Justin at Americana reads a little dust-up over at Crooked Timber, which consists of a long post about this, that, and the other by Michael Bérubé followed by a zillion comments on the subject of: War, What Is It Good For? Bérubé's spidey sense was tingling--he's got an astonishing, extrasensory ability to dragoon every squib and squeak about his own damn self. Alexander Cockburn said, and Chomsky said, and so it goes, around and around, with Bérubé bellowing at anyone who didn't open wide for the "single most promising practical argument against war in Iraq [...] that it represented a disastrous diversion from the real battle, the battle against al-Qaeda and radical Islamism" was ex ante responsible for the failure of something called a "broad antiwar movement," which, as noted, wasn't especially effective at preventing the war. For a guy who spends as much time lamenting the "intellectual dishonesty" (is there another kind?) of his infinite array of intellectual opponents, this is startlingly disingenuous. You know, I think the kids in ANSWER are kinda funny too, but I'm able to loosen by garters and pull off my opera gloves and admit them to the Brotherhood of Don't Invade Iraq. And if they want to bring along their "Free Mumia" tee-shirts, good golly, let 'em. When folks like Bérubé start chattering about The Message, you can be pretty sure that something's up, and that something almost always looks like a Democrat who wants to be sure not to "discredit" some or other sort of "intervention." The Message is marketing; it's a word for political campaigns. Of course they want their rallies to look like Just Folks. They love Just Folks.
The sanctimony of it is galling, but it's the dumb that gets me. The "practical" reasons for Iraq War opposition that attract Bérubé, single, promising, or otherwise, have at their core the common feature of being almost totally arbitrary. They're based on particular, peculiar judgments, and the Prof is pretty clear on who's got the right to make those calls: He is. Bill Clinton might be. Madeline Albright probably was. Oh, and the "liberal and progressive blogosphere." An offending passage:
People like Michael Ignatieff and George Packer took Kosovo as a model for Iraq, and in so doing, traduced the very idea of international humanitarian intervention they were trying to promote. (Though, notably, Ken Roth wasn’t fooled, and neither was Samantha Power, and neither was Michael Walzer or Danny Postel or Ian Williams, and neither, for what little it’s worth, was I. Neither was most of the liberal and progressive blogosphere.)Firstly, can you trust a cultural critic who uncritically uses a phrase like "international humanitarian intervention," which is a hoary euphemism even if you agree with and support the actions that it actually entails? Secondly, and more importantly, comes the crazy idea that the task of the reasonable, responsible opponent to war is to oppose narrowly--not to get fooled, as it were, by the bad wars; not to get lazy and "blur the distinctions" by opposing the good ones. (I hope Arthur doesn't read Bérubé; I'm afraid his head might actually explode when his eyes made contact.) Killing people for good reasons is bad, not in the least because those good reasons so often turn out to be entirely other than good. How many times must we say it: The American Liberal won't accept antiwar sentiment that is effectually antiwar. They don't want to preclude their precisious Donkle from engaging in future bouts of World-Saving. Surely somewhere some tribe is killing some clan is oppressing some ethnicity in the vital national interests of the United States. Send in the bombers!
26 comments:
Hehe. My contempt for the prog-libloggers is now as strong as triple-strength concrete reinforced by Ultimate Kryptonite. No exploding head here. And please be assured: I am far from done with these lying fuckers.
But, oh my. They truly do love them some Kosovo, don't they? That's in part why I keep returning to their defense of that act of "humanitarianism": it tells you all you need to know in one sense. Meanwhile, not one of these SOBs has a SINGLE WORD to say about Iran. Not one.
Lying fuckers. Once again, I am too kind. Why do I do that?
The Kosovo Kommando Liberals have a lot of hot air to blow, but none of it ever seems to alight over the actual evidence of what happened in the Spring-Summer of 1999. For them, that it was humanitarian intervention is an article of faith.
Yes--you've been wading in the poison long enough to acquire some head-protecting immunity.
I liked that Asia Times piece you linked over at PoN.
I think a good bit of Bérubé's brand managment vehemence comes from knowing that the liberal pastime of Looking for Mr. Goodwar is an indefensible exercise in futility and directly contrary to any humanitarian principles liberals claim to uphold. It's possible that I'm reading too much into the part of his snide, loathsome screed, where he admits that
The anti-imperialists were right about Vietnam, they were right about Chile, they were right about El Salvador and Nicaragua, they were right about Indonesia in 1975 and they were right about Iran in 1953
But it certainly looks like he recognizes that there is no Mr. Goodwar, and only tragedy can come of looking for him.
Of course, 9/11 changed everything and he had to bid the anti-imperialists a venomous and tediously verbose farwell. That was only for Afghanistan, however. He was proud to join the protests against the Iraq episode of the principle he supports.
Cockburn didn't dot every i or cross every t in his post. Possibly for the same reason no one feels a need to debunk the geocentric model of the universe.
Hey Ioz, speaking of Samantha power and other Democratic interventionists, I'm curious: what are your thoughts on Rwanda? The circumstances were peculiar, as there already was a UN force on the ground that wanted to go after the arms supplies of the genocidaires. They also wanted a stronger force to thwart the militias in the capital.
Rather than Kosovo, it was probably the clearest cut case for "humanitarian intervention". So, what do you think would have been the proper course of action? N.B. US troops would never have been deployed, it was a question of American assent to a stronger UN action.
Great Suffering Morris Ankrum! What a hairsplitting fenceriding mealymouthe toad this Bérubé fellow is.
Hmm. Didn't you used to really like Berube?
I used to have him on the blogroll. I thought he was a lot of fun on Horowitz, and he actually has written some very interesting things about disability. But he got into some scrapes with Dennis Perrin, and came off very badly. He's always been weak on the war.
Enough already!
Kosovo was not an "humanitarian intervention"; it was the end game in the break up of Yugoslavia (or even perhaps, the final resolution of the Battle of Vienna in 1683).
In 1989 Milosevic went to Kosovo and got all lachrymous over the Field of Blackbirds. Thereafter, he was politically unable to resolve the problem that Albanian majority in Kosovo presented.
Somebody had to do it for him. And it fell to Europe and the United States (NATO) to do it.
On Kosovo, we now have an authoritative statement from the highest level of the Clinton Administration: Strobe Talbot, who was Clinton’s lead negotiator during Kosovo and the head of the joint State Department-Pentagon mission dealing with diplomacy. He recently wrote the introduction to a book by his director of communications, John Norris. In it, Talbot says that for those who want to understand the Clinton administration thinking on Kosovo, this book gives you the answers. Norris says that the motive for the bombing of Serbia in 1999 was not humanitarian concerns. It was because Serbia was refusing to enact the socio-economic reforms that the US wanted. Those are the reasons given by the highest level of the Clinton administration. It was not humanitarian in intent. We know what the rate of atrocities was after the bombing. The idea that it was humanitarian intervention is very self-serving propaganda.
UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
Ellen, crooks always brag once they think it's safe, whether they're a Henry Hill or a John Norris, and their cronies like to talk it up too.
IOZ, Scruggs, Arthur, Jonathan S., my fellow smug misanthropes, I am feeling the love tonight!
A thousand blessings upon you all!
"Give me something viable to do!"
"Here"
"That's not viable!"
"Okay, what's your plan?"
"We take back the party, and then we take back the country and then. . . hey! Where are you going? Get back here you smug misanthrope!"
Meanwhile, not one of these SOBs has a SINGLE WORD to say about Iran. Not one.
Well, maybe just one:
"The number one thing we can — and must — do here is to prevent the U.S. government from taking any military action against Iran. That is the Mother of All Issues right now. It’s the sine qua non for any solidarity with dissident intellectuals and human rights activists; the minute the first bomb is dropped the democratic struggle in Iran will be derailed for the foreseeable future, maybe for decades. That message has to be articulated as emphatically as possible over and over until Bush and Cheney leave office."
I just so hate prog-leftists like Danny Postel and their stupid cheerleading for US imperialism.
Meanwhile, Graeme Blake asks an interesting question. Any takers on Rwanda? Or Sierra Leone?
For all their supposed opposition to the Bush crazies, most of the liberal and progressive blogs have virtually nothing to say about the prospect of an attack on Iran -- or, to be more precise, nothing to say that impels them to act (or even to encourage others to act) in a way that might actually matter and prevent the ultimate nightmare from descending upon us, and upon much of the rest of the world
"That might actually matter" potentially leaves a lot of weasel room. The hollow sanctimony of tossing Rwanda and Sierra Leone into the mix does not.
Hollow sanctimony? I was just curious about what kind of arguments people might make.
If I may -- Michael B. and Arthur S. notwithstanding, "the #1 Thing" we must do is NOT stop theoretical future atacks on Iran. Neither, obviously, is it to assess our responsibilities w/r/t past disasters not directly of our making (e.g. Rwanda, S.L.)...
No, the number one thing is that we ought to CEASE our CURRENT criminal actions.
And passing a $100B funding for it AIN'T the way to do that, even if the bill is laden with (arguably unconstitutional) prescriptions for "managing" the 'war'...
Any adventure begun on the back of "we have to do something" is doomed to make things worse. I feel immense sadness for the unending catastrophe of sub-Saharan Africa, and I feel shame that so much of that catastrophe is the consequence of the catastrophe of "Western" colonialism on the continent, but there's nothing to be "done." Send food and send medicine and send money, even knowing that most of it will never make it where it ought to go, but disabuse ourselves of the notion that we might somehow impose peace and erase history with the power of blue helmets and American bombs. "We were just trying to help" is usually a lie and always an error.
Thanks, that seems clear enough. I think there is a great deal of truth in your observation that "Any adventure begun on the back of "we have to do something" is doomed to make things worse", inasmuch as most of those adventures seem to have ulterior motives. Governments have tended to be very unmotivated to commit forces for altrusistic reasons.
Hence, any occasion where intervention has had a net benefit has been highly unenthusiastic, because a politician will only be enthusiastic about an issue where they see political gain. Here I refer to the US-Nigerian intervention against Charles Taylor in Liberia, the UN force (not the french intervention) in Rwanda, the UN mission in the Ituri region of the Congo. All of these have saved lives without the adverse impacts we see in many other cases. Also important to note is that none of these interventions involved bombing...I too am rather skeptical of bombs being a tool of peace.
These interventions either served as catalysts to ending conflicts or to at the least to protect civilians. Thus, "Peace" has been imposed before. George Bush does have one successful intervention under his belt, though even his supporters ignore it because they don't really care about it. The Liberian civil war ended with the dictator Charles Taylor leaving the country and Liberia has voted in free democratic elections. It was a minimal effort brought about reluctantly, but it made all the difference in the world to that tormented country.
p.s. and of course, I am well aware of America's prior duplicity in Liberia during the cold war.
Thanks, ioz. I agree (as does Graeme, I see) that "any adventure begun on the back of 'we have to do something'" is suspect, but I disagree that things are actually worse in the Balkans now than they were ten or fifteen years ago. At the same time, I do think that NATO's Kosovo war was predicated in part on the failure of the international community to intervene in Rwanda, where, btw, "intervention" need not have involved any bombing (let alone the indefensible high-altitude bombing of Kosovo) -- just the disabling of one radio station. So I'm sympathetic to the argument that Kosovo was partly a botched response to the west's failure to respond to Rwanda -- and that opportunistic liberal hawks then rode the "liberal intervention" of Kosovo all the way to Iraq. I'm just trying to figure out the extent to which the debacle in Iraq has led one wing of the left to give up on internationalism altogether, on the grounds that "every form of internationalism is a form of imperialism," or on the grounds that every form of internationalism at the present time necessarily involves the US (and is therefore a form of imperialism). That's why I'm curious as to what people think about international crises in which internationalism failed to act (Rwanda), and in which it seems to have acted appropriately (Sierra Leone). Liberia is, I think, a difficult call, and I disagree with Graeme on that count: yes, Bush's supporters don't care about it, but no, it wasn't really a "successful intervention" -- not least b/c Bush declined to intervene in March 2003, being wholly preoccupied w/Iraq.
Has anyone broken it to Berube that there is oil in the former Yugoslavia and in Darfur as well ? Does this ever figure in his calculus about the saleability of yet another "humanitarian" enterprise overseas ? Or is that verboten because it would make him into one of those filthy capitalism-haters that he's always pushing away while he gropes in his other pocket for his pommander ?
I only ask because I waded through roughly half of Berube's whinge-du-jour about how and the other right-minded musclebound liberals simply can't go to an ANSWER-sponsored march because he'll get cooties. No surprises there. But maybe the trivial presence of oil entered the discussion later. If anyone has the highlights, please share them. I'm a busy woman.
As a general set of policies, there are plenty of things that can be done to assist former colonies and weakened states, like Rwanda, that are still pawns in the post-colonial economic co-prosperity spheres.
A true liberalization of intellectual property rights. The current regime stymies production of essential drugs, among other needed basics.
Force the IMF and World Bank to back off on their export-driven extortion-cum-loan policy. Export-driven economies face de facto monopsony and oligopsony buyers. They can't compete against them and they can't tell them to go to hell. Moving from subsistence agriculture to export-driven puts small countries at the mercy of proprietary seed merchants, with aid tied to accepting their control over the most basic component of the business.
Mandate a true privatization. Rwanda remains the plaything of foreign vulture investors, especially its banking sector. Divest the institutions at a loss to local groups, preferably in the form of credit unions, which do a much better job of development investing. Bribe the heart broken vultures, which would will be happening anyway under the guise of taxpayer-subsidized restructuring and rescue. Then cut off the corporate welfare structures that make vulture mercantilism attractive in the first place.
Those are all things that can be done without interfering in local affairs.
As far as ongoing civil wars, there are no military solutions. The border issues and post colonial power structures are going to have to be settled locally and that's going to take a long time. It will never be done with any justice as long as the benevolent co-prosperity spheres, followed by advocacy for a more muscular benevolence remains the approach of the powerful states. The dubious legality of the Kosovo restructuring is a text book case of what not to do, in the aftermath of a bogus primary justification for invasion.
I know that 9/11 changed everything. I've read that many times, in essays written by people who -- bless their hearts -- have the best intentions. Some have had the courage to admit that there has never been any such thing as an act of muscular benevolence that achieved its putative goal. I can understand their retreat into incoherence and aggressive sanctimony, as the ambiguities and clarities change places whimsically and opportunistically. Before I consign them and their hysterical, self-indulgent approach to the dustbin of history, I'd like to mention that I was once one of them. I retain a certain affection, based on the shared guilt, shame and the fond memories of the moral panics we went through together. Those long nights, running around in circles, screaming, "Oh my fucking God! The brown people are killing each other! Won't somebody doooooo something?!" Those were good times, I must admit. But there comes a time when one must bid farewell to the pursuits of childhood, however muscular its appeal, a farewell to its stupidly simplistic solutions all gussied up with name dropping cites and fatuous red herrings.
Well, I hate to keep dragging out this thread, but I find this interesting.
Scruggs: Of course there are many ways to help poor countries. And, also I agree that in an ongoing civil war intervention can often be either useless or counterproductive...but I do not agree that it is impossible. I think the Americans in this threat have been so disillusioned by the perfidy of their own government as to deny the existence of past interventions that have made a difference.
I do agree with you that many of those who call for intervention do it for simplistic reasons that made them feel warm and fuzzy. Many people do get an ego boost by knowing more about say, Darfur, than the layman and then indignantly calling for a military intervention which will overthrow the regime if necessary. Such thinking ignores the situation as it is on the ground. It is less a genocide than a civil war. At most we can help protect some civilians with an AU force while trying to negotiate an end to the fighting, as has nearly succeeded.
But in talking about say, Rwanda, I am not trying to raise red herrings. This is a different issue from some other "humanitarian" interventions. In this instance, it is clear to me that outside parties through the UN could have done something to forestall the genocide, or mitigate its impact when it did occur.
To state the Rwandan case more clearly:
1. There was a UN force already in place in the capital to enforce the Arusha peace accords between the Hutu government and the Tutsi rebels.
2. This UN force was given credible evidence by an informant that extremist elements within the government were indoctrinating youth militias to slaughter tutsis, and had acquired weapons for that purpose. The UN force was given locations for the arms caches.
3. The UN force was denied permission to act on this information by UN headquarters. In this case and later in the genocide, the security council was most concerned about minimising their exposure.
4. When the genocide began following the assasination of the Rwandan president, it was organised largely by a hate-radio station, as Michael mentions. The UN declined to destroy or jam the station. The security council also did not give any additional resources to the mission, instead they removed troops. The UN commander was using these forces to safeguard tens of thousands of civilians, and much more could have been done with an expanded force. This would not have entailed fighting one side in the civil war, merely using UN soliders to save lives.
All of this can seem a bit irrelevant when considering the horror of current wars which are partly justified under the label of humanitarian intervention. But I think we should not close our minds entirely to the possibility of helping others through a military presence. In 1994 it was anti-interventionist sentiment which prevented the US and others from lifting even a single finger to help the UN commander save more lives.
Poor country, poor people, but there's not much we can do, is there? Pity they haven't any oil. Something like that.
A minor point about Rwanda: if the French had not intervened in the civil war on the government side, the government would have collapsed in 1990. No intervention, no drawn-out civil war, no genocide.
Graeme, the apparent disinterest in doing something about the genocide coupled with the intense interest in manufacturing excuses for interventions in other places speaks volumes. It's not in the nature of the state and its elite to do anything that doesn't have a payoff. At their very best, the people as individuals are capable of double bottom line social ventures. Acting in concert, they inevitably compromise on something much worse. Consistent enlightened self-interest, except in its crudest form, is beyond them. The modern state only recently institutionalized some limited and conditional protections for the people from whom its legitimacy allegedly springs. And all of those came after bloody internal struggles. These protections are seen as a nuisance by the elite, even though they can be empirically proven to be in their interest.
Almost all the electorate gets the vapors at the thought of making the leadership accountable. Even people who can reasonably be expected to know better snarl and snap at the folks who say, "Uh, fellows? Is this really wise?"
I admire the benevolence of people who genuinely care, but I do think that at this time and for the foreseeable future there is not going to be any such thing as humanitarian intervention as it's conceived and exectuted by the state.
Fair enough. I suppose I'm more optimistic than you about the possibility of making it in the political interests of politicians to do some sort of valuable, non-harmful intervention. Otherwise, I agree.
Also, I think that the best we could ever hope for from America in this regard is to get out of the way, as they didn't in Rwanda. the political climate that demands selfless intervention is much more prevalent out side of the United States. The American public has a fundamentally different conception of the use of force than does Europe or Canada. Much more smashing, supposedly to make them safer. Much less helping, and if they do want to help, for some reason they think bombs rather than boots will do the trick. They have a deep distrust of sending troops overseas unless they think it makes them safer, which usually has to involve smashing something.
at this time and for the foreseeable future there is not going to be any such thing as humanitarian intervention as it's conceived and exectuted by the state.
Hmmmm, OK, I hear this, but there are states and then there are states, and some of them aren't as vicious as the US on the international stage (as Graeme suggests, invoking the appropriate "smashing something" criterion). The reason I'm still thinking about this, though (and still hanging around this here thread), is that (a) there are occasions, like Rwanda, where US inaction actually amounts to side-taking, because, to paraphrase Howard Zinn, you can't be neutral on a moving genocide; and (b) you would think there would be more enthusiasm for the long-overdue international (UN/Australian) intervention in East Timor. So I'm just trying to figure out how much contemporary anti-interventionism rests on criticism of US military intervention, and how much of it is anti-intervention across the board.
And yes, the French responsibility for Rwanda far exceeds anything the US did or didn't do.
Post a Comment