad doesn’t bow and scrape to Israel’s will.
3. Ahmadinejad insists on self-determination.
Wow. How threatening. A nation that wants independence!
Armed Liberal at #68
That’s pretty sad. Do I care to know your “name”? No. So that’s a distraction.
Then there’s the ad hominem. Another distraction.
Look, man. If you can respond to substance, I beg you to do so.
Shooting the messenger is more your style though, eh? You did it with Mr Silber, you are doing it with me.
I’m sure your sycophantic fanboys eat that stuff like the best meal they ever had, though.
So Silber went over your head, huh? Everything he said was true, I’ll grant you he didn’t go far enough though. You seem to have problems with the truth? You’re not one of those 5th column “Youth for Cheney” Rethuglicans are you?
Your radical pal,
Ernest
“If iran gets nukes it will be very hard for us to get up the enthusiasm to invade them… So if we’re going to attack them we have to do it before they have nukes.”
_Don’t let me get you wrong here J. Thomas.
Are you saying pre-emptive strikes are a good idea?_
I thought I was laying out the logic plainly. I’ll try again.
IF we are surrounded by muslims who will inevitably band together into a single muslim government, build a superpower military, and attempt to conquer the whole world starting WWIII, then we do better to nip that in the bud.
IF there is a giant offensive threat to us or to israel from a second muslim nuclear power, then it makes sense to stop that threat before we find out whether it’s real or not, since by the time we’re sure it will be too late.
IF israel will stage a nuclear pre-emptive strike if we don’t, then it makes sense for us to do it first so the world won’t be upset at israel.
These are all arguments that people might support if they’re apolitical.
But more important —
IF we want to control the middle east and its oil, we can’t have nuclear powers in the middle east apart from israel. We still think of ourselves as a superpower, but even as a superpower we have to back off from little nations that have nukes. If panama had nukes would we have invaded them? Iraq? When there were two superpowers most nations didn’t want nukes. If one superpower pushed on them too hard they could beg help from the other, unless they were already too firmly in hand. But with only one official superpower nukes are the obvious way to defy us. What if everybody did that? If everybody had nukes we wouldn’t be a superpower, we’d just be “first among equals”.
For some of the people who talk about “nukes for terrorists” terrorists aren’t the issue — it’s a codeword. The big problem is spreading nuclear technology to nations that otherwise couldn’t afford it. Here’s how that works — if you build nukes from scratch, the traditional way to do it is to take uranium and separate out the U235. This is very difficult and expensive. Once you have a U235 reactor then you can make all the plutonium you want, cheaply. You can make cheap plutonium reactors and cheap plutonium bombs. But first you have to bootstrap with the expensive U235. When somebody gives you enough plutonium to get started, you can skip the expensive part. You might be able to afford nukes that you couldn’t possibly afford if you had to do it from scratch. Every nuclear power _can_ give away the makings to anybody they want, unless we stop them. It’s a big deal to stop pakistan and india and north korea from giving the stuff to others. Not just the technology but the seed plutonium to get started.
If iran gets nuclear power there’s no telling who they’ll give plutonium to. If any US enemies get nukes they can give plutonium to any of the others.
So we have a choice. We can accept this situation, where many countries might get nukes and we have to be polite to all of them — or we can try to prevent it.
If we accept that nonproliferation is dead then our best chance is to do minimal intervention in other nations. We can be friendly, we can encourage democracy by example and preaching but not by actually trying to overthrow nuclear governments and set up our own puppets. We could (if we amended our Constitution a little) promote democracy by inviting other nations to join the USA as states or collections of states — if they see big advantages to becoming part of the USA they might vote to do so. But we can’t run anything like an empire when the other nations have nukes too. This approach would be a big change for us. We’d have to give up being a superpower.
Or we can try to enforce nonproliferation. I think that approach is doomed. But if we try it, we have to stop iran from getting nuclear power or nuclear weapons or whatever-it-is they’re trying to do. We have to stop everybody we don’t like from doing that. A long time ago Bush listed iraq, iran, and north korea as particular targets. He’s handled iraq, he’s failed with north korea, and iran is still in doubt.
If the USA is a superpower running an empire, then pre-emptive strikes aren’t just as good idea. They’re absolutely necessary. We might lose our empire if we do them, but we’ll definitely lose it if we don’t.
So, are we empiricists? 😉
Barry Meislin said: “And WWII was hatched by the Jews.”
I hope this was a tasteless joke made with your eyes rolling, Mr. Meislan.
The facts are rather different though probably as incendiary as your quote above. Briefly, they are as follows:
In 1933, a group of American Zionists under the direction of New Yorker Sam Cohan, approached the Nazi party of Germany with a proposal: Allow German Jews who wished to emigrate to Palestine to leave with up to 10,000 English Pounds of their own money – (the rest of their assets were to be assigned to the German government with Cohan’s tacit permission) – and in return, Sam and the rest of the American Zionists leadership would strong-arm the Jewish Labour leaders responsible for a world-wide boycott of German goods that was crippling Germany’s economic recovery. Cohan promised the Nazis he could force the labour leaders to cancel their boycott.
You see, Hitler was in serious political trouble at the time – he was only the titular head of a wide-based coalition government that was set to collapse because of the trade embargo’s effect on the German economy. (The boycott had been put in place in response to Hitler’s published opinions on Jews and other minorities.)
Hitler’s fellow members of the coalition were only weeks away from stripping him of his position as Chancellor when Cohan’s backroom threats and arm twisting resulted in the Jewish labour leaders’ collapse of support for the boycott. The labour leaders caved in the face of the all-pervasive pressure these Zionist movers and shakers were able to bring to bear on them. (If you doubt their power to coerce, bully and beat their opposition into submission, you need look no further than “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy”, by Walt and Mearsheimer, just released to no discussion whatsoever in our MSM.)
The point is this: Had Cohan and the rest of his vile cabal of Zionist delusionists not forced the collapse of the boycott of German goods by strong-arming the Jewish labour leadership, Hitler would have been a footnote of 20th century history – not the author of the deaths of millions, including the untold number of Jews who were in no way disposed to approve of Zionism.
Sam Cohan subverted the almost certain political destruction of Hitler and the Nazi party to strengthen his own fringe, extremist Zionist movement, (some members of which actually volunteered to fight along side the Nazis in the 2nd World War,) and in so doing permitted Hitler to gather the strength he needed to assume dictatorial powers over the Reich!
No Sam Cohan skullduggery = no Holocaust, no 2nd World War!
All of this information is readily available in the documents kept by Germany, Palestine and elsewhere. For a more easily accessible collection of the facts, you should read Edwin Black’s, “The Transfer Agreement”, a shocking expose of the crimes of these self-serving maniacs. “The Transfer Agreement†is irrefutable evidence of the complicity of Zionism’s leadership in the worst ethical lapses of the 20th century. And they’re still at it, aren’t they?
A link: http://www.transferagreement.com/
JT – do you seriously think that the only issue with allowing widespread proliferation is the likely collapse of American – what, military threat? – in the Middle East? i.e. is it solely about our interests (which I assume are in this case access to affordable oil, and financial support with petrodollars of our financial system) ?
It seems the problems go further than this; I mean no matter what the government of any oil-producing nation, they’ll sell the oil in the market so at some level (and I’d say we’re pretty much there with $90 oil) we don’t care. Saddam would have been wildly happy to sell us oil, and give Haliburton or whoever we directed contracts to get it out of Iraq, given his political survival and a reasonably free hand to rule as he saw fit. The world financial markets are pretty efficient, the dollar will settle to where the dollar ought to be pretty much regardless of how powerful the people trying to manipulate it may be (see Hunt Brothers).
I don’t think you have to believe in ‘American Empire’ to be concerned with the issue of nukes in the hands of unstable (both politically and behaviorally) governments. And I’ll note that in suggesting that that’s the issue you fall into the fallacy of believing that all issues are just about us – that everything revolves around how it impacts the US – which isn’t, in my mind, true.
A.L.
_IF we are surrounded by muslims who will inevitably band together into a single muslim government, build a superpower military, and attempt to conquer the whole world starting WWIII, then we do better to nip that in the bud._
Wow.
Inevitably?
Superpower military?
Attempt to conquer the whole world?
Nice work, Mr Rove. You have just accused those “muslims” of being exactly like the USA.
And the point of that would be to distract and deflect attention from the fact that the USA believes that IT is the single world government, that IT has the superpower military, and that IT should conquer the whole world and begin WWIII.
Nice work. Nice work indeed.
(that was sarcasm, in case you didn’t notice)
_If I have you correctly, you’re saying that people who make protest, and disagree with our government should not be allowed to stay citizens?_
_If that is the case you’re making, you’re right, it doesn’t get discussed in public, because the extreme fascists and promoters of totalitarianism are few and far between, and so get confined to little pools of their peers, like some internet sites where those types of people congregate._
Look at the outrage against liberals. Look at the claims made about Silber and how he’s for the enemy and against the USA.
It isn’t a giant step from talking about how you are an enemy of the USA to talking about what to do about that “fact”.
_However, people like Silber and Avedis look at all of it and, by systematically excising half the story, are left with a worldview in which America is always the villain and Bush is essentially indistinguishable from Hitler._
That isn’t just on one side. I myself have been known to say we would be better off to take Bush, Cheney, and all their top aides to Gitmo and waterboard them until we find out the truth about their various conspiracies, though I didn’t seriously think it might happen. People tend to think this way about people they think are traitors to their nation.
Look at the outrage against liberals. Look at the claims made about Silber and how he’s for the enemy and against the USA.
what do you mean by that?
Are you pointing out that that is one opinion, or did I somehow make it seem that that is what I meant.
If that is what I implied about Silber, I’m very sorry.
Posted by J Thomas “If we are surrounded by muslims who will inevitably band together into a single muslim government, build a superpower military, and attempt to conquer the whole world starting WWIII, then we do better to nip that in the bud.
IF there is a giant offensive threat to us or to israel from a second muslim nuclear power, then it makes sense to stop that threat before we find out whether it’s real or not, since by the time we’re sure it will be too late.
IF israel will stage a nuclear pre-emptive strike if we don’t, then it makes sense for us to do it first so the world won’t be upset at israel.
These are all arguments that people might support if they’re apolitical.â€
Not at all, Mr. Thomas – these are arguments that people might support only if they’re mentally ill. You are one messed up thug, hiding behind the skirts of pseudo-rationality. Guys like you, with your smug, willful ignorance and thoughtless, almost casual attraction to rapacious violence as a solution to everything scare me to death.
btw, kudos to The Wendigo, Uncle Ernie, Francina Larmon, Andrew J. Lazarus and Avedis. Thank gawd there are still more Americans with sense than without.
_JT – do you seriously think that the only issue with allowing widespread proliferation is the likely collapse of American – what, military threat? – in the Middle East?_
AL, of course there are complicated combinations of concerns here. But I think it’s important to separate out the trumps when you can. If you can get to the points that trump the others then you can ignore the others.
If we allow widespread proliferation then from that point on it isn’t our choice to “allow” or “not allow” stuff.
We told Saddam to do what we said or else, and he did what we said, and we invaded his country and got him hanged anyway. If he’d had nukes we wouldn’t have done that.
Unless we can enforce nonproliferation, in a few years we won’t be a superpower and we won’t have the final say on a whole big collection of things. We basicly won’t have final say on anything outside our own borders. I say that this issue trumps all the others. We won’t be able to make military threats against practically _anybody_.
If we accept proliferation then it forces us to change the fundamentals of our foreign policy. We have to give up our empire. We might as well close down most of our foreign military bases. We’ll have to accept that our international corporations will be subject to local law. It would be a great big change and we aren’t ready to make that change, for various reasons.
So our alternative is to try to enforce nonproliferation with main force, against anybody who tries to defy us. Once we make that choice it doesn’t *matter* whether iran wants only nuclear power. Once they have cheap plutonium reactors going they can give a leg up to anybody else who wants nukes.
For nonproliferation we have to deny workable nuclear power to everybody we don’t trust, and we have to do that by military force unless they knuckle under without that.
To succeed we need not only to deny nukes to nations that don’t have them yet, we have to remove nukes from nations that do have them. How could we get rid of pakistan’s nukes? One possibility is if they go through a time of confusion we might have assassins kill enough of their nuclear scientists and technicians that they can’t keep their program going. India is harder. They’re set to be a major competitor to us and it would be hard to draw their fangs. I dunno. China and russia likewise. Britain and france and israel and japan we can hope are safe. South africa has given up and taiwan won’t announce their nukes and we can hope won’t help anybody else get them. Brazil and argentina? Who knows?
For nonproliferation our policy for most of the rest of the world has to be: We have nukes and we’ll kill you dead if you try to get them too.
There are various problems with this approach but the only alternative is to accept proliferation which demands such big changes from us that we won’t do them.
On this particular issue it is all about us. This issue trumps all the others. It all revolves around us because we’re the ones who must disallow proliferation.
“IF we are surrounded by muslims who will inevitably band together into a single muslim government, build a superpower military, and attempt to conquer the whole world starting WWIII, then we do better to nip that in the bud.”
_Inevitably?_
_Superpower military?_
_Attempt to conquer the whole world?_
On the other hand, IF you don’t accept those assumptions then maybe we don’t do better to attack iran.
_(that was sarcasm, in case you didn’t notice)_
I wasn’t being sarcastic, I was following out the logic. People who believe those assumptions will naturally tend toward those conclusions. There may be people on this very blog who think that way. Maybe even some people you’ve been arguing with.
If you think they’re insane, what approach would you like to attempt to help bring them to sanity? Or is it better to spend your time with people who are more rational?
I’m going to be done with this for now,
but if I had to my favorite thing here, and there were a (very) few parts I liked, it would have to #43
Anyone who is paying attention ought to be pissed as hell. How anyone can’t see this run-up to an attack on Iran as Iraq II, the Sequel (with far more dangerous consequences) is beyond my comprehension.
Wendigo & Larmon, you have shared a most refreshing exchange. I have enjoyed it thoroughly.
I believe that J Thomas (above in #55) was not expressing his own views, rather his take on a perspective and its potential ramifications. I think he disagress with the perspective.
And JT addresses The Problem; which is that AL is one who is convinced of American exceptionalism. To him Silber is a bad – or at least “unhinged” – person because is critical of the US.
Saddly, people like AL and Wildmonk fail to recognize that the rest of the world doesn’t buy into this concept of US exceptionalism. Why would they? To the contrary, they are able to objectively assess US practices and intentions through their own of prism of history. When we overhtrow the democratically elected government of Chile (Allende) or support a brutal dictator like the Shaw of Iran, the rest of the world does not see these as unique or atypical examples of US behavior (as AL and kindered spirits would chose to believe-if they think about it at all). Instead, the perception abroad is that such behavior is SOP for US foreign policy.
Wildmonk, this is the point I was trying to make re; Native Americans and epidemics. It doesn’t matter what you think. What matters is what the victims and those we would like to win over think; especially if there is basis in fact albeit an interpreation of the facts.
AL would say that I – like Silber – am a bad American for being critical of US policy history. First off, some of our best advancements like abolition, civil rights, etc were the result of loud criticism. How can we improve if we can’t face ugly truths?
Secondly, let’s get something straight. As one who was a professional warrior, I don’t need to get all hopped up on America the Beautiful to go out and kill and destroy for my country. If IGMFO and the mission is to kill or destroy someone or something than that someone or something is history.
Since I’m not a sociopath I’d prefer to think that the mission is necessary and righteous, but it isn’t required. And that is the attitude I bring here. I get sick and tired of people here that don’t know better accusing me of being some liberal panty waste because I am critical of the US.
AL’s is a romantic idealism. A mythical land that never was and never will be. A country of zealots organized to spread freedom throughout the world; a harkening back to the days of WW2. Democracy as the new secular religion.
But what if the majority of a country like Iraq elects to not do what we want? What if they elect to join Iranian shiites? What if they elect to be socialists? Then see Chile, Allende, elected leader of, CIA plot to overthrow and assassinate, Congressional Record……….
More recently “Demcracy” is a brand name used to justify whatever policy we wish to instill where ever we wish to exploit resources. Sometimes it is for the betterment of most Americans and some times it is only for the betterment of a few American special interests, but rarely does it have anything to do with actual democracy.
Generally “as Smedley Butler put it, war is just a racket”:http://daod.wordpress.com/2007/10/31/war-is-just-a-racket/
AL, on the other hand believes that US waged war is a tool to cause the world to become one big US flavored Free Market Disneyland. He doesn’t like to hear any evidence to the contrary.
Next, most of what is taken here – as far as what I say – to be critical of the US really isn’t. One must be aware of reality to be an effective warrior. One must know one’s enemy, one’s potential enemy and one’s friends; their strengths, weaknesses and motivations. After 9/11/01 the big question was, “why do they hate us?”. The answers were never spot on because we can’t, as a nation, face reality. They don’t hate us because of our “freedom” and social liberalism. If they did they be flying airplanes into buildings in Quebec and Amersterdam. They hate us because of our policies and our meddling in their affairs.
Case in point, Iran. We supported the Shaw. He was a brutal monster with torture chambers and every other paraphenalia of evil. So the pendulum swings and the Shaw is thrown out by his enemies. Of course they call us the Great Satan. We were in league with the Shaw. We gave them something real to hang their hat on. Bringing this up is constructive to US/Iranian relations because it allows us to understand – and one would hope, defuse – the background of their paranoia about us (there are, of course, other factors).
After our support of the Shaw, our labeling Iran as an axis of evil, our CIA funded subversion groups, our threats to bomb/invade, why wouldn’t Iran want a nuclear arsenal to prevent this? So we march on in the height of folly; good v evil, US v Them…….
After our involvement in Latin America ranging from the Banana Wars though Allende throught the Contras, why wouldn’t Venezuala and other countries be hostile to us?
If we can’t talk about these things and understand what events and attitudes they have set in motion all we are left with is labeling of those who are unwilling to cooperate as “crazy”, “evil” and us as pristine. It’s a cartoon version of the world and it won’t do. The world is growing and developing. The AL’s of the world go with Bush’s “for us or against us” philosophy. I see this as the road to disaster. Alliances will be formed against us and we are not big enough or strong enough to put the whole world under our military boot. Civil liberties here at home will further erode as we become more entrenched against the rest of the world.
Is this all what Silber has in mind? I don’t know, but it would be worth considering as opposed to knee jerk bashing of him for mentioning ugly aspects of US policy.
Well, avedis, I think you’ve done a good job of laying out our differences. Of course, I’d frame my positions (and yours) differently.
But at the core, we’re either totally self-interested as a nation – or not. If we are self-interested, then of course we should demolish and oppress at our will in order to maintain the power that keeps us – I don’t know what it keeps us, but ‘an empire’, to borrow your phrase.
But that doesn’t really describe our approach very well, if you look at the history.
I’ll come back to Iraq; if our approach is to have tame dicators throughout the world, we certainly could have put Saddam on a leash and kept him, as long as he was able to keep oppressing and murdering his people, stealing the oil money, and poking the Iranians. I would have been a good strategic move to have made him the American Viceroy in the Middle East; none of our soldiers would had to die, none of his people would have been killed by anyone except his own security apparatus.
Saddam apparently “made offers in that direction.”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3247461.stm
And yet we turned him down and invaded. How does that square with naked self-interest?
I think your reading of our history is simplistic and overly materialist; our actions (like the actions of every other actor in this play – the Soviets, their successors in the Kremlin, and most of all the Middle east political classes themselves – who somehow always seem to be considered ‘puppets’) are driven by a complicated mixture of motives. And it’s important to note that it’s a team sport – – as noted above, lots of people have an oar in what happens in the Middle East, and while we may have the biggest one, it is far from clear that it is the most powerful.
That’s a big part of what frustrates me about folks like Wendigo; they somehow seem to think that history is a monologue, with us as the only actor that they seem incapable of seeing the push and pull that goes into what winds up actually happening.
I’m kind of surprised to see you in the same boat.
As for me, I do think that the US is and has been overall a force for good in the world, and I’m happy to hold our record against anyone else’s. Are we an idyll, an arcadia? Not much. History is messy, complex, and full of people who act badly. I see it more as Flashman than as the Hardy Boys.
Maybe that’s why I don’t get so indignant when I see the same things in the newspaper.
A.L.
Mr. Wendigo the lawyer, who hopefully is not a prosecutor or a public defender if Allah has a shred of mercy, says that Mr. Silber’s ideas have received insufficient attention, so let’s start all over.
Let me glean the first fruit from Silber’s fertile essay:
1. Intervention, except in the clear-cut case of self-defense, ALWAYS leads to more interventions, which ALWAYS have unforeseeen consequences which are ALWAYS disastrous.
I emphasize the always, because Sibler always says always.
I won’t quibble with the fact that Silber doesn’t define self-defense; that could justly be left to another essay. I will only point out that it is no small task to define it. It is difficult to stretch it to Hitler, for example; in spite of those great Frank Capra propaganda films, Hitler’s lack of navy alone ruled out a Nazi attack on the United States. And even if the Japanese had established naval superiority in the Pacific they would have found an invasion more than they could handle. I suspect that if this were 1940, Silber would be with Wheeler and Lindbergh.
It would not justify Clinton’s military interventions in the Balkans or Haiti, of course. In fact, the Clinton foreign policy tended to justify itself as having nothing to do with selfish American interests. I assume Sibler is not down with that.
It would not justify an intervention in Rwanda, which we didn’t undertake. That one’s not so easy to be smug about.
But never mind which interventions are defensive and which are not. The question is, would intervening in self-defense not have the same disastrous and unforeseen consequences, leading to the opposite of what is intended? If not, why the hell not? Isn’t this an argument against setting foot outside of our borders for any reason, good or bad? I take it Silber doesn’t have much use for God – does he think the cosmos is set up to reward or punish us?
Finally, does this rule only apply to the United States? It’s hard to tell, because Silber is long on dictums and short on historical examples. Should we demand that the United Nations be disbanded? Will Iran’s meddling in Iraq lead them to disaster? Should it?
When pronouncing grand law historical laws, one ought to display a sense of humility and restraint. One ought to remember that a military intervention is a highly variable interaction between two nations, and not a chemical equation in which two compounds will always react the same way and always produce the same result. One ought not to say always so much when talking about human beings.
Let me try again to keep the opponents of AL’s essay on topic – to deal with your questions (from my own perspective, not that of AL who can defend himself).
First, the purposes of AL’s essay, as I understand it, wasn’t to give a point by point refutation of the Silber essay. It was to point out the “unhinged” nature of it to people who he (and I) would have thought would see it as obvious that it was an unhinged screed.
Well, there are lots of folks who’ve now said, in essence, “what’s so wrong about what Silber said?” Now you ask for evidence that this essay is worthy of AL’s derision and even deride him for not responding to it factually.
Well, why is Silber “unhinged?”
A) First, he accuses America of having a unique history of oppression for the displacement of the indigenous population. In this, he lacks all perspective on human history. Displacement of the indigenous populations was *wrong* but it is not and was not a uniquely American wrong. What *is* unique about America is the realization that this was something worthy of condemnation and shame. In your very condemnation of the act, you are acting as quintessentially American while refusing the honor of affiliating with us.
The response has been “don’t say that on a reservation of you’ll get beaten up.”
My conclusion: Silber is unhinged if he thinks that he contributes anything meaningful by claiming that America is uniquely bloodthirsty – he purposely maligns America by only looking at its faults while ignoring natural history (the spread of disease and the ensuing civilizational collapse), context (the commonality of displacement in human history) and our political evolution.
B) Accusing America of having a unique history of slavery – ditto. All the same points, all the same conclusions.
C) Silber claims that habeas corpus has been suspended (as does Francina…). This is simply not accurate despite containing a kernel of worrisome truth. If you are a US citizen and you were arrested tomorrow, you would have to be charged with a crime. That is because, as a citizen, you (or another person on your behalf) would have the right to seek relief from unlawful detention. It is not and never has been the case that prisoners captured in a time of war can seek such relief. I hate to tell the true believers but Gitmo simply doesn’t qualify. It doesn’t qualify now, it wouldn’t have qualified in WWII, WWI, the Civil War, the Spanish American war, or the War of 1812. On this fact you are simply wrong.
However – and this is a big one – the Jose Padilla case was truly worrying. He *is* a citizen and needed to be charged. I think it reasonable to posit that Bush was attempting to chart new legal territory because he was doggedly determined to avoid another 9/11. Nonetheless, in the face of the *reality* of the threat as it actually evolved (there weren’t new 9/11 bombers right around the corner) Padilla should have had a trial much earlier than he did. Moreover, this is not the first such worrisome development: Clinton signed the AEDPA in 1996 with limitations on the writ of habeas corpus and Alberto Gonzales has explicitly admitted that the government could extend Combatant Status Review Tribunals to US citizens since the constitution does not explicitly guarantee habeas corpus.
My conclusion: on balance, I think we all have something to worry about. Still, doesn’t it strike you as, well, ‘unhinged’ to say that “Bush has suspended habeas corpus” or that we *already* live in a police state? Have you not read Solzhenitsyn or Milosz? Don’t you realize how much freedom to petition and to protest you have compared with those who’ve truly suffered under a police state??
Ok – let me pull a few other quotes here and try to illustrate my point about the over-the-top rhetoric:
Wendigo: “If the goal is to create “democracy” in nations abroad, isn’t it hypocritical to tell them they need “democracy” when our own system here is no closer to democracy than theirs?”
Are you serious? Do you really think that Saddam was elected by a free and open vote? Ok, ok I know what you’ll say: that Bush didn’t win in 2000, that the election was rigged, etc. etc.
I know how strongly some people believe this because I’ve read a lot of the ‘literature’ behind the claims. Very simply folks: you’ve been lied to. Seriously. The 2000 election was, for all purposes, a tie. If almost any trivial thing had been different then Gore would have won. Bush won down in the statistical noise and, really, just because someone *had* to win. For example, change the “butterfly” ballot (created by a Democratic precinct clerk) and Gore might have won. If the state hadn’t been called for Gore before the panhandle counties had finished voting, Bush’s margin might have been quite comfortable. If we count overvotes AND undervotes, Gore might have won. If was counted just the overvotes, then Bush’s margin would have been higher. Etc. etc. etc. The bottom line is that, under the rules in place *before* the election, Bush won. Did the Supreme Court step in to put an end to the debacle before Gore had every opportunity to claim victory. You betcha. However, the Florida Supreme Court essentially tried to throw the victory to Gore by overruling *itself*. The SCOF Chief Justice, in an emotional opinion on the matter, admitted as much! SCOTUS put an end to the misery simply because they recognized that it was a coin flip and Bush, by a reasonable estimation in a chaotic environment, was closer to a reasonable case for victory than Gore. This does *not* invalidate the principle that America democratically elects its leaders while, quite simply, Iraq, KSA, etc. do not.
Conclusion: Think about how the discussions would be going if Gore had won. Do you have any doubt that we’d still be reading right-wing screeds about the ‘stolen’ election? You know you would think those people were nuts (and you’d be right)! Well, that’s why people think you are nuts when you write things like Wendigo’s ridiculous statement.
Avedis: “I’m having a hard time understanding why (Silber) is more more “unhinged” than so many here…that are into hyperbolic concepts of war without end, wherein torture is a good thing, extraordinary rendition is a good thing, laying waste to middle east country after middle east country is a good thing…”
This is related to the whole “genocide” meme that started many of the discussions.
Let me put it bluntly: if we wanted genocide in Iraq, there wouldn’t be a person alive. We have the absolute power to kill anyone we want and any number of people we want. When you claim genocide, you are saying the gloves are off. Despite efforts to parse terms and split hairs here, you know very well that America has no intention of committing anything close to ‘genocide’. Given Al Queda in Iraq’s *explicit* policy of committing mass slaughter to drive the country into civil war, I find it appalling and contemptible that such a claim about America is even made.
The entire concept of “War Without End” revolves around the fact that Islam has been essentially at war with the West (Christendom) since its founding. You might like to retreat into the fuzzy warmth of 9/10/2001 and pretend that Islam is just an alternative lifestyle, but I assure you that Islamic fanatics have no intention of letting you slumber forever.
But here is where you are right: America is not at any existential threat from Islamists or Iran. You are much closer to the truth when you posit an American “empire” and the inevitable dislocations that occur as that “empire” expands. This “empire” however, is not one of military conquest and material exploitation but rather an ideological empire of consensual government and free markets. Wouldn’t you rather live in a world where your biggest concern was the next Doha round rather than whether the Islamists blow up New York?
Surely you recognize that Radical Islam does indeed represent a crucial threat to such a world model built on consensual governance and free trade. They also infest a part of the world that lies astride the very lifeblood of modern, energy-intensive economies. Their potential to disrupt the world economy is obvious (as was Saddam’s when he invaded Kuwait and threatened the KSA).
Conclusion: Islamism has every intention on waging a “war without end” so we’d better have some reasonable response to that fact. Despite your dramatic declarations of opposition to American hegemony, are you sure you are ready to live with the alternatives? Do you really want a world split into warring tribal camps of collectivist dictators (all dictators are collectivist, after all) who differ only on whether they justify their reign by religious extremism or some pseudo-Marxist happy talk? Wouldn’t you rather a world wherein players “compete” based on market share under the canopy of a rational web of legal regulation? Yes, such a world would rather suck but it would suck much less than any other alternative (please don’t bother entertaining me with utopian fantasies).
Regarding torture and extraordinary rendition: no, these are wrong in almost every circumstance. That they are pursued or have been pursued in this war is to America’s shame. However, it is easy to preen about your moral superiority when you aren’t the one whose conscience has to navigate between preserving some Mujahadeen’s ‘bodily integrity’ and saving soldiers lives on the front lines (or American lives at home). As for myself, I want it stopped. I want policies to be clear so that our servicemen and women aren’t placed into a compromising position. But I simply can’t say that, in a ticking time bomb situation, that I would hold the American interrogator at fault for rough treatment if it gains information that saves lives…I can’t do that.
“Laying waste to country after country…”
Do you really think that this is an intelligent take on the Iraq war? Seriously, are we “laying waste” to Iraq when we build infrastructure, hold elections, open schools, and try to get the electricity, oil and water flowing? Al Queda in Iraq and other organizations have persistently destroyed infrastructure in an attempt to prevent a civil society from emerging. And you have the gall to say that America is “laying waste” to Iraq?? Again, if we *wanted* to “lay waste” to the country, it would look very different than it does now. *That* my friends is why AL calls Silber ‘unhinged.’ He takes our mistakes and failings and conflates them with a conscious conspiracy while simply glossing over the explicitly genocidal policy of Al Queda in Iraq.
Thank you for responding Avedis. You say:
“Saddly, people like AL and Wildmonk fail to recognize that the rest of the world doesn’t buy into this concept of US exceptionalism. Why would they? To the contrary, they are able to objectively assess US practices and intentions through their own of prism of history.”
Well, I don’t really expect the rest of the world to buy into US exceptionalism (I have an extended essay on Wildmonk.net on the very topic of the differences between the European and American models). What I disagree with is the very idea that they can “objectively assess US practices.” No mass of people will “objectively assess” the intentions of another country. This is especially true in Europe for reasons that I explore at length in the above-mentioned essay.
“When we overhtrow the democratically elected government of Chile (Allende) or support a brutal dictator like the Shaw of Iran, the rest of the world does not see these as unique or atypical examples of US behavior. Instead, the perception abroad is that such behavior is SOP for US foreign policy.”
Ever ready Kwitny’s “Endless Enemies”? You’d enjoy it for these exact reasons. However, let me point out that Allende was ousted just as he was forcing Chile down the path that Chavez is forcing Venezuela. If Venezuela is as politically and economically healthy in 30 years as Chile is today, I’ll grant your point that US involvement was for the worst. However, my bet is that this will not be the case. Same thing with the Shah of Iran – there was a context there that goes much deeper than just whether BP could pump oil. It doesn’t make it right but, certainly, the world would be a better place if the Shah’s liberalization plans had taken root in Iran and the country had naturally evolved into a Democratically elected government. As it stands, when Jimmy Carter abandoned Iran, he sowed the seeds of chaos that have cost the world far more lives than those lost to the Shah’s secret police. That is, inaction has its own moral hazards. If you want to get into Guatemala, *then* we’re likely to be on the exact same page. *That* was a travesty of epic proportions.
“Wildmonk, this is the point I was trying to make re; Native Americans and epidemics. It doesn’t matter what you think. What matters is what the victims and those we would like to win over think; especially if there is basis in fact albeit an interpreation of the facts.”
Well, I agree. However, it doesn’t help when people like Silber (and much of the academic hard-left) are spoon feeding these communities one-sided stories of American malfeasance and atrocities. As someone else noted above: many older folks from the Amerindian communities are quite pro American. Their philosophy seems to be: “they won, we lost, move on.” It is the hard left, in their attempt to discredit the entire American venture, who are once again stoking these embers to a fiery rage. This is just wrong.
By the way, my family includes (by marriage) folks of Amerindian descent. One is a DHS agent of formidable skill and training and the other is a Captain in the Air Force. The other side of the family, quintessentially white American, has no place for service to the country and would likely agree with many of the things in Silber’s essay. So I don’t think I lack for perspective in the matters that we’ve discussed.
You know, I can’t believe we’ve spent this much verbiage on this piece of depraved and repellent crap.
Click through Silber’s links – just the titles are clinical. “Chaos, War, Murder and Destruction Are What They Want”, “A Nation of Lepers, Criminals and Parasites”, “The Empire of Clowns Continues on Its Murderous, Genocidal Path”, “The Unspeakable Horror, and the Immense Evil”, and so on and so. And the contents live up to the advertising.
If Charles Manson wrote a doctoral dissertation explaining Helter Skelter, this is what it would look like. Everything is there, including the end of civilization itself, which is coming any minute. And he mines the far right as freely as the far left – those familiar with “anti-imperialists” like Lawrence Dennis will recognize a lot of this stuff.
After reading a little more, I feel bad for Silber. This is what happens when your personal problems become a metaphysical philosophy. This kind of thing persuades no one who hasn’t already fallen down the same rabbit hole. It has zero play in the public arena, and Silber knows it – hence his funk-filled predictions of doom. The only purpose it serves is to confirm the believer in his alienation and self-pity.
AL,”I’m kind of surprised to see you in the same boat.”
Well I’m not. I recognize the truth of, “That’s a big part of what frustrates me about folks like Wendigo; they somehow seem to think that history is a monologue, with us as the only actor that they seem incapable of seeing the push and pull that goes into what winds up actually happening.”
I guess I am also a closet idealist of sorts in that I think the US has been a driving force (although not the only) for positive change in the world. Afterall, civilization has come a lot farther in the past hundred years or so than it did for the previous 5,000. The quality of life for humankind is vastly improved. However, I still think we can do better. Again my criticisms are two-fold 1. constructive and meant to keep those in power honest (to the extent possible) and 2. to put a frame to our perception by the rest of the world and to thus better understand why they might be acting towards us the way they do.
Self-interested? Sure! But what does that mean. In business self-interest can mean not screwing the customer because you want repeat business from him. Perhaps in international relationships cooperation versus bellicosity and force would be the analogue. I recognize there are limits in certain situations, but I fear the Bush admin. has taken us way to far in the wrong direction…..all this neocon hegemony BS. It’s bound to backfire in the long run.
With regards to your Iraq theory, I just have to disagree. You are right and that is what we did 15 years ago. However, things are different now. OIl reserves are peaked and with India and China coming on line as huge consumers it is important to preserve favorable contracts, prices, and ensure a continued flow in our direction. Is this a wrong reason to go to war? I don’t know. Maybe not given the intense needs of our fossil fuel economy and the risks to our economy and national security if a shortage should occur. And there is all that neocon idealism. i don’t know if they believe it all or not themselves.
BTW, I remember being greater by protesters of the Gulf War when we were preparing to ship out with no war for oil bumber stickers on their cars. Oh the cynicism I felt at that time.
Still, we should be honest about what it is we are doing and why. Our system of government cannot remain if we are not.
Wow. Anybody else notice that the level of hysterical anti-Bush rhetoric varies _inversely_ to the level of violence in Iraq? Looking over this thread, there is no consistant philosophy, certainly no logical analysis, just unhinged hatred for Bush and the assumption that everything he does or espouses must be wrong and malevolent, and hence the opposite must be just and righteous.
If Iraq actually comes under control and the violence continues to drop dramatically, i’m guessing these hystrionics will grow. These guys are way too invested in their scientific hypothesis that everything Bush does is evil and disasterous. Up to and including apoligizing for Iran and Saddam’s Iraq. And of course a healthy smattering of irrelevant jew bashing manages to peak in, which is of course inevitable.
Armed liberal you are a stinking Nazi fascist who can’t handle the truth. The jig is up boys and artur silber has your number. Your are nothing but a peace of shit with a skin covering
“From 2001.”:http://www.iran-press-service.com/articles_2001/dec_2001/rafsanjani_nuke_threats_141201.htm The bad news is that Rafsanjani is regarded as one of the “realists” among the mullahs:
bq TEHRAN 14 Dec. (IPS) One of Iran’s most influential ruling cleric called Friday on the Muslim states to use nuclear weapon against Israel, assuring them that while such an attack would annihilate Israel, it would cost them “damages only”.
bq “If a day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has in possession, the strategy of colonialism would face a stalemate because application of an atomic bomb would not leave any thing in Israel but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world”, Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani told the crowd at the traditional Friday prayers in Tehran.
bq Analysts said not only Mr. Hashemi-Rafsanjani’s speech was the strongest against Israel, but also this is the first time that a prominent leader of the Islamic Republic openly suggests the use of nuclear weapon against the Jewish State.
Yes, Glen, I see Victor Davis Hanson has just declared victory in Iraq.
For the maybe the third time. You can see some of VDH’s prognostication skills here, here [opposing the surge], here, it’s fish in a barrel. Ooooops.
Or to look at it another way, we’re cheering that violence has returned to the level so bad we needed a surge to reduce it. Is there an oil-revenue sharing law? Any motion towards political reconciliation? Our recent success is re-strengthening Saddam’s cousins (with their anti-Western outlook) in their struggle against the Shiites (with their anti-Western outlook).
Our original plan of a pro-Western, pro-Israeli, secular Iraq is so far away you must think we have forgotten it. We haven’t.
And, yes, I think it’s a good idea to be hysterical as lunatics decide to go double-or-nothing with carnage and disaster attacking Iran.
The USSR into Afghanistan? You’d think we would see the lesson.
I’m sorry, I confused Glen wqith Mark in the last post.
Let me ask a question. How long before you guys stop claiming victory is around the corner in Iraq
I’ll leave Sam’s comment up as a measure of the quality of Silber’s fans…
Speaking for myself, Andrew, I can’t stop something I haven’t started. It’s not like a big magic sign is going to appear in the desert that says Victory.
Every time there’s an election in Iraq, it’s a victory. Every time the government there matures and grows stronger, it’s a victory. Every day that somebody lays down their weapon is a victory. Every day that an al Qaeda terrorist goes to Asshole Heaven is a victory. And every time Tim Robbins’ blood pressure goes up another notch, it’s a victory.
When are you guys going to stop cheering for the forces of Entropy? Why not join our side? We’ve got direct cable connections to Imperial Headquarters installed in the bases of our skulls now, and you wouldn’t believe the freaking broadband speed.
Well, Andrew, speaking for myself. I said it was a 6 – 10 year effort, so I’ll go with 2011 plus or minus…
…also speaking for myself, I called Iraq a ‘strategic failure’ and called for help in thinking up some alternate policies. Sadly, all the policies I’ve seen so far (I’m reading the Foreign Affairs series of papers by the campaigns) either call for Magic Diplomacy Dust or doubling down with a bad hand.
One thing I’ve been noodling on is what a genuinely alternative policy would look like – I’ll see if I can’t whip something up this month.
A.L.
“The sad reality is that – as I’ve said before – thinking like this empowers the ‘nuke Iran now’ crowd, because it drives out sensible thinking about what we might do that is neither insanely self-hating nor insanely belligerent.”
Get a clue. There is no sensible thinking in the Bush administration. They kill and conquer because they want to, not because someone like Silber calls them out.
BTW, why is Silber labeled “unhinged?” Has Silber killed thousands of Iraqis? Has he destroyed our bill of rights? Did he steal Iraq’s resources and turn 1 million of their citizens into refugees?
There is nothing unhinged about Silber. He has hit the nail on the head and you are Exhibit A. You don’t care about murder as long as it is committed by the government. You don’t give a damn. No, I take that back. You want it. You think that being a white American gives you the right to decide who lives and who dies.
Viva Silber!
avedis – You’re pulling in some interesting allies here…
A.L.
You are correct AL. Iraq was a strategic blunder. I think the best policy option is to accpet the reality of the place, cut some deals with Iran while still have a little leverage left and get the hell out of there and allow the sovereign freely elected govt of Iraq take care of its own affairs. This long before 2011. Probably in the next year and a half.
We have real trouble – where big time US military intervention might be required – brewing in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We can’t afford to screw around with Iraq and Iran any longer.
Like I said upstream, the US military footprint isn’t big enough to cover every unruly colony – a lesson learned a while back by the British.
“BTW, I remember being greater by protesters of the Gulf War when we were preparing to ship out with no war for oil bumber stickers on their cars. Oh the cynicism I felt at that time.”
Correction: Greeted…greeted…not greater. And I had a cynical thought about them; not about us.
No – a strategic failure – not a strategic blunder.
And to withdraw from Iraq, cut a deal with Iran (why in the world would they?) and then double down on Iran’s other border is just a silly strategy.
We can’t put too heavy a footprint into Afghanistan, or we’ll become the Soviets. They don’t like strangers wandering around in large numbers – it makes them think they are being conquered. And Iran? Iran is arming the heck out of the Taliban right now. What kind of deal will we be cutting with them on that?
And stepping into Pakistan is stepping into a major war with a country that is heavily populated (big cities to fight in – lots of civilians will die) and has nukes. And what makes you think anyone sane will believe us when we say ‘fight on our side’ once they see what happend to our allied in Iraq?
C’mon avedis, you can do better. You’d better, otherwise we’ll be stuck in Iraq for a long, long time.
A.L.
bq. TEHRAN 14 Dec. (IPS) One of Iran’s most influential ruling cleric called Friday on the Muslim states to use nuclear weapon against Israel, assuring them that while such an attack would annihilate Israel, it would cost them “damages only”.
OK! An actual quote.
Where is it from? Hmm. “Iran press service.” Who are they? What’s their propaganda angle?
A quick google search shows only that they’re “privately owned and independent”, based in Paris. Headed by Safa Haeri, an iranian journalist who wrote against the Shah from Paris in the old days. Who’s funding it? No idea.
Would they lie about an iranian speech? No idea from this info.
The headline is _RAFSANJANI SAYS MUSLIMS SHOULD USE NUCLEAR WEAPON AGAINST ISRAEL_.
But the closest thing to a quote is
bq. “If a day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has in possession, the strategy of colonialism would face a stalemate because application of an atomic bomb would not leave any thing in Israel but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world”, Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani told the crowd at the traditional Friday prayers in Tehran.
The way I read this he isn’t threatening pre-emptive war, he’s threatening stalemate.
Here’s “MEMRI’s”:http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Area=sd&ID=SP32502#_edn1 take on the same sentence.
bq. If one day, he said, the world of Islam comes to possess the weapons currently in Israel’s possession [meaning nuclear weapons] – on that day this method of global arrogance would come to a dead end. This, he said, is because the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam.
Very different translation. “dead end” sounds much more threatening than “stalemate”.
“Globalsecurity”:http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/iran/2001/011214-text.html provided a translation of the whole speech. Here’s the section just around that quote:
bq. They have supplied vast quantities of weapons of mass destruction and unconventional weapons to Israel. They have permitted it to have them and they have shut their eyes to what is going on. They have nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and long-range missiles and suchlike.
bq. If one day … Of course, that is very important. If one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists’ strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality. Of course, you can see that the Americans have kept their eyes peeled and they are carefully looking for even the slightest hint that technological advances are being made by an independent Islamic country. If an independent Islamic country is thinking about acquiring other kinds of weaponry, then they will do their utmost to prevent it from acquiring them. Well, that is something that almost the entire world is discussing right now.
“imperialist’s strategy will reach a standstill”. I could read that either way, if israel is destroyed it would be a standstill for imperialists using israel, but if israel is neutralised in a nuclear standoff that would be a standstill for the same people.
Here’s the way “FrontPage”:http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=CC0DDDAB-82AF-439E-9D88-190FC9A6A681 quoted it:
bq. Rafsanjani stated that Muslims must surround colonialism (i.e., America and Britian) and force the colonialists to see whether Israel is beneficial to them. If one day, he said, the world of Islam comes to possess the weapons (nuclear ones) currently in Israel’s possession, this global arrogance would come to an end. The use of a nuclear bomb in Israel would leave nothing on the ground, he said.
Comparing the above, I would hesitate to believe FrontPage on anything else. They didn’t exactly make it up, but they gave a different meaning to the words from anyone else.
There’s a translation problem here. It doesn’t look to me like Rafsanjani was calling for pre-emptive strike on israel, it looks more like he was threatening israel with a nuclear standoff and the remark was very widely misquoted. An unbiased Farsi expert would be a big help here.
AL – I don’t think you can blame Avedis for people like Sam or Margaret. I’m not sure who you can blame for people like that other than, say, Chomsky or Gramsci.
How about a great big “Mission Accomplished” sign on an aircraft carrier?
VDH claimed victory. Belmont Club claimed victory. Christopher Hitchens claimed victory. All drenched in snark about us poor misguided antiwar types, not to tease us too much. We laugh last.
The sad truth is, even the little victories you talk about really aren’t. Is an election such a great thing if Hamas wins? Is it a victory if one Al Qaeda member dies and three more join up? The only one of your “victories” that’s unequivocal is the shot about Tim Robbins’ blood pressure, which only serves to confirm my belief that the war is really against domestic liberals wherever it’s waged.
It’s just a cheap trick typical of con men (Don’t you want to be rich?) to suggest we have to support your failed policy because of some unattainable good thing it just might bring, free ponies for everyone in Iraq. How about dealing with the situation on the ground? We’re supposed to feel all bad about not contributing towards your discredited utopia. Just when do you return the favor and feel bad about the deaths, maimings, refugees, and destruction that are happening right now? Maybe the idea is to keep dreaming of the Great Victory so you don’t have to account for the mess you made.
[Aside to Armed Liberal: I missed the part where Bush promised us 10 years of land war in an increasingly hostile environment in the middle of low-level civil war. Are there any precedents for a good outcome of such a Children’s Crusade?]
_We can’t put too heavy a footprint into Afghanistan, or we’ll become the Soviets. They don’t like strangers wandering around in large numbers – it makes them think they are being conquered. And Iran? Iran is arming the heck out of the Taliban right now. What kind of deal will we be cutting with them on that?_
Here’s an approach — we pull our forces out of afghanistan except for selected airbases and the forces needed to protect them. (If it takes everybody we have there to protect the bases then maybe don’t withdraw anybody, or give up the bases.)
We pick afghan factions to support. We give them money and arms, and we suggest projects for them. Like roadbuilding. Road improvements in the areas they control help them move troops faster, and also help their civilians. We have to accept some overhead for graft there that we might not need at home, just try to keep it in reasonable bounds.
We ought to pay for civic improvements that they can maintain themselves, or almost maintain. If the improvements build up wealth then they can pay to keep them going and still live better. When we pay for improvements that afghans can’t maintain on their own, it’s likely not to work for long.
If we pick factions that have a reasonable chance, our money and arms could make the difference. Money and arms from pakistan probably made the difference for Taliban, and Taliban mostly collapsed when pakistan cut off that aid when we asked them to before our first attacks.
Then we try to set up a rough democracy among warlords. Remember that the Magna Carta established a rough democracy among nobles only — no votes for peasants back then. These things evolve. Count the supporters of each warlord, and in the council he gets votes equal to the number of militiamen he has. “One gun, one vote.” It’s easier, cheaper, and less lethal to vote and get a sense of the number of fighters on each side than it is to actually fight it out. That’s a start for democracy, and democracy can go farther at the rate they choose.
Then as it starts getting established in the north, we start accepting Taliban gangs too. If they want to have a vote, why not let them? They want strict islam, they can have it wherever enough people support them. That’s democracy.
It will likely last as long as the money holds out. Maybe longer, things that actually work without us might keep working after we’re gone.
While we’re foreigners who kill afghans, how different are we from a conquering army? Our emphasis has to be to get the afghans to settle their differences nonviolently. That may not work but it’s got to work better than hoping the guys we’re rooting for kill off the guys we don’t like.
A bastion strategy JT is a strategy of defeat. It concedes the countryside to the strongest, most ruthless faction and sacrifices any ability to deliver the firepower you have put behind the bastion. It does not get the Afghans to settle their differences nonviolently, instead your strategy tells them that we won’t do anything about it if they use violence against each other.
Its really a recipe for a return of the Taliban and a rebuilding of terrorist training camps in Afghanistan.
Robin, we need for “good” afghans to do the ground fighting because if we do too much of it we’re “conquering” them and raising opposition to ourselves. We might supply air support to our friends provided it doesn’t make it look like they depend on us — we can make it easier for them but it hurts them when it looks like our help is decisive.
We might want some bastions so our liaison guys won’t be too dependent on afghan hospitality. But we can probably manage without them if it’s too much trouble to have them.
An interesting point regarding the Taliban and the American-led effort to oust them. It appears that removing the Taliban has resulted in an “extraordinary improvement in children’s survival rates.”:http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2007-11-04-afghanistanhealth_N.htm?csp=34
I would sincerely like to know what the various anti-Bush, anti-War folks think about the 89,000 kids that will survive this year in Afghanistan because of our efforts. Certainly isn’t very supportive of the whole “genocide” meme, is it?
At this point, JT, your proposal is now so vague that it is meaningless.
Avedis in #89 said
Afterall, civilization has come a lot farther in the past hundred years or so than it did for the previous 5,000. The quality of life for humankind is vastly improved.
I know this is a separate issue, but I don’t know that I espouse that, who are we to define progress of civilization or to determine the value and quality of life? I don’t think our current lifestyle is one that fosters a good quality of life for humankind.
I see violence, greed and a general focus on the material.
I would point to Martin Luther King Jr. and his plea that we change from a thing oriented society, to a people oriented society.
MLK also supported(as I outlined above) an ethical evaluation of our foreign policy, and our standing as a nation.
This is, I think much more valuable than many a cheap tangent taken on this discussion. What Silber points out is extremely important, and as far as I’m concerned, doesn’t leave much to question. His statement, however unpleasant this may be for some of you, is based in reality. I will repeat myself once again, that if you are paying attention to what is happening, you ought to be mad as hell. It doesn’t take a genius to see what is happening, but it takes someone who is very honest to accept their own responsibility in wrongdoing.
I really wish this extensive discussion, with so many people involved, could have done a better job to address what Silber was getting at, rather than trivialize it, and focus on our disgusting tendencies of violence, intolerance and unashamed ignorance.
I will never know or do enough, but I’ll be damned if this limited action and understanding is all I can attribute to my time living.
Most (although not all) opponents of the Iraq War were supporters of the anti-Taliban War. I number myself among them. Indeed, we’d like more inquiry into the extent and rationale for pulling troops out of Afghanistan for use in the Iraq Quagmire.
Compare and contrast.
2001.
2002
Who is it who lost focus about bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban to go on a snipe hunt? How exactly will you be blaming the liberals for this one??
AL #101, so let me get this straight, we can’t reinforce Afghanistan because then we’d look like occupiers and the Afghanis don’t like being occupied, but Iraqis do like being occupied? What’s the difference?
Lest you forget, it was those guys based out of Aghanistan that atacked us on 9/11/01 and, before that in Africa, Yemen, etc.
Don’t you follwo the news? Insurgent activity in Afghanistan is on the rise. There is growing civil unrest in Pakistan. Islamic funimentalists of the type that promote jihad against us could, concievably gain control of the government and its nukes. Yes, AL, Pakistan – unlike Iran who you and your heros in the Bush admin would like to bomb and invade because they might someday develop nukes and might someday be hostile – actually does have real live nukes and the people that would obtain them are the very ones (or at least in league with) that have already proven thir beligerence by attacking us multiple times.
And you’re worried about upsetting the Afghanis and/or killing too many Pakistanis??????????? Mr. Guts and Glory stick it out and pay the price in Iraq???? Mr let’s bomb Iran????? Mr. Shades of WW2??? INCREDIBLE! Your lack of internal consistency is astonishing. For the record; I advocate going heavily into Afghanistan and across the Pakistani border and killing anyone withing 50 feet of a weapon. I would fully support a US/NATO intervention to prevent the Pakistani Govt from falling into Islamic fundementalists’ hands; regardless of the nature and severity of the ensueing fight. I am shocked that you do not.
Every time I think I am beginning to understand you, you say something that sems bizarre to your own logic. Now I will have stick around here longer.
Francina #110,
I am sorry, but I can’t help perceive your last as quite niave.
I will agree that it would be nice if people would advance spiritually. I place an emphasis on this myself.
However, there is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. You seriously can’t believe that there is not real value to be appreciated when comparing the quality of life we have today with that of the stinking, diseased, short and brutish existance of the past.
Oh yeah…non-hunting dog alert, “And what makes you think anyone sane will believe us when we say ‘fight on our side’ once they see what happend to our allied in Iraq?”
US/NATO will destroy the opposition and then will place its own man/men in charge. None of this silly purple finger who ha; nice if it happened down the road, but this show would be run by serious grownups as opposed to Bush and neocon dreamer/blunderers because the causus belli will be serious as opposed to manufactured.
So it doesn’t matter if some doubted our commitment to a particualr whatever (that is what you’re suggesting, isn’t it?).
BTW, the freely elected deomocratic Iraqi governemnt has asked us to leave you know. I’d say a perfect chance to get.
I am sorry, but I can’t help perceive your last as quite niave.
that’s not something I’m hurt by, and you’ve every right to point it out.. It probably is naive of me to hope for a lot of the things I do hope for, and I can see where things I do can be overtly idealist, but that is not trying to reject reality, or to shut out truth.
I guess you could say that I did not address the impossibility (of current) that some of the things I wish could be the case.. I would rather dream that we can change, that we can do better, while myself working and acting within reason, than to not dream, and do the same.
maybe, for the interest of discussion, I Ought to have left that out, and kept my likely pseudo-acceptable position, but I like to speak in what I’m thinking, what I consider before acting, and less in perceptions.
thank you though, for keeping my discussion in check
(& if what I said made sense).
also, I don’t think my statements are that highly whimsical, I think there were societies before our “civilized” one that were largely effective, and not bound by our current structures.
we are likely to say, looking at ourselves, that there is no other way to do things, but I think there is. Even if it is not the case that there were these wealthy in lifestyle societies, that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. I don’t limit the future to the realms outlined in history so much, because then you largely shut out possibility for change. (it doesn’t need to be the whole world that goes a certain way, my needs as you mentioned might not be the same as the needs of others)
Maybe I’m wrong to believe we can do better, maybe my foundation is based in naivety.. But I’d rather be naive and dreaming and thinking, than drudging discontent and hopeless. Life is too short for that.
Wildmonk said:
_This “empire” however, is not one of military conquest and material exploitation but rather an ideological empire of consensual government and free markets._
I could make a case, a strong one, that “an ideological empire of consensual government and free markets”, especially as it is conducted by the U. S., is equvialent to military conquest and material exploitation. But I won’t. I think the average thinker can figure it out. Wildmonk is playing with words.
On another topic, re: commentary about alternative social organization. So-called civilization is coming up against a wall, and that soon.
We humans were better off living as primitives. All the anthropological evidence points in that direction, propaganda about “nasty, brutish, and short” notwithstanding.
I hate to be a pessimist and a cynic, but I can’t help it. There is nothing we can do about the coming crash.
#96 from Glen Wishard:
#104 from Andrew J. Lazarus:
You’re laughing last, you think, at the defeat of American armed forces and allies in war. Or you’re focused totally on a domestic fight to the exclusion of the war and the external foe.
While neither of us now supports this war, I’d like to take this opportunity to underline that our perspectives are radically different.
_At this point, JT, your proposal is now so vague that it is meaningless._
Robin, it’s hard to make a fully-detailed battle plan in a blog post. My plan is not at all vague but I can see how you might fail to understand it, since you appear to lack the concepts.
We win when afghanistan has a representative government that mediates internal conflicts without fighting. It isn’t particularly important that they be friendly to us or do what we say — afghanistan is poor and how-tech and it will tend to stay that way, we don’t need their support much.
Reducing the violence allows a measure of reconstruction, but it isn’t worth putting too much money into things that won’t pay off and it’s hard to get economic projects to pay off in afghanistan — the mountains etc add a cost to transportation that make the place uncompetitive for lots of things. Construction needs to be built around things that can pay for themselves, things that afghans can keep going even after the foreign money dries up.
We don’t get a representative governent that mediates internal violence by sending in our military to support one faction and trying to kill other factions. That just makes more fighting, until most of the factions or killed off or we give up. Afghans won’t have a good negotiating system while we enforce the will of our special friends.
It’s hard to do democracy while armies are ready to reverse any agreements they don’t agree with. Better to start out with a limited democracy that tends to get the same conclusions the fighting would get — but quicker, cheaper, and less bloody. A parliament of warlords, where each member gets votes proportional to his armed backing, is likely to be workable. It’s how the british started their democracy, and it may evolve faster than the british system did. We set up something that somewhat fits this model but we need to do it much better. We declared some of the armed groups enemies who aren’t allowed into the parliament, and so naturally they fight. Let the Taliban into the iraqi government, let them say what they want and see how many votes they get. Kill only the ones that keep fighting.
If we aren’t using NATO to try to force afghans to stop fighting, what good is it? Not much. How can we get them to stop fighting if we don’t send in soldiers to force them not to fight? We could reward the ones who don’t fight. Give them money and encourage them to build roads in their home areas. Roads are good low-tech infrastructure that improve their economy and with luck they’ll get rich enough to keep the roads improved. In general roads are better than bridges because bridges are too easy to blow up. Maybe we can find lots of other projects that can help them build up their economy, things that they can keep going themselves after we cut off the funding.
Why would we want any foreign soldiers in afghanistan? We want to inspect what our money is being used for, and we need to guard the inspectors. And we don’t want it to look like a military defeat, so if we have some redoubts there then it looks like we haven’t been defeated and haven’t withdrawn.
What happens if Taliban insists on fighting instead of politicking? That’s their choice. The enemy gets a vote. That would make a big difference in afghanistan, because afghans mostly don’t have a burning desire to kill talibans. There’s the ethnic thing, but apart from that talibans look like religious people who have some good ideas and some bad ideas. We want to kill them off and most afghans don’t share that. Pakistan gave Taliban money and military support and they took over for awhile. Now we’re giving somebody else money and military support and they’re taking their turn. Business as usual. If Taliban got a chance to do regular politics — persuade people to go along with them if they can — and instead they chose to fight against the odds, it would look a lot more like their decision. Not just us being bloodthirsty and wanting a whole group of afghans dead, it would be them choosing to fight the rest when they didn’t have to. I think it might be much easier to get some afghan enthusiasm for killing them then.
So OK, Robin, what’s your specific plan?
“How about a great big “Mission Accomplished” sign on an aircraft carrier? VDH claimed victory. Belmont Club claimed victory. Christopher Hitchens claimed victory. All drenched in snark about us poor misguided antiwar types, not to tease us too much. We laugh last.”
_You’re laughing last, you think, at the defeat of American armed forces and allies in war. Or you’re focused totally on a domestic fight to the exclusion of the war and the external foe._
Sure, in context. When I focus on the stupid people who dumped us into this useless war, and how self-righteous they were, and how some of them are *still* trying to say they were right, it’s only natural to laugh at them.
I can’t be pleased about the defeat but it looked pretty much inevitable to me since Abu Ghraib and the Najaf and Fallujah campaigns. At first I thought maybe we could pull it off. Set up a democracy and get out. But Bremer didn’t head in that direction and here we are. What am I going to do about it now? Cheerlead for more of the same? I don’t see any good solution any more. It doesn’t help to say I Told You So but that’s what’s available to me just now. The stupids ran the government, and committed us to about a trillion dollars for a whole lot of death and destruction, a giant waste, and I couldn’t stop them. I told them they were being stupid and they laughed at me. OK. I Told You So.
“Laugh or cry, there ain’t no inbetween.”
_It appears that removing the Taliban has resulted in an extraordinary improvement in children’s survival rates._
So, Wildmonk, this is based on another study out of Johns Hopkins, like the Lancet study. Don’t you want to criticise their methodology and say it can’t be true because they did it all wrong?
All you folks arguing for a realpolitic approach should be thrilled with how things are going in Pakistan btw. Somehow I doubt you’ll be giving Bush credit for cultivating that particular relationship though.
avedis –
Well, we’ve resolved one thing –
“nd you’re worried about upsetting the Afghanis and/or killing too many Pakistanis??????????? Mr. Guts and Glory stick it out and pay the price in Iraq???? Mr let’s bomb Iran????? Mr. Shades of WW2??? INCREDIBLE! Your lack of internal consistency is astonishing. For the record; I advocate going heavily into Afghanistan and across the Pakistani border and killing anyone withing 50 feet of a weapon.”
You have no idea what I really stand for (and here I spent all that time writing it down!). I’ll skip the slur (but reserve the right to reply in kind should the mood strike me;
Yes persisting in Iraq makes sense, because counterinsurgency and nationbuilding have historically taken time and patience, above all.
Um, I said “let’s not bomb Iran” – explicitly. So don’t attribute fantasy positions to me and then slam me for it.
And I have rep0eatedly explained why what we’re doing isn’t WWII, and that the goal is to do things that will avoid a war that looks like WW II.
But why disagree with me over my actual positions? It’s so much more fun to sit down and challenge me for things I’ve never said and don’t believe.
And speaking of fantasy beliefs, if you don’t understand the difference between Afghan and Iraqi history and culture, you really have no business talking about these issues. Your proposal is a recipe for disaster, pure and simple on every front. I’ll suggest you read the history of the Soviet invasion if you want to understand what a heavy footprint in Afghanistan looks like – and how it turns out.
And to invade Pakistan – a country with a population almost three times that of Iran – the country we can’t possibly invade because it’s too powerful and populous – with a very strong standing army, and with nukes – moves you out of the realm of anyone I can justify taking seriously.
Seriously, avedis. Think about what you’re saying. At this point you’re looking more and more like a common-garden troll, and not someone who is thinking at all seriously about this stuff.
You can do a lot better than that – and you’ll have to if you want to see some alternatives to the current policies.
A.L.
There should be some derivation of Godwin’s Law covering the Mission Accomplished banner. At least Halliburton and Blackwater have some plausible relevance to our policies in Iraq. Who would imagine one peice of fabric would bunch so many panties over so many years for so little discernable cause?
More interesting posts.
Some of them use ad hominem against my statements instead of analyzing my statements and then either giving evidence that I’ve missed, or showing flaws in my analysis. When you can only use ad hominem instead of substantive response, then you must be either intellectually handicapped and unable to understand how substantive debate works, or you are just childish and petulant and whiny, and have nothing to say other than an insult. Listen, children. If you want to insult me, at least do it with intelligence and humor.
Others accuse me of simply stating “hatred of Bush.” I’m sorry, but I haven’t once said what I think about Mr Bush –personally or otherwise. So that’s another juvenile distraction of a non-substantive sort.
And then there’s the tired old accusation of “liberal.” Yes, I am sure that when a person considers himself a righteous “conservative,” then anyone who posits a disagreeable idea is per force a “liberal.” How else could the world continue in its “US vs THEM” eternal battle?
How incredibly sad that the more juvenile, knee-jerk, whiny, over-the-top ad hominem posts in here profess to be “conservative” while at the same time being utter enemies of personal freedom, personal liberty from any intrusion by other individuals or, worst of all, by a government entity.
If by “liberal” you mean to accuse me of being contrary to the childish ad hominem attacks and the non-substantive “debate” offered by the Thread Master, “Armed Liberal,” then I suppose you will call me that thing.
I tend to think of “liberals” as the topical, superficial, stupid and gullible folks who think that NPR and PBS really are “public,” who think that John Kerry is any different from George W Bush, who think that all evil in the world is the fault of “Rethuglicans.”
Sorry, people. I’m a registered Republican. A supporter of personal liberty. A defender of truth and reality. And a debater who likes to stick to the facts and the reasoning that uses them in a solid, defendable manner.
So I’d welcome any further SUBSTANTIVE comments from anyone who cares to discuss the substance behind the original post by “Armed Liberal” and its completely false premises, starting with his opening fake assault on Arthur Silber’s recent essay, and moving on to his pulpit sermon of Manifest Destiny.
Wendigo, from my POV, you haven’t made any statements worth debating. What I see are recitals of cliche claims that have little or no basis in fact and are a kind of rehashing of “Bad Philosophy’s”:http://www.armedliberal.com/MT/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=1&search=bad+philosophy Greatest Hits.
Sorry about that; I just don’t have the time.
A.L.
_Unless we can enforce nonproliferation, in a few years we won’t be a superpower and we won’t have the final say on a whole big collection of things. We basicly won’t have final say on anything outside our own borders. I say that this issue trumps all the others. We won’t be able to make military threats against practically anybody._
Unfortunately, that statement is but a theory, and it’s not even a theory grounded in reality. It is basically a statement of your personal fears, your fear of anything that comes from anyone or any place but the USA.
Perhaps you think we have the right to have the “final say” on anything anywhere.
I would remind you that YOUR personal authority extends only to yourself.
And that you cannot simply band together with likeminded and equally mistaken people and then, magically, obtain MORE authority.
Unless, of course, you are an authoritarian who believes that the point of government is to use more power and authority than that to which one is morally or ethically entitled.
So are you trying to tell us that if you’re afraid enough, you are entitled to be the world’s bully regardless of any absence of moral or ethical grounding in that bullying? That’s how your statement above reads to me. If I’m misreading it, please correct me.
Armed Liberal,
That’s a nice evasive technique, but it doesn’t have any truth in it. Using a tone of utter conviction to state something false may feel good to you, but it doesn’t change the falsity of your arguments.
I am not offering things for a question of whether they are “worth debating” from your P.O.V.
I am offering facts.
So you either address the facts, or you stick to your hyperbolic theorizing that is grounded in fantasy and fear.
Are you choosing to ignore the relevant facts, and instead focus on hyperbolic fantastic fear-laden theories?
Wendigo, you haven’t listed a ‘fact’ yet. I’ll give you one chance to do so, and may respond if you’re serious enough in trying.
A.L.
_Mr. Wendigo the lawyer, who hopefully is not a prosecutor or a public defender if Allah has a shred of mercy, says that Mr. Silber’s ideas have received insufficient attention, so let’s start all over._
Sorry, but you are mistaken. I didn’t state that at all. What I said was, Armed Liberal **pretends** to be assessing Mr Silber’s essay, but instead is just scapegoating Mr Silber and launching into a theory-laden sermon on Manifest Destiny.
That’s what I said.
And I didn’t say I was a “lawyer.”
I said “I guess I must be the Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer,” which is a reference to a satire skit from Saturday Night Live in the early 90s.
Really, if you folks think you are debating, you are mistaken.
Tossing personal insults as ad hominem drive-by pot-shots isn’t debate.
It’s just personal invective, and it’s doubly bad because it’s not even clever or funny.
_”And that you cannot simply band together with likeminded and equally mistaken people and then, magically, obtain MORE authority.”_
Err, isnt that what a government basically is? Is there some other definition of, say, the UN i’m not aware of?
_”Unless, of course, you are an authoritarian who believes that the point of government is to use more power and authority than that to which one is morally or ethically entitled.”_
You do realize that ‘morally or ethically entitled’ is a completely subjective criteria, right? Or do you have a definition to the contrary?
Well now you’re just *lying*, “Armed Liberal.”
Really, that’s beyond sad and pathetic and into the realm of totally indefensible rhetoric.
Posts number 63 and 67 are chock-full of facts. I suggest you try reading them again. Maybe you’re reading them too quickly.
Or maybe your plan is to just ignore the facts and just lie outright.
It looks to me like in your thread, you find it necessary to impose artificial standards to support your theories. If that’s true, then your whole thread really does make a case for you, but it’s not making the case you pretend. It’s making a case for the fact that you will bend and break the rules of debate whenever someone offers an argument that you cannot refute factually or logically.
Mark Buehner —
No, the point of government is not to get authority. I submit that’s where you went wrong in your own mind. I submit that you have totally missed the point of our own government’s founding. I’ll offer a suggestion: read the Declaration of Independence. It is premised on the idea that authority is not the point of government. So I’ll suggest you read it once more.
_”That’s a big part of what frustrates me about folks like Wendigo; they somehow seem to think that history is a monologue, with us as the only actor that they seem incapable of seeing the push and pull that goes into what winds up actually happening.”_
You can use that build-a-scarecrow-and-then-destroy-it tactic if you like but please do not mistake it for real debate or honest analysis.
What you ascribe to me is YOUR fantasy of what I think and believe.
It’s not my view at all.
_”No, the point of government is not to get authority.”_
Perhaps not the point, but certainly the mechanism. Can you think of a government function that doesnt rely on authority?
_”So I’ll suggest you read it once more.”_
I suggest you knock off your condescension before you get your head rhetorically knocked off around here. I feel sufficiently versed in constitutional history to have this discussion, thank you. What YOU need to realize is that you are throwing around empty platitudes (which dont even make sense btw). What is your point please?
Governments exercise power to compel behavior, from taxation to stopping you from smoking in your home. That is the reality.
Government is created to gather and execute collective decision making, which equates to power. That is the _definition_ of a government. That power has limits, that is the point of a constitution and bill of rights. You are making an argument about where those limits should be, and that is fine. Thats what we spend a lot of time doing in democratic discourse. The idea of what government is ‘morally and ethically’ entitled to is what our Nation has argued and fought about for 200+ years (rememeber that little Civil War?) So please stop pretending those specific limits are self-evident or obvious. Its a foolish argument that flies in the face of the entire human experience. If the social contract was simple, everyone would be doing it.
Wendigo:
See, I did not know that. I did not know there was a caveman lawyer on TV. I thought you meant you were from Antioch law school or something.
I’m so sorry. And so relieved.
Andrew:
Andrew, did you ask everybody that question just so you’d have a chance to talk about the big sign for the hundredth time? Damn it man, you used us.
“Get my head rhetorically knocked off”??
Wow.
E-bullies!
What’s next — a demand for my milk money?
_”Rhetorically”_ Wendingo. To quote a phrase, I’ll suggest you read it once more. Honestly, making you look foolish isn’t much work, you are doing so well yourself. Let me know if you come up with anything substantative you wish to discuss.
_”Andrew, did you ask everybody that question just so you’d have a chance to talk about the big sign for the hundredth time? Damn it man, you used us.”_
At least! 62 times at “WOC”:http://www.google.com/search?as_q=mission+accomplished&hl=en&num=10&btnG=Google+Search&as_epq=Andrew+J+Lazarus+&as_oq=&as_eq=&lr=&as_ft=i&as_filetype=&as_qdr=all&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&as_occt=any&as_dt=i&as_sitesearch=windsofchange.net&as_rights=&safe=images alone:
_So are you trying to tell us that if you’re afraid enough, you are entitled to be the world’s bully regardless of any absence of moral or ethical grounding in that bullying? That’s how your statement above reads to me. If I’m misreading it, please correct me._
I don’t claim any special entitlement. I’m saying that up until recently we thought we had the _power_. We could attack nations, and we could justify it with our own moral prejudices, and if anybody disagreed there was nothing they could do about it because we were the only superpower.
Like we went into a “sovereign” nation and grabbed their most senior general and put him in a US jail because we said he was violating US drug laws. Nobody blinked an eye at that. We did it because we could. Nobody in the world tried to stop us because they couldn’t.
What I’m saying is we’re about to lose that special status. If we want to keep it we have to fight hard to keep it, maybe harder than it’s worth.
And if we don’t keep it then we have to rearrange our thinking to something more like yours, and it should be obvious to you that a lot of us don’t want to.
The main justification for this sort of thing is that we wouldn’t trust anybody else with this kind of power, and if we lose it somebody else is likely to get it. But in a more fundamental sense it isn’t about justifcation. I’m saying that given the choice between losing power and keeping it, a lot of americans really really want to keep it. They’ll trot out excuses for you if the excuses look like an issue, but the main reason is they want to. “I’d rather be a hammer than a nail” and all that.
Uh, Wendigo, I’ll suggest a bunch of reading about the politics and political theory of the Founding – I’d start with the Federalist Papers, then move to Locke, Hobbes and Rousseau.
A whole lot of discussion has gone on about this – and the fact that we don’t live in a democracy, and were never intended to live in a democracy. We live – fortunately – in a constitutional Republic.
A.L.
JT –
You raise a great point in #140 and one well worth digging a lot deeper into.
When I get home from work…
A.L.
JT #140,
Everything you say is true as far as it goes. However, I would add this: If someone is going to be the hegemon (and I agree with you that _someone_ is certain to be) is it better for the world that it be us or someone a lot more cynical and exploitative than we are. I’m certainly not denying that we use our power in our own interests when we can, because we can (this is somehow immoral?) but would the world be better off if the hegemon was Russia? China? Some sort of Islamic Caliphate? Before you dismiss American “moralizing” too thoroughly, just consider that question.
I mention “Mission Accomplished” less often than you guys claim we’re winning.
Fred, it isn’t certain that there will be a hegemon. The world went a long time without one. There were attempts — the persian empire, alexander, rome, china, etc — and some of them covered as much as a million square miles, but nobody was ever big enough to get the whole thing.
There has never been a world hegemon until the USSR collapsed. And then we weren’t really cut out for it..
Humanity has been around for maybe a million years, depending on how you count. We’ve had villages and crops for maybe 20,000 years. Cities for possibly 7,000 years, depending on how you count. (Athens had something like 30,000 people, a little smaller than my hometown.) We’ve had something that could vaguely pose as a world hegemon for 16 years. To keep up that pose we have to burn a whole lot of oil. (Our aircraft carriers are nuclear power, the rest of their task forces are not. An F22 burns, what? 10,000 gallons an hour? Lots and lots of oil. An M113 gets what, 0.5 mpg? An up-armored HUMV maybe 1 mpg?) The oil might hold out another 50 years max. 100 years? When there isn’t enough of it then whoever wants to be hegemon has to project force some other way. Set up coaling stations around the world for their fleets? An all-nuclear navy? Little tiny observation UAVs that run on vegetable oil and get 300 mpg?
I don’t see that there has to be any hegemon. Maybe the world will settle down to spheres of influence. I don’t say that’s an improvement, but it could happen. It could happen no matter how hard we fight to stop it.
_”I don’t see that there has to be any hegemon. Maybe the world will settle down to spheres of influence. I don’t say that’s an improvement, but it could happen. It could happen no matter how hard we fight to stop it.”_
This is an interesting point. I think the idea that there is a ‘stable’ scenario to the world at this point in time is problematic. Obviously there are plenty of scenarios that are at least less chaotic, hopefully less bloody (not the same thing). We could easily see a world divided into spheres of influence that is far more violent and prone to genocide (is the number of worldwide conflicts still at a record low?). The Cold War, after all, wasnt particularly peaceful.
There is an important break line here in ideaology- i’ve actually seen it broken down by which side of the world you focus on: the Southern Hemisphere American influence has been pretty negative or absent in the last 50 years. The Northern more positive (obviously there are numerous exceptions). Those that are skeptical or hostile to American influence tend to focus on the South, those that are positive towards the North. Can you say that either one is completely right or wrong?
We’re a big, immensely influential power- so powerful that even our _absence_ of action or influence is judged (almost invariably in the negative- you dont hear much ‘good ol America had the sense not to get involved in Rwanda’). So its really a thankless job being a hyperpower (which is enough to hang up the crown if you subscribe to Pat Buchannon isolationism).
My point is that sitting on the sidelines doesnt garner you any points in this world either, and its likely to endanger you to boot. So if you are involved, you need to figure out the smart way to do it. No surprise, there are many schools of thought on this matter. I dont think its fair to ascribe unholy malevolence to Neocon intentions because their idea was more interventionist than somebody elses, any more than it is to claim the Clintons were apathetic racists for ignoring Rwanda. We’re all at the end of the day trying to find answers that are good for the US and the world and will lead to a more peaceful, prosperous, free future. We all need to remember that from time to time.
_I’m certainly not denying that we use our power in our own interests when we can, because we can (this is somehow immoral?) but would the world be better off if the hegemon was Russia? China?_
I have no idea how to guess about the whole world. But ask this other question — would _we_ be better off?
I don’t want russia or china or india in the position we’ve taken. That would be bad for us and maybe for a lot of the world.
So the question is, would there be a winner like that? I don’t think we’re strong enough to keep the position. Who’s stronger? China has the people but they’re poor and they don’t yet have the ideology for it. Russia has a long way to go to even build back to where they were in 1970. India? If there isn’t going to be a hegemon we’d be fools to bankrupt ourselves trying to do it. If it takes 50 years to sort out that there is, we could pull back now and it might still be us 50 years from now. — if it even winds up with somebody on top.
If there doesn’t have to be a hegemony, we don’t have to do terrible things to be the one. How can we find out if there are alternatives?
[welcome to our banned list, Alan. You can’t write any better than you direct.
A.L.]
Wendigo – I’m a little confused when you say that no one has responded substantively to your objections or actually addressed the problems in Silber’s essay. You go on to say that every response has just consisted of ad hominem attacks.
I tried repeatedly to capture the essential problems with Silber’s essay (entries entries #10, 52, 86 & 87). I believe that I have done so in a tone that, while a bit heated at times, is respectful of the contrary assertions that you, Avedis and others have made.
Are you sure you want to stick with the story that every reply to Silber’s essay or to your opinions has consisted solely of malign attacks on your character? I think the record pretty clearly shows that this isn’t true.
Wildmonk, in #86 you said,
_This “empire” however, is not one of military conquest and material exploitation but rather an ideological empire of consensual government and free markets._
I could make a case, and a strong one, that “an ideological empire of consensual government and free markets”, especially as it is conducted by the U. S., is equivalent to military conquest and material exploitation. But I won’t. I think the average thinker can figure that out. I mean, really, no material exploitation? (Not to mention labor exploitation, lax regulation exploitation, etc.) Of military conquest, proxy wars accomplish the same objective . . . and there is plenty of evidence of that sort of thing, too.
Come on.
not to point out the obvious on this one,
but your commentary is likely falling on deaf ears.
We can’t handle seeing ourselves as we are, which would be in negative terms. Let alone take responsibility for what we do.
from your statements at 150, and 117
I mean, really, no material exploitation?
you can point to what we’re doing, and have done, and if you get a response, it will likely be the same self promoting (arrogance/ignorance based) drivel that deters me from remaining here for very long.
I am still working out how I plan to act, according to my thoughts on exploitation, especially pertaining to our material goods, consumerism, as is evidenced throughout my past discussions.
There will be no denying before man or any other force that what we do on a day to day in this and other “civilized societies”, requires the mass exploitation and degradation of innocent people globally.
We are appointed by ourselves as a sort of global police in anything we want to control.
Now, not to build your esteem too much, addressing the value of statements by you, and the other few… (again, very few)
I didn’t know there were people like Silber. I thought this world was full of people who can only handle to bat opposition from their beloved captors.
This welcoming of different approach (like the ideas you endorse or allow) and the habit of being rather level actions, sustainability, is highly prised by me.
I see that I represent a very small part of the population. I am one of few who believe that people should be treated equal, and that through honesty in our own actions, and unselfish acts, we could progress into a better existence (be this belief naive or not, I don’t give a damn). I say this, because few people, even in jest and superficial discussion will go so far from convention, to suggest options opposing the status quo.
I refuse to fear the impact of my statements on my image. We here ought not to be having an image, so there is no need for downplay or embellishment
Your belief that something is going to go wrong, be it in terms of alas babylon, or merely the continuation of the current, and condemnable reality. Is not unfounded, though hard to deal with, it does not require somebody who is off the hinge to see where these will lead. I hope we wake up before then.
I’ll trust you to point out, if I’ve been unclear or if I’ve strayed from reason here.
“As for me, I do think that the US is and has been overall a force for good in the world, and I’m happy to hold our record against anyone else’s. Are we an idyll, an arcadia? Not much. History is messy, complex, and full of people who act badly. I see it more as Flashman than as the Hardy Boys.
Maybe that’s why I don’t get so indignant when I see the same things in the newspaper”-Armed Liberal
Spoken like a true commissar. Chris Floyd pegged you correctly it seems.
Ferency –
“I could make a case, and a strong one, that “an ideological empire of consensual government and free markets”, especially as it is conducted by the U. S., is equivalent to military conquest and material exploitation. But I won’t.”
No, please – I’d love to see you try this.
A.L.
sorry, for the fun typo 151.. “prized”
Now, however easy it may be to disarm the intellectually out-gunned, I leave any response to “A.L” to the party addressed.
the out-foxing (or however you want to put it) being not, of course on my part, I don’t claim any standing in that regard, but instead the party addressed.
AL, You are corrct that I misrepresented your views on Iran. I did not follow the link to your previous post on the topic. I apologize and hope you accept. However, I would note that the administration you support does want to bamb/invade Iran. Silber critizes the administration. You never do. Although I further admit that Silber does go a little too far in his blasts. I think Silber’s hyperbole arises from the frustration that many feel concerning where this administration is leading us.
As for my position on Afghanistan and Pakistan, I am serious. I amnot “trolling”.
You cannot compare the Soviet experience in Afghanistan to current circumatances. Our military is superior in all aspects and the enemy is not the same these days. To clarify, I am talking about killing, not nation building. Ideally, the footprint would not be in Afghanistan itself, but across the border in Pakistan. It’s an unattractive option, I admit, but the only other is to have Karzai’s HQ remain a security island with ever shrinking shores. At the current rate we will lose in Afghanistan.
Next, your cavelier attitude toward Bin Laden armed with Paki nukes is most surprising as such would be the start of armeggedon in the middle east. Prevention of this merits total all out war on a scale matching anything we’ve ever done, militarily, in our history. We simply cannot allow that to happen. Again, the sudden shriveling of the “will” you are talking about genuinely puzzles me. No job too tough unless it really is tough?
JT, Of course there have been long periods of history without hegemons (and by that I don’t mean absolute rulers of the world but only a power strong enough to keep relative order in the world) but those have been very bloody and anarchic periods. And some hegemon (by the above definition) has always eventually arisen. Some of them have been more humane than others; some have been vicious and brutal, all have done vicious and brutal things. But even the brutality of the empires was better than the brutality of the anarchy which preceded and followed them (see Roman Empire, collapse of. See also British Empire, collapse of).
Whether Russia or China or India are, in fact, capable of exercising the kind of power we do is really irrelevant to my argument. My point is that given their history and cultures, they would be considerably more brutal, rapacious, and exploitative than we are if they did have our power. And when our power does finally ebb (which it will; I believe we’re in an advanced state of decay right now) there will be a period of bloody anarchy, then _someone_ will replace us, and that will be extremely unfortunate not just for us but for the world.
avedis, I’m headed off to a conference, and so don’t have time to pull cites (obligatory excuse), but here’s a fast pass:
Unlike Iraq, which has a history and culture which are no more or less martial than the typical Arab country, Afghanistan has a culture which is highly martial, and in which the various tribes have certainly been fighting each other or the British, the Russians, or us pretty much continuously for the last 250 years (as long as there has been an ‘Afghanistan’). These differences are substantial, and predictive (i.e. you can make some decent predictions based on assumptions about the cultures). The Afghans are territorial, and extremely violent; invasions there (British, Russian back in the 19th century, British, Soviet) are typically met with something more closely approximating an uprising than what we are seeing in Iraq.
I’ve applauded the cleverness with which we sidestepped the issue in invading; by keeping a light enough footprint that it was clear that we were not an invading/occupying power, but simply there to tip the balance of tribal power.
That’s a two-edged sword, of course.
Iraq has no such continuous history of deeply embedded cultural violence; a few small uprisings against the Ottomans, an uprising against the British which was put down. So on balance, it’s more plausible to pacify a place like Iraq with a large(r) occupying army than a place like Afghanistan where increasing the footprint will itself trigger more conflict.
As to carpet-bombing the country, a) that’s genocide (something I keep wanting to avoid); and b) as a half-measure, it was ineffective when the Russians did it and they are far bloodthirstier than we are. So we’d literally have to try and kill everyone there. The consequences of this worldwide would be interesting to contemplate, no?
As to invading Pakistan, I’ll refer you to the extensive work done by folks on why invading Iran is so difficult, and point out that Pakistan has 3x the population, a stronger, better-equipped army, and as a bonus, has many of the same Pashtun tribesmen in Waziristan – meaning we get both a 1st world conflict with a large army, a major set of urban battles in large cities where we’ll see major rioting and insurgency, and a conflict with the same folks I’m trying to sidestep or bribe in Afghanistan.
Not to mention nukes.
At some point, one would hope that the bribes we’ve given Musharrif have given us the locations of the nukes, and of the key people in the nuclear program.
A whole bunch of precious cargo missions seems like the plausible thing to be planning right now; short of a joint venture with the Indians on an invasion, I’m not sure what other options we have – other than patience and diplomacy (which isn’t doing all that well these days).
I’ll admit here that there’s not much of a good solution, and that this is at least a three-pipe problem. But invading them – even if we simply pulled every last troop and file clerk out of Iraq, Germany, and Korea just isn’t in the cards.
And one reason I thought Obama was so lame for suggesting special ops actions inside Pakistan is that it would collapse the government and bring us to where we are right now.
A.L.
Invading Pakistan is lunacy. A simple map should show you that. Why not just saturation nuke the entire nation? Oh, because _that_ would be crazy?
“…on balance, it’s more plausible to pacify a place like Iraq with a large® occupying army than a place like Afghanistan where increasing the footprint will itself trigger more conflict”-A.L
What a fascinating dilemma. Which violation of the UN Charter should we pursue in order to more efficiently gain hegemony? The burdens of Empire are great indeed.
Pray tell, on what authority do we derive the right to “pacify†Iraq or any other nation posing no threat to us? The last time I checked the only legitimate rationale for war under international law is in self-defense as defined under Article 51 of the UN Charter [in advance of a Security Council resolution]. Since our aggression in Iraq in no way satisfies these standards, from what moral standpoint do you justify our continued presence there in defiance of the clear wishes of the Iraqi people? Or do I overstep in assuming that you have a moral compass at all?
“The Afghans are territorial, and extremely violent; invasions there (British, Russian back in the 19th century, British, Soviet) are typically met with something more closely approximating an uprising than what we are seeing in Iraqâ€-A.L
What I find most interesting about your arguments A.L are their underlying assumptions. Notice how you emphasize the “violence†of Afghans in resisting Britain’s far greater violent act of aggression (the invasion itself). The presumption being that successful resistance to western aggression is somehow abnormal. Therefore, the Afghans (and by extension the Iraqi resistance) demonstrated an unusual propensity for violence by checking Britain’s “right†to pillage, plunder, and exploit their lands. I find it odd that your analysis failed to perceive any trace of “extremely territorial†or “violent†traits in the British people in resisting invasion attempts; for example, what explains all the German huffing and puffing during the Battle of Britain?
Let’s examine these horrific passages from your response to Avedis:
“As to carpet-bombing the country, a) that’s genocide (something I keep wanting to avoid)â€
You think? As for genocide, what would you call the murderous sanctions on Iraq maintained during the Clinton administration during the decade preceding the Second Iraq Assault and which led to an estimated 500,000 deaths—mostly children? How about the 655,000 to 1 million plus excess deaths attributed to the current USuk assault on Iraq as estimated by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health [results published in the Lancet] and the Opinion Research Business Poll [released 9/14/07]?
“[A]s a half-measure, it (carpet-bombing) was ineffective when the Russians did it and they are far bloodthirstier than we are. So we’d literally have to try and kill everyone thereâ€
A half-measure? The implication here being that had Russia’s carpet-bombing “half-measures” been effective in subduing the Afghan resistance to their aggression, similar measures would be useful and appropriate for the US now walking in their footsteps. Whatever works I guess.
The Russians are far more blood-thirsty than we? Really? They have a record that compares to ours in Indochina?
“Everything that flies, on anything that moves†was Henry Kissinger’s advice to Nixon in the “free-fire†zones of South Vietnam. This of course was where the US killing machine slaughtered perhaps 3 million people (primarily in the south where our assault began in earnest in 1961) and unknown millions more via the carpet-bombing of Laos and Cambodia during Nixon’s “secret†plan to end the war from 1970 on.
Can the Russians lay claim to having reintroduced slavery in the Western Hemisphere in the 20th century as can the US in Haiti [1916-34]?
Correct me if I’m wrong but did not the United States slaughter 200,000 Filipinos who had the audacity to successfully remove the Spanish yoke and declare independence in 1898? Care to examine our campaign there while you compare and contrast Russian and American blood-thirstyness? To borrow a phrase from Arthur Silber: try to be serious.
Well, Coldtype, it’s reassuring to know that if all of us in the US would just commit suicide, the world would be all chocolate rivers and gumdrop trees. Where to begin?
Let’s see – intervention to stop slaughter in Yugoslavia – UN approval? Nope. Darfur massacres proceeding with stern words from the UN management? Yup. The French into the Ivory Coast? No UN action. I could go on, but my fingers would get tired.
When the UN evolves into a force with real authority – moral and political – I’m happy to talk about UN motions as some form of morally or legally binding law. Today? Not so much.
So invasion = bad, sanctions = bad. I give you points for consistency, many in your shoes don’t even have those. Here’s my take: Saddam violated international law and norms of behavior by invading Kuwait.
He entered into certain undertakings in order to keep from being deposed and hung back then.
He didn’t honor them.
We were free, under the terms of the armistice (not peace treaty, note) to act to enforce those undertakings.
So that would be the basis for us to ‘pacify’ Iraq.
As to ‘pacifying’ Afghanistan, they openly harbored ObL who was involved in a little contremps here in New York City and Washington DC (not to mention a few embassies and a warship). So that gives us the right to have ‘pacified’ them. If we could – in either case – evolve a local government that would simply offer stability and some guarantee of future good behavior, I’m sure we’d leave.
Then again, we’re still in Japan, German, and Korea…
Um, yes the Russians are a lot more bloodthirsty than we are. Remember the kulaks? gulags? Clusterbombing villages in Afghanistan – not JDAM’s targeting individual houses. If you genuinely think this, welcome to the Duranty Hall of Fame…
A.L.
AL, “He didn’t honor them.” He had no WMD. So what are referring to?
You still haven’t answered my question as to what we should do should Pakistan fall into the hands of Islamic militants alligned with Bin Laden and/or other proven enemies of the US.
If the rational of invading Iraq, a country without WMD, was to prevent an iota of a chance that it might, someday develop nukes – and this is the rational from the Bush admin. behind doing something destructive to Iran as well – why would a nuclear armed country like Pakistan in the hands of Bin Laden not be an automatic reason to invade and pacify?
Or was Iraq and (soon Iran) about something else. Oil maybe? And if so, how are the people you dismiss not accurate in their accusations of colonialism?
You are really falling apart here AL.
Your argument re; Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan (should the present govt fall) would be like the US in 1941 saying, “hey, we can’t declare war on Germany. They’ve got lots of really good tanks and a big airforce and they’re real mean. Let’s declare war on Mexico instead. We can win that one!”
The only other vaguely potive possible explanation behind your argument is the retarded domino theory; that once Iraq becomes a peaceful happy democracy then all other violent countries in the neighborhood will follow suit. Of course, there is nothing to substantiate this and much current evidence points to the oposite effect.
You have been duped by greedy plutocrats running our govt and you continue to play the fool.
Avedis.
We sought to prevent Saddam from acquiring nuclear weapons (and we seek the same with Iran) because possessing such weapons makes the nation a far more formidable opponent. Indeed, possession of these weapons essentially rules out intervention in almost every case short of their use in an attack on the U.S.
Pakistan already has such weapons – they’ve crossed the Rubicon, so to speak. They are powerful enough that we simply cannot challenge them using a conventional force.
Thus, if you don’t understand the difference between “before” and “after” then it is no surprise that you are confused by A.L.s point. When I see you getting confused on such basic matters as this, Avedis, it isn’t A.L. that I think is “playing the fool.”
So Wildmonk, you, like AL, refuse to answer the question as to what we would do should Pakistan fall to extremeists.
Give up?
And if we can accpet a nuclear armed Bin Laden/extremists in Pakistan, then why not less extreme elements in Iran. At least Iran is a functioning state and they have never attacked us nor threatened to do so. They have proven to be rational actors thus far.
But how about answering the question above?
_Of course there have been long periods of history without hegemons (and by that I don’t mean absolute rulers of the world but only a power strong enough to keep relative order in the world) but those have been very bloody and anarchic periods._
Who was hegemon before us? Maybe the british when their navy controlled all the oceans of the world? What timeframe would that be? Before that, who? Maybe the spanish back whenk their navy controlled all the oceans of the world? And before that…. anybody?
_And some hegemon (by the above definition) has always eventually arisen._
I think our views of history must be very very different. Was there somebody who kept relative order in the world at any time between 600 BC and 1500 AD? 1500 AD to 1700 AD? Are you thinking on some small scale?
_Some of them have been more humane than others; some have been vicious and brutal, all have done vicious and brutal things. But even the brutality of the empires was better than the brutality of the anarchy which preceded and followed them (see Roman Empire, collapse of. See also British Empire, collapse of)._
Ah! You think of the roman empire as that sort of hegemon. But they had the occasional scrap with the persians, they certainly didn’t keep order in or near persia. They didn’t even get to india, and china was just the legendary place that silk came from.
Well, did rome even keep relative order inside the roman empire? No. They continually incited revolts so they could put them down. Roman armies stomped across their own countryside fighting each other — Marius and Sulla, Caesar and Pompey, and down the line. Roman technology and roman engineering brought wealth to rome, and as that wealth dissipated so did rome.
_Whether Russia or China or India are, in fact, capable of exercising the kind of power we do is really irrelevant to my argument. My point is that given their history and cultures, they would be considerably more brutal, rapacious, and exploitative than we are if they did have our power._
If they can’t do it then we don’t have to do it to stop them. If we can’t stop them then we don’t have to go down in flames trying. Where it makes a difference about how brutal they’d be as hegemons is if they’ll do it unless we stop them, and we *can* stop them. That’s the time we have to think about how much of our wealth and lives and honor to give up trying to stop them. I’d say if it takes all the wealth and half the lives then it’s worth it. I don’t know about the honor.
_And when our power does finally ebb (which it will; I believe we’re in an advanced state of decay right now) there will be a period of bloody anarchy, then someone will replace us, and that will be extremely unfortunate not just for us but for the world._
Some anarchic times are bloodier than others. Sometimes it looks to me like the british tried to make things fall apart when they left, like they thought when things got bad enough they could come back or something.
I agree about the decay. I was surprised how fast we’ve sunk during Clinton/GWB. It looks to me like Reagan was a big part of it — he made promises his economy couldn’t cover. We outspent the russians into bankruptcy, and if it takes us 30 years longer than them to collapse that’s a sort of accomplishment.
So what’s your point again? What I hear is:
1. We do some bad things as hegemon but all hegemons do; the world is worse without a hegemon than with the bad things we do.
2. Any plausible candidate to replace us would be obviously worse than us.
3. When we inevitably fail there will be a bad period of ugly bloody anarchy and then somebody bad will replace us with predictably bad results.
So sad.
My natural thought from this is to first try to arrange some sort of soft landing — various ex-empires haven’t done well. Second, try to arrange a soft landing for the rest of the world. If we do things well maybe the anarcy doesn’t have to be as bloody as it would otherwise be. And third, be ready to do what we can to delay the rise of another hegemon. If the anarchy seems worse then we might as well go ahead and let them impose order, but if it isn’t that bad why not delay the bad hegemon?
But here’s a separate thought. Is there anything we can do to revive the USA? I have an idea about that but I’d like to hear other ideas first.
AL Dude,
On #153
WTO, World Bank . . . no consensus of the masses, no democracy, with impositions/deals made. Proxy wars: Central America, South America, etc. when popular movements start challenging minority government policies. Contra aid ring a bell? School of Americas comes to mind. Free markets aren’t free; it’s a rigged system. Read some Chomsky, will you? Smedley Butler. Chalmers Johnson. Spreading democracy is code for multinationals cashing in on lax regulation, repression of labor movements, etc. Who needs conquest, military or otherwise, when you get all this through the elite, minority governments of the Third World? Read Veins of Latin America. Read more books. Haiti, recently – an American backed coup. Venezuela, recent American backed coup attempt. Both presidents democratically elected. Chile comes to mind. Iran, 1953. It’s a long list. I’m not wasting any more time on this. It’s all pretty obvious. Bye.
Nor has AL or Wildmonk answered the question of what happens if did successfully install democracy in Iraq and the vote was to become a Sharia state hostile to Israel and proably more or less so to the US – which is the most likely outcome because that is what the people want.
Like I said in #164, you guys fall apart at a certain point.
Francina Larmon,
Thanks. I’m not coming back here. Chris Floyd is the reason I checked it out, just to see what he was talking about. He’s got this place pegged. If you haven’t read it, “here is the link”:http://www.chris-floyd.com/Articles/Articles/Kill_the_Messenger%2C_On_With_the_War%3A_A_Noxious_Discharge_From_Armed_Liberal/
[NM: Corrected bare long URL. ]
Coldtype – a few points
Yes, Saddam’s attempt to gain a stranglehold on Gulf Oil was a direct threat to the Developed Nations, including the US. Not all threats are mounted by rolling tanks into a foreign country.
The legal pretext for the Iraqi war is the fact that Saddam reneged on the terms of armistice after the first gulf war. While France wanted, literally, to give him an 18th chance to comply with the terms, the US and England observed that there was ample legal pretext for invasion based on the original armistice and its violation and proceeded accordingly. France, clearly had commercial interests in avoiding that outcome. While you may disagree with the justification, calling the war “illegal” is simply wrong on its face.
It is very unlikely to be true that 500,000 deaths (“mostly children” as you say) died due to sanctions in Iraq in the 1990s. These figures were from Saddam’s propaganda organs and passed into popular “knowledge” when Madeline Albright was asked whether she thought that the “deaths of 500,000 children” was justified. More importantly, the UN (not the US and not Clinton) imposed these sanctions when Saddam reneged on the terms of the armistice. If Saddam had lived up to his word, then none of the misery caused by the sanctions would have occurred. The moral culpability here clearly rests on Saddam’s shoulders and certainly not on the US.
You also say: “How about the 655,000 to 1 million plus excess deaths attributed to the current USuk assault on Iraq as estimated by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health [results published in the Lancet] and the Opinion Research Business Poll [released 9/14/07]?”
There have been numerous studies of excess deaths in Iraq over the last few years. Only the Lancet study came up with figures as high as 650,000 (which you inexplicably inflate to 1,000,000). The critique of this study is quite straightforward: the methodology depended on population reports from a population that was given explicit incentive to exaggerate. It also suffered cultural mismatches in the understanding of the terms used in the questions (such as “family” which can be conflated with “tribe” in Iraq where it would not be taken that way in the West). The actual figure is undoubtedly still too high but a) you are practicing propaganda by selectively quoting and even inflating the Lancet study and b) you ignore the efforts by the US and its allies to minimize civilian casualties through its rules of engagement. Keep in mind that many of the excess deaths have occurred at the hands of the same homicidal thugs that made Iraq a living hell before Saddam’s ouster. The difference is that, before the war, the use of murder as a tool of oppression occurred behind closed doors with official sanction. It had little chance of being exposed in the Western press.
I have no idea where you come up with the wild assertion that the US reintroduced slavery to the Western Hemisphere when it occupied Haiti in 1918 and I strongly doubt that you’ve captured the truth about what happened there. However, the Soviet Union’s official policy of starving the Kulaks into submission in the 1930’s is established historical fact. Millions died through the direct, conscious and purposeful action of the Soviet State. So, yes, I absolutely dispute your assertion that the US suffers by comparison with the Soviet Union.
In a similar vein, you *do* know that the Soviets armed, advised, and even on rare occasions fought alongside the North Vietnamese, don’t you? Blaming America for the deaths in Vietnam while ignoring the context of the war, the Soviets’ role and the slaughter that took place when the South fell a few years later is, at best, a very crude historical revisionism. The Vietnam War may have been naive, misguided, even a betrayal of essential American values but it seems pretty clear that it was not pursued to get genocide jollies or to expand market share as you imply. Americans fought in VietNam because A) they wanted to roll back the Soviets’ grab for power in South Asia and B) they were easily convinced that, by doing so, they were also helping the Vietnamese to “move up” to a more advanced and enlightened social organization: liberal democracy.
Sorry Avedis, I didn’t know that that was the question (what to do if Musharraf falls).
If Pakistan falls, we will truly need time to figure out *who* it has fallen to before we proceed. It will surely not be to Osama as you seem to be implying but it may well fall to elements that are considerably less friendly to the US. However, I would not be surprised if we did indeed find a means for destroying or disabling their nuclear weaponry. I would support aggressive attempts to make this happen but I would certainly *not* support an all out military assault. Keep in mind that Pakistan’s situation is also different because it is on India’s border. India is a very potent player on the world stage and a reasonably strong U.S. ally. Anything that we do would surely be coordinated with India.
That being said, the likely result is that the world political situation just deteriorates while we stand by fairly powerless to stop it. I know of know magic pixie dust that would make it all better given Pakistan’s possession of nuclear weaponry.
Avedis says: “Nor has AL or Wildmonk answered the question of what happens if did successfully install democracy in Iraq and the vote was to become a Sharia state hostile to Israel and proably more or less so to the US – which is the most likely outcome because that is what the people want.”
First, I have responded to an enormous range of assertions that you’ve made and have done so in the spirit of a bar debate among friends. Please don’t go off accusing me of reneging on important questions – like what to do about Musharraf or what happens if Iraqis elect Islamists – when this is the first I’ve heard of it.
Now, to your answer. A fair number of the parties (“lists”) that were installed after the most recent vote are in fact fairly antagonistic toward the US. That’s just the way the democracies work. And I am largely Ok with that since I would expect that, over time, the internal logic of democracy would moderate the impulse to extremism. With that being said, recent opinion polling out of Iraq is showing movement in favor of a more secular state and one that includes all Iraqis rather than a fragmentation into separate states (I was checking on an assertion by Coldtype when I saw the survey – just Google “Iraqi Opinion Poll”). Thus, I think that your worry is a bit misplaced – that does *not* appear to be “what the people want.”
Ferency, if you think that we reading Chomsky is the path to greater wisdom, you are not likely to get a lot out of the exchange here anyway. So long…
J Thomas. Maybe I’m wearing rose-colored glasses but I don’t see the US in decline. Certainly not because Reagan spent too much! The national debt as a percentage of national wealth is simply not that high. The primary two threats that I see _internally_ are a breakdown in fiscal discipline in congress (in particular, pork and the sleaze that comes with it) and the rise of identity politics and the coarsening of debate that goes with it.
Neither of these is particular new and we’ve muddled through before. So I think that reports of America’s imminent demise are quite premature.
By the way, JT, I do not see that Patriot Act or the other manifestations of war the way that Silber, Avedis see them. History teaches us a lot about America’s ability to respond to a threat and then bounce back. In many ways, we are more free today than we have been throughout our history (in other ways, not so much).
Oh man, Ferency, you are leaving before explaining how “consensual government and free markets” is just the same thing as “military conquest and material exploitation”?? Wow, this is like Fermat’s proof…you’ve left it to the reader while noting that it is trivial and obvious!
By the way, I know that you were placing words in my mouth (“no material exploitation?”) but I’m ok with that. Yes, we Capitalists do exploit materials. That’s why your typical Rousseauean noble savage sleeps on dried grass and we sleep in comfy beds. Labor exploitation? Well, as long as the labor is voluntary (and, obviously, paid) then I’m Ok with it. Hell, my labor is exploited every day and I’m damn happy to have a job. The disproportionality of power in first-world to third-world economic transactions presents problems that can be addressed through good governance. After all, Japan was once filled with third-world workers and “Made in Japan” meant “cheap and poorly made.” Well, you wouldn’t exactly say *that* any more, would you?
“Of military conquest, proxy wars accomplish the same objective ” – oh yes, last time I wanted to export something to Canada, I sent a few “troops” up there to wage a proxy war. Oh, excuse me, I sent a sales person up to meet with a few customers…same thing, same thing.
Look, I know that what happened in Guatemala, for example, was inexcusable. I know that people are greedy and that they will manipulate and coerce others whenever they can get away with it. That is the challenge of good governance in the modern world: to create frameworks where consent and service pay more than coercion and fraud. But you need only get your nose out of the trees (specific instances that your heroes like Chomsky exploit over and over again) and look at the forest to see that consensual government and economic freedom are the only workable means of organizing a large, complex society. You and people like Silber have no alternative. It is obvious that you have no workable plan when you exalt the Soviet Union and other, similar losers. You make no sense when you point to the Yanomomo indians or some such noble savage as the “model” for human societies. With nothing to propose, I guess it only makes sense to blindly criticize the random injustices that inevitably arise in the course of human events and act as if such observations give you special insight into the failings of the modern world. But surely you know that this is “faux learning” – that the world is far more complex, chaotic and, in many cases, beautiful than this narrow in cynical view of the world admits.
Ferency has a point about our commercial empire, and yet it’s debatable.
Consider el salvador. Basicly all the land owned by a small rich minority, the “eighteen families”. For several generations this minority chose to concentrate the economy on coffee and mostly nothing else. The roads were built to take coffee to the ports which were built to export coffee. They expropriated a lot of land to build coffee plantations and let the former landowners work on the plantations. When the poor people complained they killed them. The result was not a particularly great economy — income varied from year to year according to the single crop etc. But it was a good system to keep all the wealth concentrated.
El salvador was entirely arranged to produce coffee for us, not at all in the best interest of most slavadorans. They were like a colony for us. But officially we didn’t run that colony, rich salvadorans did. If we were going to intervene, how should we do it? Should we encourage land reform? What we did instead was to train and arm the army that killed slavadorans who wanted land reform — because we said they were communists.
If the locals who own the country happen to behave exactly the way anti-imperialists think we’d want them to if they were our colony, what should we do instead? I mean, if we aren’t communists. Should we interfere with private property? Well, maybe. It depends. Saddam owned all of iraq and we took it away from him because we didn’t like how he ran it. Are we really in control? Are they doing that stuff because we want them to? We do pay them a lot of money to do it that way, and whether we’d pay them even more to do something else is sheer speculation. I dunno.
If they do this stuff when we didn’t ask them to, is it any of our business? If you buy pork but you aren’t the butcher yourself, do you have any responsibility for the hog’s death?
As it happened el salvador decided to reduce their dependence on coffee in the 1990’s. They’re trying to do various hi-tech things now and they may succeed. Probably what’s succeeded most is maquilas — people work cheap cutting cloth for US textiles etc. Is it just a new stupid plan to replace the old stupid plan enforced by the Eighteen Families? Wish them luck.
“Well, Coldtype, it’s reassuring to know that if all of us in the US would just commit suicide, the world would be all chocolate rivers and gumdrop trees”-A.L
No A.L, here’s where you are wrong. I do not confuse US foreign policy with the befuddled American public–most of whom haven’t the faintest idea what their government has done in their name elsewhere. I take issue with the elite sectors of our society (multi-national corporations, Wall Street, the arms industry, etc) and their apologists amongst the intelligentsia who define US foreign policy. I should remind you that the US is in bed with the most undemocratic, tyrannical regimes on earth of which Saudi Arabia is merely the worst example. And let’s not explore the death-squad “democracies†of Central and South America which, with critical US assistance, savagely repressed their populations in service to US capital throughout most of the 20th century. These policies did not serve my interests as an American citizen, however, they were manna from Heaven for the United Fruit Company, Standard Oil Company, and other select Wall Street titans to name just a few.
In the modern era our masters peddle vicious schemes such as NAFTA and the other so-called “free trade†agreements which subjugate the sovereignty of whole nations to the “needs†of multi-national corporations and their major investors in the “race to the bottom†for Shangri-La: a place were labor organizing is a capital offense and, if their luck holds, a WTO-imposed devil-may-care environmental policy.
“Let’s see – intervention to stop slaughter in Yugoslavia – UN approval? Nopeâ€-A.L
Our “intervention†in Yugoslavia had nothing to do with stopping a slaughter but everything to do with expanding NATO into Eastern Europe [and Eastern Europe into the maw of “globalizationâ€]. In fact, the NATO bombing served as the prompt for Serb actions [the ethnic-cleansing of Kosovo began AFTER the NATO air-assaults]. And yes A.L you are correct, this too was all done in violation of the UN Charter.
“When the UN evolves into a force with real authority – moral and political – I’m happy to talk about UN motions as some form of morally or legally binding lawâ€-A.L
So in other words we are operating pretty much as a rogue state then. Is that what you’re finally acknowledging? We and we alone may operate outside the boundaries of international law but no one else may exercise this “right†of course. Interesting.
“Saddam violated international law and norms of behavior by invading Kuwaitâ€-A.L
Saddam violated international law and norms of behavior by invading Iran [1980] yet curiously he received critical economic, diplomatic, and military support for his crimes from the US at the time. Suharto would benefit from similar US largess during the Indonesian atrocities in East Timor. Isn’t it funny (though certainly not for the victims) how murderous tyrants that serve the interests US capital get a pass? Let’s look at a few examples:
Cuba was just a sunny place for shady people under Batista, but became a “threat to our very survival†under Castro.
The Dominican Republic was such a fine place under that friendly Trujillo chap, but Juan Bosch and his program of land reform just had to go.
Venezuela let the good times roll under the likes of Gomez, Pérez Jiménez, and Caldera, but this Chavez fella just seems to have his head in the wrong place.
Quick, hide the children!! The Sandinistas are coming! Will a Somoza please save us from the Nicaraguan hordes?
We said yes to the Duvaliers in Haiti, but no to that meddlesome priest Aristide with all his damn popular support.
The Iranian people may have said Mossadegh, but WE said Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
Patrice Lumumba may have felt that an independent Congo with its vast resources should serve the needs of the Congolese—for once—and the masses may have been with him in this belief, however, WE helped engineer his slaughter and gave them Mobutu instead.
Chileans may have thought Allende was the answer, but WE knew far better than they that Pinochet was right the man for the job.
I could go on A.L but then MY fingers grow tired.
Be patient Wildmonk, I’ll get back to you soon enough.
I’ll weigh in another time. Consider the following item, from the Project for a New American Century, statement of principles (in part):
•we need to accept responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.
Such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next.
Elliott Abrams
Gary Bauer
William J. Bennett
Jeb Bush
Dick Cheney
Eliot A. Cohen
Midge Decter
Paula Dobriansky
Steve Forbes
Aaron Friedberg
Francis Fukuyama
Frank Gaffney
Fred C. Ikle
Donald Kagan
Zalmay Khalilzad
I. Lewis Libby
Norman Podhoretz
Dan Quayle
Peter W. Rodman
Stephen P. Rosen
Henry S. Rowen
Donald Rumsfeld
Vin Weber
George Weigel
Paul Wolfowitz
You were saying?
By the way, the Democrats are pretty much in line with this policy of American preeminence. Empire, anyone? But I guess you guys are okay with it.
Wildmonk, “consensual government and economic freedom are the only workable means of organizing a large, complex society.” I mostly agree, but let’s not turn this into a religious fervor.
I think the Chinese are proving otherwise. 20% annual wage growth, public education growth, an oil company bigger than Exxon (a reason for Iraq?) and ownership of a significant amount of our debt……………….
_I think the Chinese are proving otherwise. 20% annual wage growth, public education growth, an oil company bigger than Exxon (a reason for Iraq?) and ownership of a significant amount of our debt………………._
Yes, but just imagine what they’d be doing if they were democratic! They’d have probably run MicroSoft out of business by now. Not to mention Halliburton.
Coldtype – I appreciate your efforts and your list. I think you are right in some key areas and wrong in others. Let me make absolutely clear, however, that I do *not* support many of the actions taken in Central and South America during the 20th century. I’ve contributed money to Guatemalan reform efforts for essentially my entire adult life after reading Kwitny’s “Endless Enemies.”
What you seem to get right is that America has often acted according to the principles of realpolitik or, worse, the simple economic interests of certain influential players (Guatemala being the purest example in my book). What you get wrong is that you don’t see that all nations pursue their own interests and, in particular, that the Soviet Union did this with extraordinary ferocity. On that isolated measure, I guess you could draw up a case for moral equivalence. However, I disagree strongly with the proposition that our interests are always antithetic to the progress of other countries (Soviet interests, in contrast, were almost _always_ antithetic to progress).
Among the first rank of countries today, Germany, Japan, S. Korea and to an extent all of the countries that emerged victories from WWII are premier examples of a consonance between American interests and the good of the nations in which we intervened.
Among the countries that you list among your crimes of America, Chile is perhaps the best example why I think that you are _still_ wrong; especially when you contrast it to Cuba. There are two key factors that people ignore when they point to Chile and indict the US for its efforts against Allende. First, Allende was cut from the same cloth as Castro in Cuba and Chavez in Venezuela: he was well on his way toward suspending constitutional government and ruling by personal fiat. He already had made it quite clear that entire classes of people were going to suffer under his rule in the coming Chilean “utopia.” Pinochet, with some US help, shut down this power grab by implementing his own police state and “disappearing” thousands of his opponents. So isn’t that the same thing that Allende merely threatened? Well, no. That brings us to our second uncomfortable truth: Chile is now, arguably, the most successful country in South America. Compare the progress of economic and political freedoms in Chile with the complete lack of progress of Cuba.
In the one case, a nascent socialist revolution was stopped (brutally) and a new state – at first right wing and oppressive but, over time, democratic and progressive – was born. They _succeeded_ in the long run. In the Cuban case a communist revolution succeeded and the entire country has lived under a brutally oppressive government ever since. Please don’t respond with “health care is free” and “education is free” as if I don’t know that. These aren’t the only signposts of relevance (you know that) and, on many other indices including press freedoms, freedom of conscience, economic freedom and productivity, etc. Cuba is among the worst human rights violators on earth. Their suicide rate, among the worst in the Western hemisphere, and the desperate flight of many Cuban people to the U.S. is testament to how the people feel about their “Socialist Paradise.”
Is this a blanket approval for right-wing dictatorships? *Hell no* You are perceptive to point out that, in other cases, powerful right-wing oligarchies have manipulated our fear of communism to get us to support their brutal and oppressive tactics. In some cases (again, Guatemala being foremost) we’ve done so with the thinnest veneer of idealism and an obvious influence from powerful economic interests. So yes, Coldtype, we have to come to grips with the fact that “consensual government and economic freedom” as a principle is often manipulated by powerful interests in ways that are brutal, disgusting and extremely counterproductive. But it is equally important that you realize that the “socialist paradise” promised by people like Chavez and Castro *always* results in oppression and brutality _without end_.
This is an extremely hard problem: one approach, democratic capitalism, sucks a lot of the time but can lead to a successful, healthy state. The other approach, full Socialism, sucks always. The real kicker, however, is that land reform, workplace regulation and other progressive policies, when undertaken in measured doses with an eye toward the long-term enhancement of economic freedom, are the only means we know of to transform a right-wing oligarchy into a healthy and free state. How do you know when you’ve got a Castro and when you have Patricio Aylwin? (the first president after Pinochet)
So, to sum, what I *object* to is the reduction of this problem – on the part of you and Silber and others on this thread – to a simple-minded “easy” problem: where America is always the evil actor and every two-bit socialist dictator is the vanguard of the people. I object to you holding up the victims of Pinochet while ignoring the victims of Castro. I object to the one-sided America bashing that sows hatred rather than understanding. I object to intelligent people refusing to see that the projects they have historically promoted (e.g. Khomeni over the Shah) are often *worse* than the regimes that are overthrown.
Let us stand up for *all* victims and promote freedom for *all* people rather than simply arguing for “our side” regardless of the suffering it has sown. And let us do so with clarity of vision and hard skepticism for leftists who promise utopia and rightists pursuing economic gain. I would also ask you to recognize that, despite all the blood and tears that the real world inflicts on even idealistic implementations of consensual governance and free economic exchange under an umbrella of law, these are still the only realistic way forward.
coldtype, I’m really not interested in writing a point-by-point critique of Howard Zinn’s version of American history.
I’ll suggest that it a partial interpretation of a much more complex history; that it ignores (at minimum) the fact that the Soviet Union was supporting efforts to violently overthrow governments in Latin America in their own interest; it ignores the brutal history of Cuba postrevolution; yes everyone is literate, and some of them who use that literacy for things the regime doesn’t like – people who write things about Cuba like the things you write about the US – spend lots of time in little stone rooms getting treatment that would make a US interrogator blush with shame.
It’s a badly incomplete view, driven in large part by Bad Philosophy (search this site and my old site for an explanation) and a nostalgic overhang of a bunch of intellectuals for communism as they imagined it to be.
A.L.
Holy Utopia!
Looks like the Perfectionists are on the march, waving green banners and chanting, essentially, “Perfection is our God and Chomsky its prophet”.
A thousand pardons for the delay in responding Wildmonk. Our discussion reminds me of a similar one I had with a poster on my own site nearly a year ago about our impending assault on Iran. This gentleman posted under the “Fillmore†handle and, while we shared many points of agreement on US foreign policy, he could not accept my argument that our threatened actions against Iran were both morally indefensible and technically illegal. Before I respond directly to your comments Wildmonk, I think it would be helpful in identifying with greater precision where the fundamental differences in our philosophies are if I repost my response to Fillmore here since I feel you share many of his assumptions.
* * * *
The Moral Concept of Universality
Fillmore I suspect that we are bringing forth our arguments based on completely different assumptions and as a result we seem to be talking past one another. You see, I do not subscribe to the myth of American Exceptionalism which holds that our nation, unlike other nation-states, exercises its power only in pursuit of benevolent ends. There are virtual mountain ranges of evidence that suggests the precise opposite. Like every nation-state Fillmore, ours is one designed by and primarily for the powerful, not for those like you and I or most Americans for that matter.
I was first introduced to the concept of “universality†from the dissident writings of MIT professor Noam Chomsky. This simple moral concept holds that we bare responsibility for the consequences of our actions (or inaction). Furthermore, the concept of universality naturally requires that we be logically consistent in justifying our actions. Hence, if it is considered a crime for an official enemy to commit certain acts, then logic and elementary moral principles dictate that it is also a crime if we or forces with which we are allied commit the same acts. For example, how could the purveyors of elite public opinion in the US condemn the human rights abuses committed daily within the totalitarian regimes of Eastern Europe during the Cold War yet reserve nary a word in protest for far worst abuses within the US domains (South and Central America, Haiti & Dominican Republic, Indonesia, the Philippines, etc)?
On a related note, it is also a wasted effort (if not the height of hypocrisy) and of no benefit whatsoever for those living under tyranny (whom we hope to relieve) if we don’t direct our energies in directions that have some realistic hope of success. If our efforts are genuine then this should naturally be our only goal. For example, it makes little sense for us as American citizens to shake our fists in anger over the mistreatment of say the Chinese by their government (no doubt a fact) because we have no influence over that government and its internal decisions. Our protest would therefore be empty and of little moment for those whom we profess to defend. We cannot help them.
A far more effective use of our energies would be in applying pressure in areas where we can wield influence and effect change—our own government for example. So if it is our intention to relive the suffering of Iraqis then Washington is where we would begin. Likewise, if we wish to end the deplorable conditions under which the Palestinians live within the open sewer that is the illegally occupied West Bank and Gaza then, once again, Washington holds the key. Are you aware that the nation with the highest rate of human rights abuses in the Western Hemisphere—Colombia—also is the recipient of the largest share of US foreign (military) aid? These are people we can help Fillmore.
* * * *
Let’s now look at some of your comments Wildmonk:
“Yes, Saddam’s attempt to gain a stranglehold on Gulf Oil was a direct threat to the Developed Nations, including the US. Not all threats are mounted by rolling tanks into a foreign countryâ€-W
By “stranglehold†you imply that Saddam wished to keep [and drink perhaps?] the oil reserves of Kuwait. Well this doesn’t seem logical since the Developed Nations hold the world’s largest economies thus representing the greatest demand for the Middle East’s most important resource (specifically that of Iraq and Kuwait in this instance). The oil itself has no value unless it’s available to the market at large. Why would the West, the greatest consumer, be left out of the equation? As many have pointed out, once the oil hits the tankers and reaches the open sea it can (and does) go literally everywhere. So there was never any issue of availability at all, the whole point of refining petroleum is to sell it not keep it.
No Wildmonk, the real issue was the very same one that fueled the West’s (primarily the US & UK with critical Israeli assistance) campaign against Nasser and Arab nationalism decades earlier: who shall control and PROFIT from this resource? Answer: the western energy corporations at any and all cost.
“The legal pretext for the Iraqi war is the fact that Saddam reneged on the terms of armistice after the first gulf war. While France wanted, literally, to give him an 18th chance to comply with the terms, the US and England observed that there was ample legal pretext…calling the war “illegal” is simply wrong on its faceâ€-W
Wrong again Wildmonk. This is the standard argument dusted of by apologists for the US assault on Iraq when they cannot get around the fact that Team Bush launched the aggression without UN Security Council authority or a credible Article 51 rationale—the only justification for war in international law. For a look at the actual facts, as opposed to the steady stream of propaganda, let’s review Jonathan Schwarz’s point by point deconstruction of Michael Cohen’s defense of the US case for war. This was originally posted on Schwarz’s site, “A Tiny Revolution†back on 14 August 2007:
* * * *
Yesterday Atrios got into a blog dust-up with Michael Cohen, who posts at Democracy Arsenal. (Democracy Arsenal is a Democratic foreign policy group blog founded by Suzanne Nossel, who worked for Richard Holbrooke when he was US Ambassador to the UN. Michael Cohen was chief speechwriter for Chris Dodd as well as Bill Richardson when he was US Ambassador to the UN.)
The basic point of contention (see Atrios, Cohen, and Atrios again) is Cohen’s view that “Like it or not, there was a defensible case for war in Iraq.” Thus, Cohen feels that even though he personally opposed the war, liberal hawk war supporters like his friend Will Marshall shouldn’t be mocked. And Atrios doing so is “exactly what is wrong with some elements of the anti-war left — an inability and unwillingness to even consider the arguments of their opponents.” Cohen went on to ask bloggers to refrain from name-calling and instead “advance the debate.”
So, I’m going to take Cohen at his word and attempt to do that here. I’ll focus on this statement by Cohen, which is the heart of his argument:
“I’m not really interested in re-debating the rationale for the war in Iraq, although I will make a few important points, which have seemingly been forgotten:
• Saddam kicked out UN inspectors in 1997 and prevented them from doing their job for more than 5 years.
• It wasn’t just the US that believed Saddam had WMD. Read the UNSCOM reports, they make clear that the United Nations believed Iraq was not being honest about its WMD programs.
• The UN Security Council voted 15-0 in 2002 that Iraq was in “material breach” of UN resolutions regarding their WMD program. Moreover, the Council warned of “serious consequences” for continued Iraqi recalcitrance. (Read the UN resolution here).
So the UN Security Council did in fact determine that there was a “defensible case” for war in Iraq — it wasn’t just Will Marshall.â€
Each of these statements is either factually inaccurate or technically correct but highly misleading. However, I emphasize I’m not claiming Cohen is lying or arguing in bad faith; I’m simply pointing out he’s mistaken. Here are the details:
“Saddam kicked out UN inspectors in 1997”
_Inaccurate_.
In fact, the UN inspectors were withdrawn at the request of the US on December 16, 1998 (not 1997) after a report by UNSCOM stating that it still “did not enjoy full cooperation from Iraq.” The request was made so inspectors would not be endangered by Operation Desert Fox (named, weirdly enough, after Nazi general Erwin Rommel), a four day US/UK bombing campaign conducted December 16-19. The authoritative sources for this are the official UNSCOM chronology (see the December 16, 1998 entry), and The Greatest Threat by Richard Butler, then head of UNSCOM (Butler recounts his conversation with America’s acting UN Secretary Peter Burleigh on p. 210).
It was only after Desert Fox—which was undertaken with no UN authorization, and harshly criticized by France, Russia and China—that Iraq announced that it would not permit inspectors to return.
“[Saddam] prevented them from doing their job for more than 5 years”
_Highly misleading_.
First of all, it was known before the current war that UNSCOM accomplished a great deal, despite the very real obstructionism of Iraq. (For details of extensive Iraqi non-compliance with inspections, see the UNSCOM chronology.) Rolf Ekeus, Butler’s predecessor as head of UNSCOM from 1991-97, said in 2000 that “we felt that in all areas we have eliminated Iraq’s capabilities fundamentally.” More recently, Ekeus has stated he “was getting close to certifying that Iraq was in compliance with Resolution 687 [the original UN resolution requiring Iraqi disarmament].”
Secondly, and even more importantly, Iraq provided an explanation for its frequent non-compliance: it claimed the US and UK had infiltrated UNSCOM with spies who were attempting to overthrow the regime. For instance, this was the rationale given for Iraq’s October, 1997 demand that UNSCOM no longer include American personnel.
There are three critical points to be made about this:
(a) While the US called Iraq’s accusations “unfathomable,” Iraq was, in fact, correct. The Washington Post’s Barton Gellman reported extensively on the subject in March, 1999. (Gellman quotes Butler as telling a friend, “If all this stuff turns out to be true, then Rolf Ekeus and I have been played for suckers, haven’t we?”) Scott Ritter discusses details of US attempts to use UNSCOM for the purposes of a coup in chapter 13 of his book Iraq Confidential.
(b) We now know Iraq was telling the truth about its motivations for blocking inspections. For instance, one of the main instances of Iraqi non-compliance mentioned in the December 16, 1998 UNSCOM report was Iraq’s refusal to allow UNSCOM to inspect a Baath party headquarters. Indeed, Bill Clinton specifically mentioned the headquarters incident in his address to the nation on Desert Fox. Here is the Iraqi perspective, as reported in the CIA’s postwar WMD report:
Iraq engaged in denial and deception activities to safeguard national security and Saddam’s position in the Regime…Saddam was convinced that the UN inspectors could pinpoint his exact location, allowing US warplanes to bomb him, according to a former high-level Iraqi Government official. As a result, in late 1998 when inspectors visited a Baath Party Headquarters, Saddam issued orders not to give them access. Saddam did this to prevent the inspectors from knowing his whereabouts, not because he had something to hide…
(c) The US infiltration of UNSCOM, which of course was well known to the US government, was never mentioned by the Bush administration in the lead up to war. Instead, Iraqi obstructionism in the nineties was presented as completely illogical unless Iraq were [sic] hiding WMD. Moreover, it’s still being presented that way. Here’s Michael O’Hanlon in his recent interview with Glenn Greenwald:
[T]he circumstantial case that Saddam, who was one of the great users of chemical weapons in history as you know, would have voluntarily given these things up, when he refused to let inspectors verify the fact and therefore deprived himself and his country of tens of billions of dollars in oil revenue. It was just a very hard concept to believe.
In fact, anyone familiar with the circumstances should not have found it “a very hard concept to believe.” I found the idea that Saddam Hussein wouldn’t want US spies trying to kill him wandering around his palaces a very easy concept to believe—which is one of the reasons I was willing to bet someone $1000 that Iraq had nothing.
“It wasn’t just the US that believed Saddam had WMD. Read the UNSCOM reports, they make clear that the United Nations believed Iraq was not being honest about its WMD programs.”
_Highly misleading_.
Obviously the US officially “believed” that Saddam had WMD (although there’s never been an honest investigation into the pressure exerted on US analysts). It’s also the case that UNSCOM, officially speaking, believed that Iraq had never come completely clean about its WMD programs.
But the UN believing Iraq hadn’t come completely clean and the UN believing Iraq actually had WMD are two different things. An extremely important point to understand about UNSCOM and Iraq is that UNSCOM never discovered evidence of continuing Iraqi WMD programs after the Gulf War in 1991. What the UN wasn’t able to verify was that they had uncovered every last detail of what Iraq had done before 1991. Once again, here’s how Rolf Ekeus put it in 2000: “[W]e felt that in all areas we have eliminated Iraq’s capabilities fundamentally. There are some question marks left.”
Scott Ritter’s perspective is well known, of course. And here’s the view of Ron Cleminson, a Canadian member of UNSCOM:
“I used to say: ‘You know, we basically know amongst ourselves there are no weapons and we’re unlikely to find any’…My take on it is that this information was known, and in spades. But this stuff was being pushed on a political level. They [in Washington] were just absolutely ignoring what was obvious. My guess is that with full American cooperation and without all this politics, [UNSCOM’s mission] could have been wrapped up in three to four years.”
This by no means is to say that everyone at the UN believed Iraq had disarmed. Richard Butler, Ekeus’ successor, clearly did believe Iraq was hiding something substantial. And Hans Blix, Butler’s successor, has written that his initial “gut feeling” was Iraq had something (though Blix also says by early 2003 he and his team “became doubtful.”)
In any case, the UN simply cannot be enlisted as part of a claim that everyone agreed with the US.
“The UN Security Council voted 15-0 in 2002 that Iraq was in “material breach” of UN resolutions regarding their WMD program. Moreover, the Council warned of “serious consequences” for continued Iraqi recalcitrance. (Read the UN resolution here). So the UN Security Council did in fact determine that there was a “defensible case” for war in Iraq.”
_Partly inaccurate, partly highly misleading_.
It is, of course, true that UN resolution 1441 included language about Iraq being in “material breach” of its obligations and warned of “serious consequences.” However, it absolutely does not follow that the Security Council determined there was a “defensible case” for war. In fact, such a claim doesn’t make any sense. The Security Council is not in the business of declaring that a “defensible case” for war exists. Rather, it either grants authorization for war, or it does not. If the Security Council had wished to grant authorization for war, it would have used very specific language: that member states were permitted to use “all necessary means” to enforce the relevant resolutions. (For example, see paragraph 2 of UN Security Council Resolution 678, which authorized the Gulf War in 1991.)
And indeed, when 1441 was passed, Security Council members explicitly stated that they had voted for it in the belief it did not provide “automaticity” for the use of force. Instead, the resolution says that the Security Council would “remain seized of the matter”—i.e., the Security Council, and no one else, remained in charge of what happened next. Here’s John Negroponte, then US Ambassador to the UN:
The resolution contained…no “hidden triggers†and no “automaticity†with the use of force.
Jeremy Greenstock, UK Ambassador to the UN:
…there was no “automaticity†in the resolution. If there was a further Iraqi breach of its disarmament obligations, the matter would return to the Council for discussion.
France:
_If the inspection authorities reported to the Council Iraq had not complied with its obligations, the Council would meet immediately and decide on a course of action. France welcomed the lack of “automaticity†in the final resolution_.
Mexico:
_Those who had advocated the automatic recourse to the use of force had agreed to afford Iraq a final chance…The resolution had eliminated “automaticity†in the use of force as a result of material breach. He welcomed the acceptance of the two-stage approach_.
Joint statement by France, China and Russia:
_Resolution 1441 (2002) adopted today by the Security Council excludes any automaticity in the use of force. In this regard, we register with satisfaction the declarations of the representatives of the United States and the United Kingdom confirming this understanding in their explanations of vote…
In case of failure by Iraq to comply with its obligations…It will be then for the Council to take position on the basis of that report_.
So there’s really no question how 1441 was understood by the countries voting for it. Furthermore, just two weeks before the US and UK went to war without a second resolution (after Bush lied and claimed he’d demand a vote), the UK attorney general believed such a war would be illegal. Indeed, his assistant Elizabeth Wilmshurst ended up resigning because she believed the invasion would be a “crime of aggression.”
Later Kofi Annan said the invasion was illegal, as did even Richard Perle. Essentially the only people who earth who believe the war didn’t violate international law are George Bush and Tony Blair.
Finally, it’s worth pointing out that the Security Council “defensible case” gambit is not one Will Marshall or anyone else in the US foreign policy establishment is likely to embrace as a general principle. For example, by that standard, given the numerous UN resolutions that Israel has defied, any country on earth could claim authorization to attack them.
-J. Schwarz
* * * *
Due to the sheer volume of inaccuracies in your replies Wildmonk this will have to conclude part 1 of my response, part 2 (and possibly 3) will follow shortly. Until then be well.
_I do not subscribe to the myth of American Exceptionalism which holds that our nation, unlike other nation-states, exercises its power only in pursuit of benevolent ends. There are virtual mountain ranges of evidence that suggests the precise opposite._
Sure, but so what? The Exceptionalism thing helps some people feel better about it all, and also we do have a lot of idealists who *want* us to be benevolent, and they can interpret our general nonbenevolent behavior as something still to improve. So the idea makes us happier even if it’s wrong in practice.
_Like every nation-state Fillmore, ours is one designed by and primarily for the powerful, not for those like you and I or most Americans for that matter._
Of course, how could it be otherwise? However, we get some benefits from being citizens of this country which citizens of other countries don’t get. There are still advantages to being a US citizen even though we don’t live up to your ideals.
_I was first introduced to the concept of “universality†from the dissident writings of MIT professor Noam Chomsky. This simple moral concept holds that we bare responsibility for the consequences of our actions (or inaction)._
Of course we’re all responsible to God. But who can hold us responsible in this world? We’re a superpower. Being a superpower means never having to say you’re sorry.
_Furthermore, the concept of universality naturally requires that we be logically consistent in justifying our actions. Hence, if it is considered a crime for an official enemy to commit certain acts, then logic and elementary moral principles dictate that it is also a crime if we or forces with which we are allied commit the same acts._
Same objection applies. We don’t have to be logically consistent unless there’s somebody who can make us be logically consistent. We’re a superpower so the usual rules don’t apply to us.
_it makes little sense for us as American citizens to shake our fists in anger over the mistreatment of say the Chinese by their government (no doubt a fact) because we have no influence over that government and its internal decisions. Our protest would therefore be empty and of little moment for those whom we profess to defend. We cannot help them._
But it helps our government when we express our support for them and against their enemies. Every time we do a Two Minute Hate against the chinese it reinforces the idea that we’re good and they’re bad and everything we do is right and everything they do is wrong. Even if we aren’t enough of a superpower to invade china and set up a government there we like, still it shows we want to.
_A far more effective use of our energies would be in applying pressure in areas where we can wield influence and effect change—our own government for example._
Assuming we can actually influence our government, are you sure it’s a good thing? You can’t let amateurs run a superpower however they feel like. It takes experts to do that. You aren’t qualified to say what needs to be done, you should leave that to foreign policy experts. In theory the choice for you to make is whether you want us to be a superpower at all. But I believe the large majority of the US public wants us to be the only superpower, and their complaint about the current administration is that it appears to do it incompetently.
“The legal pretext for the Iraqi war is the fact that Saddam reneged on the terms of armistice after the first gulf war. While France wanted, literally, to give him an 18th chance to comply with the terms, the US and England observed that there was ample legal pretext…calling the war “illegal” is simply wrong on its faceâ€-W
_Wrong again Wildmonk. This is the standard argument dusted of by apologists for the US assault on Iraq when they cannot get around the fact that Team Bush launched the aggression without UN Security Council authority or a credible Article 51 rationale—the only justification for war in international law._
We make a pretense of accepting rule of law because it’s a polite and friendly way to talk. In reality, what difference does it make to anybody whether there was really a good excuse under international law? Saddam made an excuse under international law that we rejected so we fought the Gulf war. Who’s going to go to war about our excuse? Nobody. The UN eventually caved in and recognised our occupation because they’d look ridiculous to say they opposed it when there wasn’t anything they could do about it. And they hoped to get some minimal leverage with us out of the deal, but they didn’t.
I guess it makes a difference to you. You get to argue with people about it and be right. Well — if you’re right, _and_ you’re a superpower, then you get to invade any country you want that’s too weak to resist.
_[snip very long correct explanation showing our government was being quite misleading to us about iraq over 5+ years before 2003]_
Sure. But we’re a superpower. Our government *can* lie to us, so it *does* lie to us. More convenient for the government that way.
And it isn’t just that most of us accept being lied to. A lot of us believe that when they find out the government is lying to them, it’s *unpatriotic* for them not to believe it anyway. They go on repeating lies because they think it’s patriotic to do that. To the extent that we aren’t actually a superpower, to the extent that we have deadly enemies who can gravely hurt us on a moment’s notice, we do better to all support the government however the government wants to be supported, whatever the government chooses to do. Remember, you aren’t an expert and only government experts who have access to the deepest secrets know whether we ought to attack iran. It’s unpatriotic for you to disagree.
—-
There’s one fundamental choice that determines all the others. If you’re loyal to the superpower then you have to go along with whatever the superpower wants. We can perhaps have room for disagreement after there are no more deadly enemies like iraq, iran, north korea, or china. But until then we have to accept whatever the superpower chooses. It would damage security for the superpower to tell you the secrets that could let you make an informed choice.
If you’re loyal to the way the USA used to be but not loyal to the superpower then you’ve chosen the other way. To do that you must accept risks. It’s possible that some enemy might nuke US cities or even invade us, and without a multi-billion-dollar espionage outfit and an even more expensive military and so on, we can’t prevent it. You have to accept that we won’t control the world and that bad things might happen outside our control.
Probably the worst approach is to fall between the two stools. If we run enough of a superpower to make the rest of the world mad at us, but not enough to defeat the rest of the world, then we lose big. Being undecided about whether to be the superpower that threatens the rest of the world is the worst choice. When we let our mouth write checks that our stealth bombers can’t cover.
It really bugged me when we defeated iraq and Cheney announced to the world that syria and iran were next. Even if he knew the plans were prepared and the mission status was go and everything was fine, he shouldn’t have announced it like that. Now it’s nearly 5 years later and Operation Iranian Freedom isn’t there, the closest we come to something effective involves a limited war with tactical nukes and no occupation. We look weak and stupid. He didn’t have to make those threats.
It was political theater. These guys aren’t serious about running a superpower, they’re thinking small-time politics. The only thing big-time about them is the graft. I’m afraid we’d fall in the middle with an ineffective superpower even if we gave them full support.
What a mess.
This thread looks to be dying as it falls off of the rotation so I’ll not write another extended reply ColdType. But almost everything about our disagreement can be summarized in this exchange:
My comment:
“Yes, Saddam’s attempt to gain a stranglehold on Gulf Oil was a direct threat to the Developed Nations, including the US. Not all threats are mounted by rolling tanks into a foreign countryâ€
You say:
‘By “stranglehold†you imply that Saddam wished to keep [and drink perhaps?] the oil reserves of Kuwait. Well this doesn’t seem logical since the Developed Nations hold the world’s largest economies thus representing the greatest demand for the Middle East’s most important resource (specifically that of Iraq and Kuwait in this instance). The oil itself has no value unless it’s available to the market at large. ‘
This is just substituting a straw-man, my friend. Saddam doesn’t gain a ‘stranglehold’ by taking the supply off the market (“drinking it” as you say) although he could so significant pain over the short term by doing so. The point is that, were he to take control of enough of the market (e.g. Iraqi, Kuwaiti, and Saudi production), he becomes a market maker and thus able to gain inordinate control over pricing and availability. He also takes control over a flood of money with which he can buy an extraordinary amount of influence. Now, if the Swedes had this much oil revenue, I would not worry as much. But when a malign tyrant like Saddam then, yes, I think it entirely reasonable to point out the threat. Of course, to believe this, you have to be in the habit of thinking strategically while recognizing that information is uncertain and mistakes are inevitable.
With all this being said, your argument does not seem to me to be serious. Instead, you seem intent on getting to the almost obligatory snipe that its all about “corporate profits.”
By the way (I know I said I’d only mention one thing but I can’t resist), the problem with Chomsky’s arguments vis a vis Universality aren’t in the principle. Universality is quite reasonable as a guide to proper international action and we do indeed bear responsibility for our actions.
The problem with your application of Universality goes right to the heart of this entire thread as first introduced by A.L. and captured in Silber’s essay: you ONLY apply the principle of universality to America. It appears to me that, within your style of argument, _no other party is ever responsible_. Furthermore, no positive outcomes are _every admitted_ when American intervention has borne the fruit of freedom and progress (Germany and all of Europe, Japan, Korea, support for the overthrow of Marcos and a host of other tyrants, etc. etc.) Instead, there is always the “Yes, but” followed by the inevitable observation that someone, somewhere also materially benefitted (usually a “corporation”).
To close let me ask you a favor: the next time you are reading about “high crimes” committed by America, ask yourself whether you are not too easily falling into the mental trap of seeing the whole world through green-colored glasses (seeing everything in terms of the greed of the players involved). That is, ask whether idealism isn’t at least a reasonable explanation for some of the things that you are seeing and whether “profit” is _always_ the only motive. You might be surprised how often “muddling through trying to figure out or defend a principle” explains a lot more than some conspiracy theory about a cabal pulling strings behind the scenes.
Coldtype: good work.
_You might be surprised how often “muddling through trying to figure out or defend a principle” explains a lot more than some conspiracy theory about a cabal pulling strings behind the scenes._
“muddling through trying to figure out or defend a principle” can be used to explain *anything*. Similarly, conspiracy theories can be made to explaine anything.
This is useless. A theory that can explain anything that happens does not actually explain anything.
One individual conspiracy theory might be tested. It will predict specific conspirators; they could be kidnapped and tortured into revealing information. It will predict specific events that can be reconstructed and perhaps found to be impossible.
One individual “muddling through” theory cannot be tested. “At this point Bush is showing Principle A. Now here, later, he’s given up Principle A and he’s looking for a new principle. By this point on the timeline he’s discovered Principle B and he’s using that. Now this sequence is interesting, he’s switching between A and C, with the occasional B & D thrown in, because he’s trying to muddle through. You can explain anything he does by a series of changes of heart.
But the theory that it’s about what’s in his gut can be tested. Get a record of what he’s been eating and check it out. “Here’s what he did after he ate the pizza. That gives him gas, and see — he started talking about Saddam’s chemical warfare. Over here is the garlic pastrami, it produces nightmares, and see how he accuses the Democrats of stopping him!”
It’s better not to use explanatory principles. It’s better not to even argue with people who use explanatory principles. Just walk away.
J Thomas – your post brought a smile. You are indeed correct although, in my own defense, I was really attempting a bit of soft derision at the idea that evil conspiracy theories explain very much. We all live in a state of profound informational uncertainty and it is easy to simply project our own fears onto the world.
One of the dominant theories of consciousness (I hold a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psych) is that humans almost never practice predictive reasoning. Instead, we act to satisfy our emotional urges and then use our reason to clean up afterwards. Intelligent people are simply better at self-justification.
Thus, when I read people ranting on about “corporate crimes” or, the rightist variant, “communist conspiracies” etc. etc. it just strikes me that the purveyor is just trying to fill a powerful need to impose order on the world. Not that either theory lacks for real-world evidence, it’s just nowhere near powerful enough to explain everything it is called upon to explain (Marxist Class Theory is a spectacular example of this).
I’m getting some sort of blacklist effect that makes it very hard to post.
Thank y*u! The banned words were “Thank y*u”.
Wildm@nk, thank y*u! Yes, people tend to see what they want to see, and what can we do about that?
Given that we’re k@ndred sp@rits, I want to look at your last response.
You point out that S@ddam could get extra b@nefits from a lot of oil, not just the money from selling it. As a m@rketm@ker he could have a lot of control over the price, and also he’d get some control over who gets it. Anyone he refuses to sell to has to buy from a r@stricted market that might sell higher because of the r@duced choice.
This is all true. You have pointed out a problem with the argument that free trade between the USA and smaller ec@nomies will be fair or even a little bit fair. Further, given the threat of invasion or s@nctions, they might have to agree to d@als that are worse than no d@al at all. The logic that’s true for our enemies is true for us too, unless we make it untrue.
You suggested Saddam getting the oil from iraq, kuwait, and saudi arabia. I don’t think it’s plausible he’d get saudi arabia. As a practical matter, when he invaded kuwait he didn’t have any plans on SA and his army was not at all prepared to go farther. He could have prepared to invade saudi arabia later if we didn’t intervene, but we did intervene and after the Gulf War he was never in shape to invade kuwait or SA again.
But more than that. Saddam was running a dictatorship. Dictators are good at stopping initiative among their people, but they aren’t usually that good at encouraging initiative. A dictator must try to give initiative to people he thinks are personally loyal to him and deny it to everyone else. The natural result is that they tend to produce m*ckey-m*use economies. The people who would otherwise try to make smart decisions instead try to make defensible decisions. Dictators often also wind up with m*ckey-m*use armies, though sometimes the generals etc try to make their military strong regardless out of patriotism. (Cf USSR under Stalin, germany under Hitler, etc. Do a good job and get purged or do a bad job and maybe lose a war. A lot of generals got purged.)
It usually isn’t enough for a dictator to point his arm and say “Conquer that country over there for me.” He needs to get his people enthusiastic about the idea or he’ll get a m*ckey-mo*se invasion. Saddam got that for kuwait. A lot of iraqis believed that kuwait was part of iraq, unfairly split off by the british. Saddam claimed that kuwait was trying to make iraq poor by dumping oil to keep the price down and worse, stealing iraqi oil to dump to keep the price down. Iraqis were glad to follow him to war with kuwait. There was no argument for invading SA.
On the other side, the arab world was not particularly interested in helping the emir of kuwait. But they very well might care about muslim shrines taken over by a secular dictator. It would be hard for Saddam if he didn’t take all of SA; it would be hard for him if he did. Normally of course the saudis wouldn’t want foreign armies in their country at all, but if the US hadn’t intervened they could have brought in large numbers of egyptians. Saddam would have had a very hard time conquering SA even without US opposition.
But all that aside, we need to get less dependent on oil. It is a declining resource. And low oil prices are a big barrier to our finding alternatives. If Saddam didn’t raise prices we owed it to ourselves to do it. Schumpeter claimed that m*nopolies in established technologies help new technologies get their foothold. (He argued that m*nopolies are good for the economy because of that. M*nopoly in a mature industry helps us break the stranglehold that mature industry has gained. He might not be right but he’s talking about just exactly our situation.)
_you ONLY apply the principle of universality to America. It appears to me that, within your style of argument, no other party is ever responsible._
Is that true? It certainly isn’t true for the nation. We revile and occasionally do acts of war against other countries that violate certain “principles”. We armed the mujahedin against the USSR which had invaded them without due process. We bombed one side in an ethnic-cleansing issue in the balkans. We attacked iraq twice, conquering the country once. We applied stricked monetary policies to various debt*r nations, strickening them with sometimes vast economic hardship.
But we are now the world’s biggest debt*r nation, and we’re doing these various things we’ve punished others for. You can say that Coldtype ought to spend more time about how we were right to punish the others for what we’re getting away with, but why should he bother? Most of those are in the past, we’ve already punished them for it. I guess it would make some sense, though.
“The USSR invaded afghanistan without due process and we gave advanced weapons to the muj to stop them. We were right to do that! We invaded iraq without due process and we’ve threatened iran and russia to warn them not to give weapons to the iraqis. Why are we right this time?” Should he say it something like that?
“Mexico owed too much money and we imposed an economic solution on them that left millions of people doing subsistence farming — no medical care, no electricity, no jobs, no money, nothing. We were right! We owe more per capita today. Shouldn’t we impose that solution on ourselves?”
Do you want him to write in that style instead of using a little bit of shorthand? Or is there some deeper objection?
Thanks for responding.
I agree with much of what you wrote. In hindsight, Saddam probably could not have taken SA for the reasons that you point out. At the time, however, (and even up to the 2003 invasion) I remember a fair number of press outlets talking about Saddam’s army as being the “third most powerful in the world” with their extensive experience in the Iran/Iraq war, their WMD experience and their large troop levels. That was the foundation for my belief that Saddam had the *potential* to threaten disruption or control of much of the world’s oil supply.
Upon reflection, I gave too much credence to this possibility and for exactly the reasons that you point out. I think it behooves all of us to cast a skeptical eye to stories we hear about the viciousness and growing power of the enemy of the week (as an aside, I’m reading “God and Gold” right now and the author made the same points in the Chapter I read last night as you have made above).
Regarding Bush’s mindset, though, keep in mind a few things. If you’ve ever participated in military/strategic planning exercises, one of the things that you try to do is to control the “feed” (resources, information and even motivation) that inflates the military potential of your opponent. This is the thinking behind pre-emption: stop the opponent in the early stages of bulking up and you’ll never have to face a desperate fight.
The problem, of course, with looking at the world through the prism of military/strategic planning is that it tends to boil problems down to military ones. After 9/11, I think it is pretty clear that this was the trajectory of the thinking in the Bush administration.
I seriously don’t believe that Bush sought war with Iraq to enrich “buddies” in Halliburton, Exxon/Mobil, etc. and it bothers me when I hear people making this assertion. I’ve known enough reasonably wealthy and powerful people well enough that this doesn’t really make sense to me (and yes, I do realize that this kind of war for resources has indeed happened in the past and that the potential is still quite real – it just doesn’t strike me as likely in this scenario).
I think it much more likely that Bush and his administration were simply following a military/strategic arc from the day the towers came down. They arrived at a set of beliefs about the feasibility of installing a consensual government in Iraq and the benefits of doing so that had the virtues of being coherent, that told a good story (“we’ll be greeted as liberators”) and that had a happy ending (“democracy in the middle east diminishes the desperation that spawns extremism”). Without overwhelming evidence that they were wrong on any single point, they simply weren’t going to leave the evolution of Iraq to chance. Having a bully pulpit from which to preach, they were going to use it. Having a well-defined set of reasons for ignoring Russia and France in the security council (and anti-war types in the street), they gave little credence to their objections. This could be taken as criticism or as defense of Bush but I mean it as neither: its just the best take I have on what actually went on.
The problem was that this mindset persisted in the face of evidence that a) Saddam was not as big a threat as he was meant to be and b) that the reconstruction was not going as intended after the invasion was completed. As the William Langewiesche of the Atlantic wrote, the problem isn’t that Bush lied to the American people, it is that he lied to himself.
—
On to a few more of your points:
We do indeed need to get off of our dependence on oil. I don’t think that there is any single strategic pursuit that is more important than that at this point.
With respect to Universality, I see your point about Americans in general: we do indeed see other countries’ failings and often indulge in quite a bit of theater as we point them out. My point was really more about Chomsky for example, and Silber/Coldtype. They seem to use the concept in a very one-directional way.
So I guess I *would* like to see Coldplay and others like him present things in the manner that you laid out. For example, there *are* some important distinctions between Afghanistan under the Soviets and Iraq under the US. Yes, we armed the muj (or at least the Northern Alliance – we did not arm OBL – Pakistan’s ISI did that). But I simply didn’t see the Soviets trying to build a consensual government as we’re trying to do in Iraq. To me this makes a world of difference and I am amazed that that doesn’t seem to make a difference to them.
The way they avoid this conclusion, of course, is to claim that we are *not* there to help create a consensual government or, worse yet, that consensual governments and the free economic systems they usually spawn are themselves evil (“No War for Oil! No War for Corporate Cronies!”). This makes no sense: if you read the mil-bloggers and folks like Michael Yon or Michael Totten rather than just paging through The Nation, I think it will be pretty clear what our true objectives are. Of course, I also have 5 years of Naval Intelligence work under my belt so that gives me a different perspective as well.
So, I’m willing to criticize Bush for failings of execution and I’m willing to defend the position that we’re too quick to go to war or to impose our will on other nations. However, the whole mindset that we’re bloodthirsty savages out to rape other countries for a quick buck seems nauseatingly biased and obviously wrong on its face.
“This thread looks to be dying as it falls off of the rotation so I’ll not write another extended reply ColdType.”-WM
This is nothing more than a reserved cop-out. What exactly are you ‘in this’ for? Attention?
How pathetic.
_I think it much more likely that Bush and his administration were simply following a military/strategic arc from the day the towers came down._
It’s always hard when you try to figure out what somebody else really wants. Was our intention in iraq to control the oil, or to stop Saddam before he got stronger, or to protect israel, or to create democracy in the middle east, or to get military bases we could use to control the oil, or create a mission for our military with the USSR gone, or get a short-term political advantage, or what? Different people wanted different things.
In a complex government lots of people have the chance to delay an aggressive war. Politicians listen to their constituents. Businessmen who think the war will be bad for business will complain, if they think it will be bad for them. Soldiers who don’t see a good outcome will complain. Religious leaders who think it’s wrong will complain. Etc. And people who want it for their own reasons will push it. The more different reasons that converge, the more likely we attack.
When we say “Government X wants to do Y” what it ought to be is shorthand for “I’m afraid that Government X may soon be able to do Y and they might in fact do Y”.
_The problem, of course, with looking at the world through the prism of military/strategic planning is that it tends to boil problems down to military ones. After 9/11, I think it is pretty clear that this was the trajectory of the thinking in the Bush administration._
Yes, I agree. Whatever the ultimate reasons, it boiled down to “they wanted to invade iraq”. They got the capability to do it and they did it, despite all the reasons that might have persuaded them not to.
_I seriously don’t believe that Bush sought war with Iraq to enrich “buddies” in Halliburton, Exxon/Mobil, etc. and it bothers me when I hear people making this assertion._
I see that more as a structural thing. The Halliburton guys wanted a war to make them money and get them deeper embedded in supplying the military, so to the extent they got a voice in it they were for war. How much did they influence Cheney? I don’t see any way to find out. Restate that as “I’m afraid that Halliburton is getting more chances to make a lot of money from our military and more chances to supply services that no one else can supply, and they are actually doing so.”
_We do indeed need to get off of our dependence on oil. I don’t think that there is any single strategic pursuit that is more important than that at this point._
We agree! What can government do to aid this? I see two approaches, punish people for using too much oil and reward people for using less. The two could work together. When we subsidise oil use we work against getting independent of oil.
_My point was really more about Chomsky for example, and Silber/Coldtype. They seem to use the concept in a very one-directional way._
We have plenty of people who use it only in the other direction, so it doesn’t look liks such a problem to me. But I’ll try to tip off anybody I see using that sort of argument about your preferences. It could make a difference.
_But I simply didn’t see the Soviets trying to build a consensual government as we’re trying to do in Iraq. To me this makes a world of difference and I am amazed that that doesn’t seem to make a difference to them._
Democracy in england started out as democracy for aristocrats only. The peasants had to trust their own lord and master to take care of them, and they tended to put up with that. Having a parliament probably reduced the number of small wars where peasants got killed, which was a plus. Not as many wars of noble against noble, not only because the king had a strong army, but because they could take their grievances to the whole group and if the majority was strongly against them they could expect to lose.
Afghanistan has a bunch of fighters who trust their leaders. They don’t need to elect those leaders. If they didn’t trust them they’d join somebody else. I doubt they really see the advantages of effete democracy yet. The soviets tried to build a modern economy, and they failed. That was a different big deal.
Democracy says if you don’t trust your leaders you can get rid of them without violence. That’s a plus. Communism says if you trust the leadership they’ll build a great economy. That’s a different plus and it took a long time for people to stop trusting them to do that.
It would be good if we could offer afghans democracy and also a modern economy and also freedom for islam to enforce decent moral standards. Offer them all the most important things and they’ll probably go along. But we can’t do that.
_The way they avoid this conclusion, of course, is to claim that we are not there to help create a consensual government or, worse yet, that consensual governments and the free economic systems they usually spawn are themselves evil … ._
“I’m afraid we will put in all this effort and they won’t wind up with a consensual government.” What we’re there for is an abstraction that might not have immediate influence on what we’re doing at the moment.
_This makes no sense: if you read the mil-bloggers and folks like Michael Yon or Michael Totten rather than just paging through The Nation, I think it will be pretty clear what our true objectives are._
We’re there to kill Taliban, that’s a central thing. If we want consensual government, why not let Taliban run for office and state their case? Only go military on them when they do nonconsensual attacks. But we aren’t there for that much consensual government. We want consensual government after we win. (By which I mean, “I’m afraid we aren’t trying for consensual government with people who disagree with us, as evidenced by our actions so far.”
See, if consensual government works, then every Taliban we can get to spend his time politicking is a Taliban we don’t need to kill. He’s participating in peaceful government. But from a military view that would mean letting him spread propaganda, and we’d be afraid his propaganda was so effective that we’d have to stop him. Consensual government looks like it isn’t our biggest priority. It’s a rather low priority so far.
_So, I’m willing to criticize Bush for failings of execution and I’m willing to defend the position that we’re too quick to go to war or to impose our will on other nations._
I tend to agree with that. There’s a problem for our military that when we go too long without a war we tend to cut the budget. But when we fight too long we put too much of the budget into the fighting and not enough into preparation for the next fight. We need a better way to set the military budget.
_However, the whole mindset that we’re bloodthirsty savages out to rape other countries for a quick buck seems nauseatingly biased and obviously wrong on its face._
Perhaps they’ve looked too much at our history with latin america. I think that view is somewhat biased but it’s easy to see that side of it when you look at the evidence. I think sometimes we’ve been too quick to overthrow third world nations. Suppose that they did set up a government that was too socialist, say. We could wait and then when they eliminate democracy and their people don’t like what they’re doing, we could support an insurgency. That was the original function of our special forces. We used them for counterinsurgency in vietnam because the insurgents were against us. But we got to use them as designed in afghanistan against the russians and in kuwait against Saddam. We could have used them in the philippines against Marcos but instead we supported Marcos until he absolutely couldn’t hold things together and then we helped him run away.
I think it would be better for us to wait until an undemocratic nation has a majority of their people against the government, and then give them minimal help to overthrow the bad government and set up a democracy. They could say they did it all themselves, no need to highlight our role. That’s the kind of democracy promotion that I expect would work.
But if we had a lot of people in the discussion some of them would be explaining why we have to control things. A lot of americans really want democracy in other countries on the assumption that they will agree with us about everything. As soon as they see differences of opinion then they want democracy for the enlightened ones who want to do what we want. Bremer stopped pushing democracy in iraq as soon as he saw religious parties getting power. Etc.
“Intelligent people are simply better at self-justificationâ€
-Wildmonk
How perceptive of you Wildmonk. In many ways you verify Chomsky’s dictum: It takes a very good education not to perceive the true aims of US foreign policy.
“The problem with your application of Universality goes right to the heart of this entire thread as first introduced by A.L. and captured in Silber’s essay: you ONLY apply the principle of universality to America. It appears to me that, within your style of argument, no other party is ever responsibleâ€
-Wildmonk
It’s clear now that you do not fully grasp the concept of Universality. Furthermore, it is not my duty as an American citizen to address the behavior (or misbehavior) of foreign states. My responsibility is in addressing the crimes of my own country.
I think it would be more productive if I restrict my critique of the “American Exceptionalism†myth (for in truth this is what you’re advocating) to just one example rather than write an entire book on correcting your misrepresentations of the Vietnam conflict, the US overthrow of Allende, Chavez and the Venezuelan shift to the Left, the Cold War, etc. The US pattern of domination and conquest is so consistent that, as Chomsky has often noted, it takes a very good education not to see it. Of course our victims are not afforded this luxury.
In fact, I would like to shift my focus away from our ongoing crimes in the Middle East entirely and direct my attention to a comment you wrote in an earlier post:
“I have no idea where you come up with the wild assertion that the US reintroduced slavery to the Western Hemisphere when it occupied Haiti in 1918 and I strongly doubt that you’ve captured the truth about what happened thereâ€
-Wildmonk
Of all of your comments Wildmonk, I must confess that I found this one to be the most offensive. Not because I believe that you are consciously being obtuse about one of the most shameful episodes in our nation’s history, but because this comment so perfectly illustrates how proudly ignorant we Americans are of our past. Our governments are responsible for the slaughter of millions of human beings around the world (and seek to add more to the list), yet all most Americans can muster is bovine indifference—or apologetics.
None of America’s many “interventions†during the 20th century could surpass the rapaciousness of its invasion and occupation of Haiti during the years 1915 through 1934. I purposely selected Haiti in the examination of American Empire that follows because nowhere so perfectly illustrates the greed, hypocrisy, and apologetics that underpin American aggression around the globe. In US-occupied Haiti one finds the same convenient rationalizations [civilizing mission, promoting democracy, excessive idealism] justifying our current incursion in Mesopotamia as in all the others—without exception.
*Undermining Democracy: US Terror in Haiti*
It has often been noted that US dominance of the world both militarily and economically began in earnest following the Second World War, however, American dominance of Central America and the Caribbean began a half century earlier. By 1900, the Central American republics were little more than American business possessions run by local military elites or oligarchies operating in a caretaker capacity. The US would establish complete dominance of these regions economically and politically and, by 1917, would extend this model into the Caribbean. This would be most successfully accomplished in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, and of course in the outright US possessions of Puerto Rico, St Thomas, and the Virgin Islands. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman in their seminal study of American imperialism, _The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism: The Political Economy of Human Rights Vol. 1_ noted a consistent pattern which soon emerged wherever US Marine expeditionary forces disembarked to “restore orderâ€. This phenomenon included the reorganization of the military and police forces of the target country and the redirection of its economy towards satisfying the requirements of US investors—a practice continued through the present day (Chomsky & Herman, 243). The critical necessity for US control of the indigenous military apparatus within its Central American and Caribbean possessions served the obvious purpose of protecting undemocratic client regimes (devoid of popular support) and assisting them in their task of keeping the region safe for US investors.
In 1804 Haiti, renamed by the former slaves after their hard-won emancipation, would become only the second republic to declare its independence in the Western Hemisphere after the United States of America. Unlike America, however, Haiti would remain diplomatically isolated and ostracized throughout the remainder of the 19th century. As the first successful slave revolt in recorded human history, Haiti would represent perhaps the first “threat of a good example†in the hemisphere and this event could not be allowed to infect the profitable slave operations of the neighboring West Indian islands or the American south—all of which formed the engine of early 19th century mercantilism.
C.L.R James in his classic study of the San Domingo Revolution, _The Black Jacobins_, writes the following about the then colony of France on the eve of the French Revolution:
“In 1789 the French West Indian colony of San Domingo supplied two-thirds of the overseas trade of France and was the greatest individual market for the European slave tradeâ€
The fantastic profits enjoyed by French elites from the produce of the San Domingo charnel house were not lost on France’s imperial rivals. The colony’s principal value lay in its abundance of both fertile soil and slaves. On the backs of those 500,000 slaves would rest the fortunes of France—or whoever could relieve her of this bounty.
The repercussions of the French Revolution would arrive with devastating impact on San Domingo because the slaves had been following developments and had drawn the obvious conclusions—Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity should apply to them as well (James, 83). By August of 1791, the slaves of San Domingo would revolt and forever change the course of their history. Before any of this could occur, however, the slaves would have to defeat in turn the local whites and the French Royal troops, the Spanish from neighboring Santo Domingo, a British expeditionary force of 60,000 troops, and finally a French invasion force of similar size under Leclerc utilizing battle plans personally prepared by Napoleon himself (James, ix). All of these campaigns against the rebellious slaves had the following objectives: the reinstitution of slavery and the return of the colony to profitability. The latter depended completely upon the former. The slaves’ savage twelve year struggle led by Toussaint L’Ouverture and completed by Dessalines would reduce their number by one third, but for the survivors their greatest fear—slavery’s return—had finally been overcome. Fortunately this generation of slaves, the first to remove their own chains, would not live to see how misguided they had been. Capital, in the form of American investors buttressed by US Marines, had plans for Haiti yet.
The consequence of the slaves’ temerity to declare their own freedom was a crushing indemnity owed to France for the “loss of property†which would grow to 21.7 billion dollars and require a century to pay off. At the time of independence, Haitians were not prepared to meet the technical requirements of running a national economy and her leaders realized early on that if their society was to remain viable then outside assistance was essential. The first priority was the need for capital with which to purchase goods and services not locally available. While most nations refused to acknowledge Haiti’s independence, there were no barriers to providing lines of credit and selling manufactured goods to the fledgling government. This “financial assistance†would be the critical inroad by which western powers—first France, then Germany, followed finally by the US—would inexorably obtain control of Haitian sovereignty.
Never forgetting the specter slavery, Dessalines and the framers of the first Haitian Constitution insured that the document included a provision that only Haitian citizens could own land in Haiti. Hans Schmidt notes in his book, _The United States Occupation of Haiti, 1915-1934_ that this was devised as a bulwark against foreign domination. While Haiti would remain desperately poor throughout the rest of the 19th century, it still belonged for the most part to the Haitian people. If Haiti was to become “profitable†again in the capitalist sense of that term, then Haitian sovereignty must necessarily come to an end. The colony of San Domingo was lucrative precisely because it had been designed for massive agro-export through the brutal exploitation of workers without rudimentary human rights. Independence reversed this completely, for Haitians now worked and lived for their own needs. Haiti instituted a land-tenure system that made freeholders of the former slaves and their progeny. While this system was of course “unprofitable†most Haitians quite naturally had different priorities. The continued freedom and well being of Haitians, however, was of absolutely no concern to western powers salivating over France’s misfortunes. The soil of Haiti was still fertile and Negroes with strong backs were everywhere to dig profits out of that soil—provided they were properly “motivatedâ€. This was perfectly understood by Dessalines and the other founders of Haiti’s independence. Thus their Constitution went to extraordinary lengths to insure Haitian sovereignty against foreign encroachment (Schmidt, 11). This would all change of course with the US invasion and occupation, but the method by which American control was obtained is instructive.
The first significant American investments in Haiti were in concessions to build railroads in 1876. American investors attempted to use the country’s proximity to Haiti and the islands of the Caribbean in general to dominate regional trade. The US State Department, in response to their demands, attempted to gain exclusive competitive advantages for American products (Schmidt, 36). By the late 19th century, enterprising Germans were successfully challenging US commerce in Haiti and the State Department’s diligent attempts to pressure the Haitian government into granting American manufacturers preferential concessions were met with failure (Schmidt, 45).
The McKinley administration adopted a more successful strategy when it encouraged American manufacturers to adapt their products for the Haitian market and, more importantly, offer more liberal credit terms (Schmidt, 43). This would lead directly to heavy American investment in Haitian railroad schemes which ultimately came to a head when the Haitian government, corrupt as it had become, refused to pay for work that had not been performed on “railroads†that led nowhere. The American investors (with State Department support) nevertheless demanded payment.
Several factors worked against continued Haitian sovereignty by this time. One was the rampant and systematic corruption that so pervaded the governments that succeeded Dessalines nearly a century earlier. The caste system in Haiti, encouraged and exploited by the masters during the time of slavery and enthusiastically embraced by Mulattos, worked to defeat any real cohesion of the society. Mulattos forever identified with France and the West generally, whereas blacks who comprised the overwhelming majority of the population were justifiably suspicious of the West and France in particular. Occasionally these two factions would coexist peaceably but for the most part Mulattos, who represented the Haitian elite, were content to run the economy into ground between frequent coups (helpfully assisted by Western arms merchants and bankers) and occasional trips to France. Blacks, politically marginalized but greatly feared due to their sheer numbers, were primarily relegated to the rural countryside where they successfully subsisted on a plot of land or two. Occasionally sectors of the black masses would rally behind the flag of this strong man or that one during the course of innumerable revolutions in Haiti during the 19th century—again with the connivance of Western investors (primarily French but increasingly German until the American intervention).
The second handicap facing Haiti was the crushing indemnity owed to France. Satisfying this astounding obscenity would be Haiti’s albatross for most of the 19th century. 80% of Haiti’s meager revenues where used for debt service at a time when those funds were desperately needed for the nation’s infrastructure and social institutions (Schmidt, 43). This served to further weaken Haiti internally and left her ripe for conquest.
The third and perhaps most obvious threat to Haitian sovereignty was America’s emergence as a dominant force in the Caribbean. The British, who had been the major deterrent to the projection of American power in the southern Western Hemisphere generally and the Caribbean in particular for most of the 19th century, began refocusing their attention to other sectors of their empire around this period. With the withdrawal of Britain’s West Indian squadron from Jamaica in 1905, the US Navy gained critical breathing space and freedom of operation throughout the region (Schmidt, 31).
Finally, the most critical obstacle facing Haiti was French control of Haitian capital. By the late 19th century the Banque Nationale, which served as the Haitian treasury and the device by which the indemnity was paid, was completely under the control of French officers answerable to superiors in France. From this institution France was in a position to exercise veto power over Haitian fiscal policy. The Banque Nationale received customs revenues, printed and distributed currency, paid government salaries, and (most critically) guaranteed debts. The Banque Nationale was Haiti’s crown jewel and control of it was the first priority of American bankers. Ultimately, Haiti was just too attractive a prize for the emerging giant of the hemisphere.
By the turn of the century, America had largely mastered the imperial model of conquest which often worked as follows: foreign bankers or investors would float high-risk loans to debt-laden Latin American or Caribbean governments and, when they invariably defaulted or refused to pay, these investors would appeal to their government which would duly respond with gunboats against the offending country. These activities, which never failed to lead to lucrative concessions, amounted to massive, state-enforced extortion. Haiti’s steadfast refusal to submit to a similar scheme spearheaded by the National City Bank of New York (NCBNY) would lead directly to the loss of her sovereignty.
The developments which led to the US occupation of Haiti were manipulated by officers of the NCBNY, most notably Rodger L. Farnham, who in addition to his role as vice president of NCBNY he was a trusted advisor to the State Department on Haitian affairs. Farnham was intimately involved in organizing and coordinating the American receivership of Haitian customs following the occupation (Schmidt, 39). Though American bankers had muscled their way to a 50% partnership of the Banque Nationale by 1911, the Haitian legislative body would not acquiesce to their demands that Haiti’s customs be placed into an American receivership. This defiance would remain a point of frustration for senior officers of the NCBNY right up to the eve of the invasion. Haiti’s refusal to pay for the Plaine du Cul-de-Sac Railroad, which met none of the agreed upon conditions of the contract but to which the NCBNY had invested heavily would be the final straw. Under the pretext of restoring order after the dramatic death and dismemberment of Haitian despot Guillaume Sam at the hands of an incensed mob (he had recently executed 167 political prisoners) and preventing further “undue†German influence in Haitian affairs, US Marines invaded Haiti on July 28, 1915—all in the midst of Wilson’s nakedly hypocritical crusade to make the world safe for democracy.
The consequences of the US occupation for the people of Haiti were understandably severe. Haiti was to become profitable again. This would of course necessitate certain “structural adjustmentsâ€. The first of these would be the immediate dissolution of the Haitian Parliament at gun point. Next a pliable local leader would need to be selected to better deflect from the embarrassing spectacle of the Defender of Democracy occupying a sovereign neighbor in direct contradiction to its most hallowed rhetoric. Enter the first American Puppet of Haiti: Phillipe Sudre Dartiguenave. Finally after rebellious Haitians had been ruthlessly suppressed and “stability†established, the US rewrote the Haitian Constitution in 1918 thereby creating a far more useful document for US investors. Among its highlights would be the legalization of alien land ownership which directly countermanded the Haitian law established to resist foreign domination. Another would be the so-called Haitian-American Treaty which in truth was a unilateral document executed by the State Department and frequently cited as justification for the continued occupation (Schmidt, 77). This “treaty†would formally transform Haiti into a virtual US plantation. Haitians were finally reintroduced to an economic model their 18th century ancestors would have easily recognized. The “new†program for Haiti was based upon the principle that economic development should come about through plantation agriculture financed by private American investments. This of course necessitated the destruction of the existing land-tenure system, with its various peasant freeholders, and reduced these formerly independent farmers into peonage (Schmidt, 11).
Under the occupation, US Marine Corp commanders would run the Haitian provinces and all revenues and debts were placed in the care of American bankers. The political marginalization of the Haitian masses was extended and all important matters of state were decided by an American military administrator whose word was the supreme law of the land. The puppet Haitian legislature and executive were given the task of ratifying his decisions upon demand—without questions. For American investors Haiti was of course a veritable paradise. Where in the entire hemisphere were cheaper labor costs to be found? All necessary infrastructure improvements would be provided at taxpayer expense under the bayonets of US Marines. With Marine assistance, Haitian peasants would be forced into de facto slavery under the corvee system of forced labor (Schmidt, 12). These 20th century slaves would be whipped into building roads, repairing harbors, completing rail lines, and other infrastructure improvements necessary to satisfy the requirements of American capital.
Haiti was neatly wrapped in a bow by the US State Department and presented to investors for exploitation in a manner that was fast becoming routine throughout the expanding American Empire.
Direct US control of Haiti would end in 1934 after it became clear following the 1929 uprisings against the occupation that it was far more cost effective to run the island via native client regimes whose devotion to American interests were beyond question. Thus began the modern era of American dominance of Haitian affairs. From this point on the island would be governed by a series of despots who effectively suppressed and disenfranchised the population while deftly removing any obstacles to the expropriation of resources and profits to American investors and the Haitian elite. The most effective of these gangsters were the father and son tandem of Francois “Papa Doc†and Jean-Claude “Baby Doc†Duvalier who successively ruled the island with spectacular brutality. The Duvalier kleptocracy would reign in Haiti with unwavering US support for 29 years. Unfortunately by 1986, Baby Doc’s brutality and corruption had engendered such enmity from the masses that US investors faced the very real possibility of losing the plantation. Acting quickly, the Reagan administration informed Baby Doc that he no longer had their confidence and a change of address, preferably outside of the Western Hemisphere, would be advisable. Taking the hint and an estimated 500 million dollars from the Haitian treasury, the President-For-Life fled with his entourage to France where further ignominy would await him.
Following the Duvalier debacle, the US installed a new military regime under General Henri Namphy, but by then it was already too late to salvage things. The masses were no longer willing to tolerate yet another US puppet despot. They had found their voice and successfully agitated for free elections which were to be monitored by international observers.
*Aristide, Lavalas, and the Threat of Democracy*
The Haitian general election results of 1991 caught the American government completely unawares. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a troublesome priest whose tireless agitation on behalf of Haiti’s peasant majority had long run him afoul of the kleptocratic Haitian elite, helped organize the Lavalas Party. Lavalas is a Creole term meaning: the flood and symbolized the aspirations of Haiti’s peasant majority. The Lavalas Party was a grassroots coalition of progressive groups which had the overwhelming support of the general population. This support propelled Aristide and the Lavalas Party to the presidency with 90% of all votes cast in the first free elections in Haiti’s history. These developments shocked and horrified the American government to say nothing of investors. Aristide and the Lavalas Party had arrived with a clear mandate to redirect the resources of Haiti towards addressing the needs of Haiti’s general population. Keeping to form, the US rescued its possession from the clutches of democracy by supporting Namphy’s seizure of the Haitian government against the wishes of its people in September 1991.
Aristide was returned to power on October 15, 1994 when the US realized that Haiti was ungovernable under Namphy whom the masses had never accepted, and this time could not be cowed. One of Aristide’s most important and courageous acts upon his return to power was to decommission the Haitian Nation Army—the traditional mechanism by which the US controlled Haiti’s general population—and brought charges against many of its leading officers for human rights violations during the coup period of 1991-1994.
It is possible to relate only a few of Lavalas’ achievements during Haiti’s brief flowering of democracy here, but they are among the most important [1].
Under Aristide, for the first time in Haiti’s history, a universal schooling plan was implemented aimed at providing an education for every Haitian child. According to the Haitian Action Committee, “Aristide mandated that 20% of the national budget be dedicated to educationâ€. Under Lavalas, more schools were built between the years 1994-2000 than had been erected between the years1804-1994. This tally would include 195 new primary schools and 104 new public high schools—many in rural areas which had traditionally been neglected. Furthermore, the Aristide government granted a 70% subsidy for school books and uniforms, in addition to expanding the lunch program to include the serving of 700,000 hot meals a day. A bilateral Haitian-Cuban project would bring 800 Cuban health care workers to Haiti’s rural areas. With Lavalas support, hundreds of Haitian medical students were sent to Cuba for training. Forty hospitals, health clinics, and dispensaries would be renovated and constructed under Lavalas governments. These programs and others brought about a significant improvement in the health care of a country with fewer than 2000 doctors for a population of 8.5 million.
On the economic front, Aristide doubled the minimum wage and refused US demands that state-owned enterprises including the airport, national telephone company, electrical company, and three banks be privatized.
In response to these Lavalas initiatives and Aristide’s distressing inability to read the clear signals from Washington that his priorities were out of sync with those of the investment community, the US brokered an international aid embargo against the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.
On February 29, 2004 the US government engineered the removal of the democratically elected president of Haiti via a coup utilizing the resurrected Haitian National Army which attacked from the Dominican Republic. Aristide would be kidnapped by US Marines and deposited in the Central African Republic and was not informed of his destination nor was an attempt made to seek his approval [2]. The Lavalas Party, its supporters and its institutions have been virtually destroyed. Many organizers have been killed, fled into exile, or are in hiding in the rugged mountains of Haiti. Some 3000 escaped prisoners—many of whom had been convicted of human rights violations—are running rampant through the countryside and towns where Lavalas had strong support and are killing any and all they can find who may have had ties to Lavalas institutions. All of these depredations are occurring with the support of the US and its principal accomplices, France and Canada along with UN forces primarily comprised of Brazilian, Chilean, and Pakistani troops.
All of the Lavalas initiatives noted earlier were later reversed by the US-installed puppet regime of Gerald Latortue (Prime Minister) and Boniface Alexandre (Acting President) [3]. The proposed November 2005 sham elections (postponed several times) included few candidates from the popular Lavalas Party since, unsurprisingly, most were running for their lives. All of these findings have been confirmed by several human rights delegations sent to Haiti since the events of February 2004 including but not limited to, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, The National Lawyers Guild, and the Center for the Study of Human Rights at the University of Miami Law School.
* * * *
[1] Much of the information I have included here about the achievements of Lavalas has been provided by the Haitian Action Committee (HAC). The HAC is a San Francisco Bay area group of activists that have fostered contacts with grassroots organizations within Haiti as well as the diaspora of Lavalas organizers forced by US-backed terror to flee their country following the coup of February 2004.
[2] A full account of this incident can be found on the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) web site as well as the NLG delegation’s findings of conditions in Haiti during the months immediately following the coup of February 2004 at http://www.nlg.org.
[3] It should come as no surprise that both Latortue and Alexandre were residing in the US during the years preceding the coup tirelessly advocating “regime change†in Haiti.
Wildmonk, your psychology based argument could be reasonable, but it is not. We don’t live in ivory tower theoretical land. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
In the real world we can know exactly what the Bush/Neocon crew was thinking re; invading Iraq. How? They wrote it all down and spelled it out precisely in the various PNAC documents; Securing the Realm, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, etc.
The invasion of Iraq was conceived, by the mid 1990’s, to be a strategic move a al the “flexing” of hegemenous US muscle and colonialization. Corporate cronies lined up and awaited the day. 9/11 provided the excuse. Bush and the whole neocon gang (what’s a neocon? read the PNAC documents lists of signatories) should be impeached (where appropriate) and indicted for high crimes and treason. You don’t fabricate a casus belli and lie your country into war; ever. It seems especially heinous when there really is a lethal foe out there – and still out there – making videos and issuing threats from where we are not.
Google, read, and get back to us on this. Thanks.
“Democracy in england started out as democracy for aristocrats onlyâ€
-J. Thomas
Clearly you realize that the conditions for “democracy†do not exist if they are enjoyed by “aristocrats onlyâ€â€”a group representing a fraction of 1 % of the population.
“The peasants had to trust their own lord and master to take care of them, and they tended to put up with thatâ€
-J. Thomas
…For to do otherwise meant certain death. This is a very good description of tyranny not democracy in any meaningful sense.
Perhaps I misinterpret your meaning here. In any event, Wildmonk has dominated my attention to such an extent that I’ve neglected to read some of the other comments as closely as I should.
Coldtype, athenian democracy was for free men only. US democracy for a while was only for male landowners. Etc.
The idea that everybody should have a vote is very ideal, but in practice sometimes it works to start with something less than that and improve over time.
If afghan warlords get a way to vote proportional to their strength, and they get a clear idea of the odds should they decide to fight, that’s a big improvement over just slugging it out and seeing who wins. If only armed men vote for the warlords that’s better than everybody voting — at first.
It took england a long time to give commoners a vote, and eventually they extended that to women and even to irishmen. Democracy got better as england saw the use for it. It might work like an ecological succession — each stage is good at taking over from the previous stage, and might not work real well at coloniseing bare ground.