I should start out by saying I haven't read Yglesias's book; I plan to get it from my library at some point. My understanding from Yglesias's blog writing, however, is that he sees the Gulf War as a legitimate liberal internationalist intervention, which to me is a serious problem for his argument, because I don't see a bright line between the 1991 invasion, the regime of sanctions, inspections, no-fly-zones, and bombings that followed it, and the 2003 invasion that followed that. We essentially had a situation where a war blessed by internationalist standards gradually lead to mounting pressure for a war carried out on unilateralist grounds. I don't think the problem with the Gulf War or the Iraq War was just the presence or lack thereof of international support; it was that America was leaping into something as massive and destructive as war without considering the catastrophic and typically uncontrollable side effects war inevitably produces.
The original Gulf War, putting aside details of how it was actually carried out, doesn't seem to me to be a problem -- Iraq had invaded and occupied a foreign country, and the UN authorized a war to roll back that invasion. If that's not legitimate, what would be?
Once you get into the aftermath of the Gulf War, that's more complicated, but the bright-line distinction from an international law point of view between the Gulf War and Kosovo or this Iraq War seems clear to me.
Hm. I sort of agree with stras's critique, but I'm not sure you can blame the mere existence of the first Gulf War for the clusterfuck that followed, and if you do you raise grave concerns about whether internationally mandated military interventions are even possible when you have the possibility of the kind of bullying that kind be marshalled by a security council member, and if you think that, how do you think that International Law as such is a failure, and wouldn't that be a really dangerous and problematic place to be, especially if you're a superpower on the decline -- but with lots of nukes?
3: one problem, I think, is that the bright line is really centered on the US acting in good faith, but to plan foreign policy for the US you can't very well predicate it on us acting in bad faith.
Isn't the difference that Clinton bombed Kosovo because of the genocide of the Albanians, but no one was really getting hurt in Iraq in 2003?
Principled distinction between Gulf War I and Iraq 2003: The Empire Strikes Back: the UN authorized the first one, not the second. Rule: The US should only participate in wars that are sanctioned internationally. Following that rule would have kept us out of Iraq in 2003.
That would have also kept us out of Kosovo, so it seems from what LB is describing that Yglesias wants it to be permissible sometimes for the US to act on its own. But that's not a principle that distinguishes Iraq & Kosovo. "Do not act unilaterally when you're making up the reason you're invading" is the best I can come up with, but that doesn't work as a rule to keep the liberal hawks from being fooled.
If that's not legitimate, what would be?
That's the point. It's not about "legitimacy," it's about consequences, and the consequences of the Gulf War included a sanctions regime which claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and ultimately lead to the Iraq War. Looking at war as a matter of legitimacy, instead of who's going to live and who's going to die, is an entirely perverse way of thinking.
Maybe Yglesias is thinking 'Immediate humanitarian intervention alone is an acceptable reason; pre-emptive warfare never is.'
Well, yeah, that's kind of the same soft spot I was talking about. What are the principles that define 'good faith'? You can't realistically demand unmixed motives, but what's the standard for a good faith intervention even if you assume that it also has self-interested motives?
And I would add to 8 that we often don't know what the consequences of a given military action will be, which is a very good reason to presume against military intervention, regardless of how internationally popular a given war may be at the time.
8: well but are you saying that there's no need for military intervention ever? If you are, then we fundamentally disagree in a way I'm not sure how to address, but if you aren't then don't we need a way to make the use of force about something other than manifestations of national will, however conceived?
but are you saying that there's no need for military intervention ever?
Of course not. There's self-defense. But neither Kosovo nor the Gulf War were self-defense, and neither Kosovo nor the Gulf War were good ideas.
And I would add to 8 that we often don't know what the consequences of a given military action will be, which is a very good reason to presume against military intervention, regardless of how internationally popular a given war may be at the time.
So should the U.S. have gotten involved in the European theater of WWII?
10: right. It's a problem, and one that is insufficiently solved even in our domestic political institutions, so even if we were to vastly strengthen the UN -- problematic from a democratic governance perspective, maybe -- there still would be the problem of the large states being able to do what the fuck they want, actually.
10 to 5.
8: But not acting, there, has the consequence of rewarding Iraq's patently illegitimate invasion of Kuwait -- there are consequences on both sides. We could have fought to remove Iraq from Kuwait without subsequently imposing sanctions -- those consequences weren't inherent in the decision to go to war.
So should the U.S. have gotten involved in the European theater of WWII?
Again, self-defense. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor; the U.S. declared war on Japan; Germany declared war on the U.S. in return; the U.S. declared war on Germany in return.
You can't realistically demand unmixed motives,
Wait, as a doctrine for liberal internationalism? Why not? We demand it all the time when setting up domestic police forces.
There are so many differences between the nature of the "interventions" in Iraq 2003 and Kosovo that to me it is not even worthwhile to view them as being the same kind of thing. This so hopelessly muddles any discussions that it makes them worse than useless.
And I agree with Tweety in 4, both Gulf War detractors (inevitable step towards quagmire) and supporters (yay we won! It was easy!) often do not place the war in context of the whole weird history of US/Iraq relations. We did not just wake up one day and "Ohmigod! Kuwait, he's a madman!"
11: That's generally right, but you still have to weigh the consequences of inaction against the consequences of action.
Japan attacked Pearl Harbor; the U.S. declared war on Japan; Germany declared war on the U.S. in return; the U.S. declared war on Germany in return.
That ignores two things: 1) Lend-Lease and 2) Germany's declaration of war was basically irrelevant, since it wasn't like they were actually going to be attacking the U.S. anytime soon.
But not acting, there, has the consequence of rewarding Iraq's patently illegitimate invasion of Kuwait
Forgive me for being so blunt, but so what? Did the U.S. invade Israel to expel it from Gaza and the West Bank? Did it invade China to expel it from Tibet? Countries invade and occupy each other all the time without intervention from the United States. And from a utilitarian standpoint, do you really think that more people would've died if the U.S. hadn't intervened, given the consequences of intervention? Saddam may have been A Very Bad Man, but when you add casualties of sanctions to the casualties of the Iraq War, you're looking at well over a million dead.
22: It is clearly legitimate to define "self-defense" beyond the narrow definition of direct attack on my territory. (but of course this is the top of a long, maybe slippery, slope that to the neocons includes Iraq 2003 and Iran now).
23: did either of those constitute the case of a sitting UN member taking over another?
There's a post-Rwanda argument that the UN charter & other sources of int'l law ought to be changed such that ongoing or imminent genocide is a legitimate basis for intervention. There are dangers in this: people could make bad faith arguments about genocide & launch wars of aggression; well-intentioned humanitarian interventions could turn into clusterfucks, etc. But I find it somewhat persuasive. Obviously, it wouldn't settle the question of whether an individual war is justified. And that's not really where international law stands right now. But it's a more limited & more defensible basis than the "pre-emption doctrine". And it's an argument with general application, unlike the "pre-emption doctrine", which is basically a "U.S. does whatever the fuck it wants doctrine" that no one argues should apply to any other country.
The other distinction that people sometimes draw is that it was supported by NATO, not a "coalition of the willing." But that's not much of a legal argument. It doesn't fall within collective self-defense of NATO; that's more a political indicator--the fact that we got an existing European alliance on board for an intervention in its backyard, as opposed to having just England, Spain, Australia & a bunch of smaller countries that we bullied or bribed into sending token support.
I'd say the most legally troubling thing about Kosovo is the lack of real Congressional authorization.
Oh yeah, and I forgot Destroyers for Bases.
The whole notion of "consequences of inaction" with regards to the U.S. military making war in an unrelated part of the world is pretty damn arrogant, if I might add. It presumes that America has a right and a duty to "do something" about anything that happens anywhere on the planet, and that something must invariably involve blowing something up.
There's two questions here: whether Yglesias is right to argue that Kosovo and Gulf War I were right and that Iraq 2003 was not (the humanitarian interventionist position), and whether, having granted Yglesias that premise, he's done a good job of explaining what distinguishes good interventions from bad ones.
Countries invade and occupy each other all the time without intervention from the United States.
Sure, but it would be a better world if they didn't, and a robust system of international institutions that prevented that sort of thing from happening would be a good thing. We haven't expelled China from Tibet because we're reasonably afraid of the consequences of starting something there; we didn't use military force to expel Israel from Gaza and the West Bank because we're enmeshed with them and approve of their actions. That doesn't mean that protecting countries from invasion isn't a generally good thing to do.
And like I keep saying, you can't say the Gulf War was a bad thing to do because sanctions were bad -- the two things are seperable policies.
did either of those constitute the case of a sitting UN member taking over another?
Why should it matter if they're sitting members of the UN? Do you honestly believe that had anything to do with America's motives in the Gulf, or with its lack of interest in starting a war with Israel and China?
It is clearly legitimate to define "self-defense" beyond the narrow definition of direct attack on my territory.
Sure. But the point still stands: Germany's declaration of war on the U.S. was functionally irrelevant.
We haven't expelled China from Tibet because we're reasonably afraid of the consequences of starting something there
And we should have been reasonably afraid of starting something in Iraq.
And like I keep saying, you can't say the Gulf War was a bad thing to do because sanctions were bad -- the two things are seperable policies.
But they weren't. The sanctions regime came about as a direct result of the decision not to take Baghdad - to "contain" Saddam rather than invade Iraq. You can't really divorce these policies.
In the short term.
Sure. But given stras's line of reasoning, shouldn't we have waited until the long-term consequences started to make themselves felt? After all, you don't know what the consequences of a given military action are going to be.
And we should have been reasonably afraid of starting something in Iraq.
Why?
Absent obvious cases of self-defense, I tend to think about war as similar to lynching: if you're going to do it, it's best to get as many of the town's prominent citizens involved as possible. Didn't we have the support of most of the well-sized powers and regional powers in Kosovo?
The decision not to take Baghdad was a but for cause of the sanctions, certainly, but the sanctions as imposed weren't a necessary result of that decision. Saddam could have been contained just fine without the type of sanctions that imposed the humanitarian cost they did.
But given stras's line of reasoning, shouldn't we have waited until the long-term consequences started to make themselves felt?
Don't be an ass. I made it pretty clear that I think military action is justified in the case of self-defense, and that responding to a hostile country that's declared war on your country is self-defense.
I think we would have been justified in entering WW2 even if Japan hadn't invaded Pearl Harbor & Germany hadn't declared war on us. A war can still be a bad idea/moral disaster even if it would be legal under international law. But if you're arguing that international law justification is necessary, if not sufficient, a theory that doesn't allow for defensive alliances at all is nuts as far as I'm concerned. If you're arguing for a pure consequentialist analysis & international law just doesn't matter, then this isn't really the same conversation LB is having.
Saddam could have been contained just fine without the type of sanctions that imposed the humanitarian cost they did.
But the U.S. wasn't just going to pick up its bags and leave Iraq alone without the imposition of sanctions given the makeup of the American political and military elite. You can't divorce these decisions from the context of their political climate.
I made it pretty clear that I think military action is justified in the case of self-defense, and that responding to a hostile country that's declared war on your country is self-defense.
I still wanna know about Destroyers for Bases and Lend-Lease.
given the makeup of the American political and military elite.
The American political and military elite favor a light rouge to bring out their cheekbones, and burlesque laquered lips.
The case for bombing in the case of Kosovo was emphatically not clear-cut. And 'genocide of the Albanians' really over-states the situation. If we describe the sort of displacement-of-persons/ethnic cleansing/nasty inter-group civil-warfare that was going on in Kosovo as genocide, then there's a shit load of genocide going on all over the place.
re: Lend-Lease -- that began in 1941. Pre Pearl Harbour but quite a long time after the beginning of the War.
40: What I'm saying is that even when a war looks pretty cut and dry - Bad Guy Country X invades Good Guy Country Y, and America can easily swoop in with umpty-zillion allies and take out the enemy in a couple weeks - the war can still be a shitty idea because it can lead to very bad consequences. This shouldn't be such a difficult concept to grasp. It happened in the Gulf War. Yes, you can imagine some parallel earth where an entirely different group of political elites decided not to impose sanctions and no-fly zones on Iraq after the war, just as you can imagine a universe where the Iraqis greeted us as liberators. But imagining doesn't make it so.
What all of this means is that we need a much higher standard for deciding to blow up other countries than the standard of international law. International law is nice, but it's clearly not enough if an internationalist war still produces very negative outcomes.
re: Lend-Lease -- that began in 1941. Pre Pearl Harbour but quite a long time after the beginning of the War.
Right. But it was still the U.S. getting involved in the European war prior to a declaration of war by Germany. Not full-on, boots-on-the-ground involvment, but pretty heavy involvement nonetheless. (And indicated that the U.S. almost certainly would have come into the European war even absent Pearl Harbor.)
I vaguely wish I didn't find myself agreeing with Stras so much about Gulf War 1. In retrospect the unasked question was this: "Assuming we win, in the sense that repel Iraqi armed forces and restore Kuwait's preexisting government, what then? What do we foresee as necessary or desirable afterward, and what happens if we just come on back home?" If there'd been anything like debate about it then, it would have been much easier to drag some of the most serious flaws of Gulf War 2 into the spotlight.
I feel pretty comfortable saying that anytime we're looking at answers with an emphasis on continued policing and governance, that's a job for the UN, and we ought not act on our own without commitments to share the burden in place. Because I don't want us going lone cowboy as a general matter, nor do I want us coming in, smashing stuff up and killing people, and then leaving foreseeable chaos behind. Inevitably there are surprises, but one of the conditions of warmaking of any kind should be plausible answers to "And then what?", with preparations based on the kinds of answers that apply that time.
I don't think Tibet is relevant to this discussion.
I'm confused as to why liberals want Kosovo to have been justified. Why not just give it up? I have to come out and say that I'm a "humanitarian intervention" skeptic generally -- it doesn't seem clear to me that the international community really knows how to do the things that a humanitarian intevention would claim to be doing, at least not on a consistent basis. Also, it's not really clear to me how much good Kosovo in specific did. Aerial bombing seems like a weird way to implement a "humanitarian intervention."
re: 46
I don't think so. Countries have allies. They help allies. Doing so often doesn't constitute a declaration of war. The US sells arms, for example, to lots of people. In the case of Lend-Lease and Destroyers for Bases, the US was getting something in return for helping an ally.
Some people think that Lend-lease was a way for the US to stay out of the war, rather than a slippery-slope on the way into it.
You can argue about whether the US should have been helping the UK but their help for the UK fell far short of actual warfare.
"What all of this means is that we need a much higher standard for deciding to blow up other countries than the standard of international law"
Okay, what's the standard? Does the U.S. have to be attacked, or is collective self defense ever a justification even if not in the first Gulf War? If it's "individual or collective self defense" + will save more lives & prevent more human suffering than it inflicts, I'm pretty close to with you. If you're arguing that the U.S. shouldn't ever get involved in wars unless we're directly invaded, I'm not.
Okay, was Britain's 1939 declaration of war on Nazi ermany after the invasion of Poland justified? I can't believe how difficult it is to get a straight answer from people on whether "collective self defense/defense of another" is ever a justification for war.
China didn't really invade Tibet. China's sovereignty over Tibet was generally recognized, and still is -- even by the Dalai Lama, who really only asks for a degree of local autonomy. If the US had intervened it would have been an invasion, though I don't think that that was ever even considered.
It's not clear to me that WWII is even relevant in this context -- in any case, since we're all indoctrinated from the womb about how just a war it was, maybe it's harder to think clearly about it in the sense of potentially being willing to say something negative. (For instance: The US didn't get involved to stop the Holocaust!)
So in its place, I propose the case of WWI.
stras, I largely agree with what you're saying, but Yglesias' argument is emphatically about a practical, politically feasible Democratic foreign policy, and not about seizing the quasi-pacifist moral high ground.
I think what distinguishes (1) Gulf War I and (2) Kosovo from (3) Gulf War II is:
(1) The invasion of Kuwait was a clear-cut violation of international law and the expulsion of Iraq from Kuwait was authorized by the U.N. Security Council.
(2) The tactics used by the Serbians against the Kosovars were arguably genocidal and a majority of Europe was willing to sanction an intervention. Drafting NATO as the legitimizing institution was to some extent "forum shopping," but there's a reasonable argument to be made that preventing bloodshed *in Europe* should not be contingent on Russian and Chinese approval.
(3) No U.N. sanction, no NATO involvement, no clear-cut violation of international law, not a matter of keeping order "in the neighborhood." Oops.
I don't think so. Countries have allies. They help allies.
But that gets back to the reason I asked about WWII in the first place: stras was arguing that we shouldn't have attacked Iraq in response to Kuwait (a U.S. ally). I'm trying to figure out what distinguishes the one case from the other.
Doing so often doesn't constitute a declaration of war. The US sells arms, for example, to lots of people.
The main reason it doesn't constitute a declaration of war these days is that no one is stupid enough to attack us over it.
I can't believe how difficult it is to get a straight answer from people on whether "collective self defense/defense of another" is ever a justification for war.
It is. But I'm probably not who you're asking.
I'm confused as to why liberals want Kosovo to have been justified.
As a matter of political branding, liberals want to be for some wars, but not for all wars. It is also helpful if a war you could conceive of supporting occurred after 1945.
If you're arguing that the U.S. shouldn't ever get involved in wars unless we're directly invaded, I'm not.
I'm curious as to why this is. What kinds of "good wars of choice" do you think the U.S. should be engaged in?
One of the reasons I'm disappointed in hearing Yglesias defend the Gulf War - and apparently Kosovo - is that he's been pretty good on why it would be a bad idea for America to invade the Sudan. In addition to pointing out the capacity to do a lot more harm than good, he's often made the case that if America wants to get into the business of saving people's lives in third world countries, it'd be far more effective to buy and distribute more medicine, vaccine, mosquito netting, etc. than to go around blowing shit up.
What all of this means is that we need a much higher standard for deciding to blow up other countries than the standard of international law.
Right. The sanction of a legitimate international institution (in this case the UN) is, the claim would be, a necessary but not a sufficient condition for intervention.
It seems that the question of legitimacy is being read in two ways upthread: LB's question regards the legitimacy of an international body (and its decisions regarding intervention), while others drifted to questions of the legitimacy of the intervention itself considered apart from the decision of any institutional body.
And the question, I take it, regarding the position Yglesias presents (as sketched by LB) is whether and to what extent the presumptive legitimacy of the institutional body can be disregarded, i.e. when can one of its decisions, if judged illegitimate, render the body itself illegitimate.
Or at least, if that's not quite the question, it's the one I find interesting. It's essentially a question of whether the US would or should ever be willing to entirely subordinate its decisions regarding military interventions to an international body; or whether it should always preserve a right to disregard that body.
What kind of contrarianism is LB displaying in linking to Powell's instead of Amazon? Kausian or Yglesian?
It is also helpful if a war you could conceive of supporting occurred after 1945.
This is pretty easy. No.
What all of this means is that we need a much higher standard for deciding to blow up other countries than the standard of international law.
There's also just using good pragmatic judgment about the likely consequences, which is clearly necessary, and would have led to the aftermath of Gulf War I being conducted very differently. But that's not so much a standard -- "standard" in this context seems to me much more like "the threshold you have to meet before you even start thinking about the specific situation on a pragmatic level."
55: Isn't defining Russia as not having a legitimate interest in Europe a problem there? Myself, I lean toward saying Kosovo wasn't legitimate, but I'm shaky enough on it that I'm interested in argument.
54: Indeed. WWII is also a bad example for arguing about intervention on behalf of others because we were attacked by one ally and were declared war on by the other ally. "If someone declares war on you you're allowed to go to war" doesn't help at all for the usual humanitarian interventionist reasons.
61: The pro-labor kind. Powell's is organized, Amazon is not.
For instance: The US didn't get involved to stop the Holocaust!
Are there actually people who get upset if you say this?
stras, where do you stand on Afghanistan 2001?
quasi-pacifist
What is this supposed to mean, by the way? A pacifist is someone who doesn't believe in taking up arms under any circumstances. I've explicitly disavowed that view. And I've no idea what "quasi-pacifist" means, other than an insinuation that I'm a dirty hippie for not being fond of pointless wars.
60: That's one of the questions. A followup question is whether you can usefully rely on the concept of legitimacy in a world where all the actually available international institutions do have genuine legitimacy problems. I want the answer to that followup question to be yes, but I don't have a worked-out argument that gets me there, and I would have liked Yglesias to hand me one.
54: no kidding about U.S. involvement. But it's directly relevant. I am asking whether it's EVER justified to get involved in a war before your country is invaded. For anyone answering "no, never, self defense & actual invasion of your own country are the only justification for war" obviously it's legitimate to test that with the hard case. I'm not arguing that invasion of one country by another anywhere in the world is automatically a justification for U.S. involvement regardless of the consequences, so I'm not sure that WWI is so relevant. But fuck it, if no one will even answer the Great Britain & Poland question, there's obviously not much interest in dissecting first principles.
And I've no idea what "quasi-pacifist" means
I've assumed it means something like, "someone who, generally speaking, opposes most wars but not all wars." Someone like you!
re: 56
Well, personally, I'm not 100% sure about Gulf War I. I think a case can be made for using military force to expel Iraq from Kuwait.
However, where it gets problematic, is that there are lots of other similar cases where no such expulsion by military force takes place and the reasons why it happens in some cases and not in others often look like naked self-interest or partiality on the part of some of the actors.
This isn't problematic for a foreign policy realist -- they just point-blank accept that naked self-interest is the name of the game -- nor is it problematic for your national-greatness conservative -- fucking up people who can't fight back is the name of their game. However, it is problematic for your liberal interventionist who does want to occupy the moral high ground.
This is why liberal interventionism is such a problematic position to take.
52: I can't believe how difficult it is to get a straight answer from people on whether "collective self defense/defense of another" is ever a justification for war.
Yes, absolutely. And clearly the special treatment and attention given to treaties in the US Constitution is justified by how serious a matter it is to enter into such an agreement. (And as far as I know all of the discussion on the subject in the Federalist Papers etc. was on how to divide up that power. Speaks to the point above that the deficits in internal consensus re: Kosovo are possibly more of a concern than the external, NATO after all.)
67: I was against it from even before day one. I stated this conviction on September 11, 2001 on a public internet forum, although the posts from that day are no longer available. I was convinced that the US would respond with a more or less arbitrarily declared war, and in my view, we did.
With this in mind, I defy anyone to try to stake out a position to my left!
70: This was probably clear from my defense of Gulf War I, but I'm on board with entering a war in response to an invasion of one of our allies as justified, although it may or may not be wise depending on the circumstances.
This is pretty easy. No.
Did you mean: "This is pretty easy. No?" If so: no.
Looking at this list, Gulf War '91, Kosovo, and Afghanistan are really your only options. Many Congressional Democrats voted against the first Gulf War. Afghanistan is such an easy call that no credit accrues. So Kosovo may be their only choice (again, from a political positioning POV).
stras, where do you stand on Afghanistan 2001?
Supported it naively and rather bloodthirstily at the time; in retrospect it's a complete clusterfuck and a moral nightmare. Why, exactly, has a discrete mission to wipe out a handful of al Qaeda terrorists evolved into an open-ended counterinsurgency against the Taliban? And why is it that every major liberal foreign policy thinker wants to implement the Afghani equivalent of The Surge?
I'm not arguing that invasion of one country by another anywhere in the world is automatically a justification for U.S. involvement regardless of the consequences, so I'm not sure that WWI is so relevant.
Replace "U.S." with "UK" and it gets a bit more relevant. (Think of the "Rape of Belgium".)
i don't know much about what happened then there
but always think Vietnam did really good liberating Cambodia from pol pot, and thought it was almost the same time-frame, when America fought a war in that region why the US did not do anything, or may be you did and i just don't know that
Kosovo and saddam hussein's downfall i 'd also support, just the war shouldn't have lasted this long
i mean the intervention ideally should have been that, intervention and restoration of what is the internationally recognised good, democracy and human rights, but not continued occupation
Ruanda, Darfur should have been intervened the UN sanctionedly and asap imo, though of course not the US alone should be responsible to intervene
I've assumed it means something like, "someone who, generally speaking, opposes most wars but not all wars."
But opposition to war is not, in and of itself, pacifist.
I can't believe how difficult it is to get a straight answer from people on whether "collective self defense/defense of another" is ever a justification for war.
It's a bit quick to be pulling out that sort rhetorical trick. We're 70+ comments into a discussion on a fairly involved issue, and pulling the 'why won't you answer' move is a bit low.
FWIW, my own view is something like LB's 75 with fairly deep worries about the wisdom of doing so in many/most actual instances..
One thing I haven't seen mentioned here is that America's military and foreign policy bureaucracies have their own institutionalized, semi-autonomous planning agencies, and do not key their planning on the demands of the electorate or even on the orders of elected officials. They have enormous powers to manipulate both public opinion and the elected civilian leadership. At the end of his life, for example, LBJ believed that he had been tricked into escalating the Vietnam War.
War opponents are always at a loss because they have no institutional heft at all; they tend to be thought of as a rabble of uninformed individuals. The war faction has massive presences in the media, academia, and in both political parties. There is no countervailing antiwar presence.
I think that this has been true more or less since 1941. It went along with increased technocracy and rule by experts, and the suppression of populism (which is basically Nazi, as we know.) And it did include the McCarthyist transformation of the university, but I won't harp on that.
Everyone reads Orwell their own way, but the switch from war on Eastasia to the war on Eurasia in 1984 (and the subsequent whipping up of popular support for the new war) can be related to the switch from alliance with Stalin to a cold war against Stalin, or to Nixon's playing the China card, when enemies suddenly became friends. The de-Nazification of Germany was crippled by our need to have allies against Communism, and we also buddied up to Franco for the same reason.
I have become very pessimistic. I think that America will continue to be militarist and imperialist as long as it is able to. I only really hope for less-adventurist imperialism.
74: Good for you, Zip. I'm still ashamed that supported Afghanistan for as long as I did.
But opposition to war is not, in and of itself, pacifist.
It sounds like we're talking about semantics now. My interest wanes.
I can't believe no one is going to defend Operation Just Cause in Panama, when it was clearly for a just cause. It's right there in the name!
Why, exactly, has a discrete mission to wipe out a handful of al Qaeda terrorists evolved into an open-ended counterinsurgency against the Taliban?
Because the distinction between al-Qaeda and the Taliban is not so clear as that question would make it out to be.
I think that America will continue to be militarist and imperialist as long as it is able to.
I'm pretty certain of this. The empire will only end when it goes broke.
And I've no idea what "quasi-pacifist" means
I'm purposeful conflating principles and consequences. If you place the bar on military intervention so high that it can rarely if ever be passed, that's "quasi-pacifist." For instance, I'd say Noam Chomsky is a quasi-pacifist, even though he claims WWII was justified.
Josh, did you trip off your warblog and fall into here or something?
84: You mean "Operation Why? Just 'cause."?
75: yeah, I agree. I actually opposed Gulf War I at the time, but I was in 7th grade; I've never seriously re-examined the question as an adult. On the one hand, a "no aggressive wars, the international community won't allow it" norm is valuable. On the other hand, given the Iraq War it's hard to argue that such a norm actually exists or is really what we were defending. And as far as the human consequences of the Gulf War, sanctions regime, etc., I've never looked at that in detail.
Kosovo I opposed before the fact because I thought preventing genocide was justified but an air war was just not going to work; then I thought, "oh, I guess it did work"; then I had doubts about the lack of Congressional authorization & legal legitimacy etc. & about how good the consequences were. So I'm basically ambivalent about both.
In general, I think that it's useful to have some "you can't go to war unless...." rules of international law, but it's entirely possible for a war to meet those conditions & still be immoral, disastrous, etc.
re: 80
Damn right. Irrespective of my views on warfare by nation states, on a personal level, I'm all for punching some people in the head.
I'm purposeful conflating principles and consequences
Oh, good. You won't mind if I call you "pro-mass-murder," then.
Britain and France's declaration of war in support of Poland seems to me pretty much the model of justifiable defense of another. But to be honest, part of that is that there are no major competing claims to sovereignty involved in any of the participants. The Balkans have problems of who gets to say "this is mine" that go back to the 19th century (in something like their present form), and I have the impression that Kuwait's history involves a lot of imperial decree for the convenience of oil companies, which as a general thing I have trouble taking seriously as a foundation for governance. (I reserve the right to be shown to be a through-hat-talking nitwit here, and to graciously acknowledge it if I am.) Furthermore, there were allegations at the time that Kuwait was slant-drilling into Iraqi-held parts of that big oil field on their border, and I never did hear the results of investigation by outside groups into that.
And, of course, Poland didn't engage in a well-funded campaign to deceive the British or French people into war with the connivance of the British and/or French governments. Kuwait did, with the US. (Britain and the US connived that way too, which is why I'm happy to take intervention on Poland's behalf as a test instead.)
I would like to see more folks like Yglesias take up seriously the question of why the US is not a justifiable target of invasion from just about anyone else in the world, on behalf of any of our targets these days. Because I can't see a genuine standard fit for the whole world that doesn't put us front and center.
88, 92: Jesus Christ, you've gone right into strasshole mode, haven't you?
A couple of points: this is a lot like the discussions of "procedural liberalism." If you commit to a set of rules, sometimes you're going to get perverse outcomes; it's nearly inevitable, because rules are crude and events are complex.
Given that, it might be better to come up with a set of flexible principles that explicitly recognize the need for good judgment in any given case. Something like the Catholic doctrine of just war.
The other thing is that sometimes in a situation where you WANT a multilateral military response to some kind of situation, you don't get UN troops but you would still totally rather have the US in there than nobody. (I'm talking about Rwanda here, because I'm in Rwanda at the moment and have a one track mind).
I don't think any of it is easy. As a proud quasi-pacifist, I have no idea how to decide which wars I like, except by hindsight. Hindsight makes everything so simple!
Josh, did you trip off your warblog and fall into here or something?
You know, it *is* possible to have been against the invasion of Iraq, and in fact to be completely within the mainstream of opinion here with regard to U.S. foreign policy, and still disagree with you about this stuff.
I would like to see more folks like Yglesias take up seriously the question of why the US is not a justifiable target of invasion from just about anyone else in the world, on behalf of any of our targets these days. Because I can't see a genuine standard fit for the whole world that doesn't put us front and center.
Quite.
strasshole mode
Excuse me? Re-read 84 and tell me who's being the asshole.
I supported going into Afghanistan, and can envision a possible world in which the Administration conducting that war was not incompetant and wicked, and in which we Marshall Planned the hell out of Afghanistan after routing the Taliban, and in which by 2008 burgeoning beacon of democratic institutions reverse domino effect blah de blah de blah.
Oh, good. You won't mind if I call you "pro-mass-murder," then.
As long as it's in good faith!
They were so proud of the just war doctrine in Catholic school. We flitted right over contraception, marriage, etc. to talk about that for a week. (But then, all the priests were gay.)
96: Exactly, that's the Kosovo problem. (Or it might be. I'm very hesitant about these arguments because I don't know enough to be sure when intervention would practically have been likely to improve the situation - I'm ambivalent about Kosovo on that front, even in hindsight. In Rwanda, it seems as if military intervention would have to have saved lives, but I don't really know of my own knowledge.)
Re-read 84 and tell me who's being the asshole.
George H. W. Bush?
100: Isn't that the basic argument given by the Iraq incompetence dodgers, though? "I can imagine a world in which George Bush did Iraq right." I can imagine a lot of things, but usually the objections go something like (1) you did know this was George Bush, right? and (2) you did know this was Iraq, right? And in that vein, we both should've known that this was George Bush, and that this was Afghanistan.
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I was opposed, but resigned, to the war in Afghanistan, but supported the invasion of Iraq.
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95: I thought about mentioning just war theory, but I thought it was more fun to watch everyone stumble towards it through series of examples. There is also the practical trouble with just war theory that it places a lot of weight on discerning the state's intentions. Good for Catholic souls, perhaps, but a lot harder to use practically if one doesn't have a reliable way to discern them.
or may be you did and i just don't know that
Actually, we helped create the conditions that led to Pol Pot's regime, and ultimately to an opportunity for Vietnamese intervention. No need to thank us, Vietnam—it was the least we could do.
Isn't defining Russia as not having a legitimate interest in Europe a problem there?
Well, sure, but we're talking about practical diplomacy here. And that would be your pre-Putin, Yeltsin-era, hitting-the-skids Russia we were snubbing. No reason to think we couldn't get away with it, legitimacy-wise.
82, 96: Another problem here is that answering pragmatic questions about likely consequences requires a lot of expertise, and as Emerson notes, in the US at least the professional military is seen as the sole source of the relevant expertise, but isn't a politically neutral player.
Doh! LB beat me to the HITS book review. I was going to finish it last week but then, well, beer.
Josh, here's a difference between al Qaeda and the Taliban: al Qaeda attacked America on 9/11, and the Taliban didn't.
To continue my dark mumbling, I increasingly doubt whether it's realistic to suppose that civilians can really control the military and the police. They can try, but groups with the license to kill are hard to effectively oppose. The nations where the military actuallydoes seem obedient to civilians seem mostly to be nations which are not at war, haven't been at war recently, and don't expect to be at war in the forseeable future.
There are very few American cities where the police aren't semi-autonomous, often with their own elected leader and an invulnerable policeman's union. A friend of mine in Portland claimed that no Portland mayor had ever succeeded in getting control of the police force.
112: And I actually bought my copy.
Josh, here's a difference between al Qaeda and the Taliban: al Qaeda attacked America on 9/11, and the Taliban didn't.
Of course, but surely alliances must mean something, right? Is it controversial to say that al Qaeda and the Taliban were meaningfully aligned against the United States?
I bought my copy, too!
Everyone should buy a copy!
106: To which I reply that Afghanistan was a hell of a lot more relevant to the Al Qaeda problem than Iraq was, and the ability of the Bush Administration to fuck things up was at that time unproven, so why are you trying to draw an equivalence?
In case this isn't clear, I'm only talking about the "necessary but not sufficient conditions" sort of rules. The weighing of the likely consequences of a particular war is always a necessary additional step. Lots of wars that could be characterized as self defense, defense of another country, or an attempt to stop a genocide have been & still could be awful ideas. (E.g., regardless of the international law justification for other countries to invade us after we invaded Iraq, I don't think it would've been a very good idea.) But it's possible for countries to convince themselves of ridiculously rose-colored views of the consequences, so it's good to have those international law rules too.
116: "Meaningfully aligned" in what way? Taliban leaders weren't sitting in a room drafting plans to hijack planes with bin Laden and KSM. The Taliban had given al Qaeda sanctuary in Afghanistan. They weren't meaningfully coordinating with al Qaeda to attack the U.S.
yeah, my best wishes to Cecily in Rwanda
i just recalled Soljenitsun, how the gulag prisoners in 1950 ies were wishing that the US'd declare a war with stalin
the first time i read i thought something like no wonder they were prisoners, they're so unpatriotic and antisoviet after one WW to wish another
but on re-read i thought i got what he meant, all their despair
107: Unsurprising given the historical enmity of Iran and Iraq.
103: military action would totally have saved lives. There was prior knowledge of arms stashes and impending orders for massacre, and a request for additional UN troops. Instead the UN pulled everybody out so they wouldn't be stuck in a dangerous situation.
But, I, personally can see a bright line between at least Rwanda and Iraq. Specific incipient harm, etc. I don't know that much about Kosovo so we might be talking around each other.
"Meaningfully aligned" in what way?
In the way you just said: providing sanctuary, even in the face of a threat of military force. That's a sufficient criterion for me, but I recognize that reasonable people can disagree.
120: Failing to assist the US in retailiation against Al Qaeda? If an organization warring against another country is located within your country, you really are 'either with it or against it'. The "Al Qaeda attacked you, we (the Taliban) didn't, but you can't come into our sovereign territory after them because that would be unprovoked war against us," position is really untenable.
120: There was guy out on the back deck of my house with a high powered rifle taking out my neighbor's kids. I never planned anything with him, I just let him in when he came to the door. Those cops that busted in afterwards and yelled at me and took me down and cuffed me have a lot of nerve.
123: I'm sure you're right, it's just an issue where I feel my lack of expertise.
82: One thing I haven't seen mentioned here is that America's military and foreign policy bureaucracies have their own institutionalized, semi-autonomous planning agencies, and do not key their planning on the demands of the electorate or even on the orders of elected officials.
I've been reading Andrew Bacevich's The New American Militarism. Just a couple of chapters in, but it's a bit of a reality check given the extent to which I've become so accustomed to laying virtually all blame for our dubious military adventures on a given presidential administration itself. Bacevich gives a general history of evolving military policy (chiefly within the military, but also as it morphed in interaction with relevant executive bodies) in response to the Vietnam War, the Cold War and its end; how the state of affairs in military policy at a given time was reflected in our prosecution of various adventures, or actually constituted a fuckup divergent from existing doctrine, and so on.
Sorry, that was a cheap "think of the children" move. I should have said "taking out my neighbor's dogs".
Afghanistan was a hell of a lot more relevant to the Al Qaeda problem than Iraq was
That's a jump over the low bar. Midgets think I'm pretty tall, too, but for some reason I never made it into the NBA.
the ability of the Bush Administration to fuck things up was at that time unproven
Except for the fact that Bush was already a demonstrable idiot with little to no interest in policy, who had decided to flush away a multi-million-dollar budget surplus on tax cuts for the rich as the country headed into recession. And again, this was Afghanistan, a country made up of various disparate tribes and ethnic groups that hadn't been unified under a single government in decades. The notion that America was going to turn this into a successful nation-building exercise should've been laughable.
My favorite part about Afghanistan is that the Taliban offered to turn over al Qaeda if we showed evidence that they were behind the attack. We got pissed off at such an unreasonable demand and invaded the shit out of them.
On another point: Using what was basically a European war as a model for international relations today is pretty dumb, since most borders for contemporary African and Middle Eastern states were arbitrarily drawn by the Western powers. Yet we are supposed to treat them like brute unchangeable facts. Why shouldn't Kuwait be a part of Iraq, for instance? Or why shouldn't there be a Kurdistan? Etc., etc.
Europeans got to establish their borders by conquest, population transfer, etc. -- why should the third world be excluded from the fun of building their own nation-states the old-fashioned way if the nation-state is to be the end-all of international law?
(This thread is making me want to reread Hardt and Negri, beyond the quick review/skim I did for exams.)
I bought my own copy of HITS and opposed the Afghanistan war in a widely distributed email that really upset my uncle, who for some time afterwards stopped forwarding me emails with the various themes of Kill 'em All and Wow, Women Complain A Lot.
I've wavered in my Afg. opposition, but the most sense has always been made by those who contemplated international police action (and, in the presidential race, were mercilessly mocked for it).
77 is very humanizing.
Using what was basically a European war as a model for international relations today is pretty dumb, since most borders for contemporary African and Middle Eastern states were arbitrarily drawn by the Western powers.
This is kind of a really good point. Is there a better way to resolve the problem, though, than to let them just fight it out to draw new borders?
"On another point: Using what was basically a European war as a model for international relations today is pretty dumb, since most borders for contemporary African and Middle Eastern states were arbitrarily drawn by the Western powers. Yet we are supposed to treat them like brute unchangeable facts. Why shouldn't Kuwait be a part of Iraq, for instance? Or why shouldn't there be a Kurdistan? Etc., etc."
Or why shouldn't Iraq be the 51st state?
That's insane. A lot of borders are "arbitrary" in one fashion or another. The U.S.'s territory wasn't exactly legitimately acquired, and yet I wouldn't be cool with Mexico or Canada invading.
Is there a better way to resolve the problem, though, than to let them just fight it out to draw new borders?
Not that I can see.
Which is to say, stras, that if you don't think the benefits outweighed the costs in the case of Afghanistan, that's fine, but to suggest that the principle of self defense doesn't at least offer a measurable benefit to the US that has to be weighed against the cost (as opposed to the Iraq case, where there was essentially no threat to defend against) seems disingenuous.
136: again, stupid, insane, and actually appallingly West-centered in its own way. "WE have real countries no matter what bloody way their borders were set, but those fake little Third world countries should fight it out; it'll be good for them."
The borders of a nation-state are always de facto borders -- legitimacy doesn't enter into the question. The definition of the modern state is an agency with a monopoly on coercive force over a given territory. What right do Mexico and Canada themselves have over their territory, much less ours, given that they are also products of colonialism/imperialism?
Josh, here's a difference between al Qaeda and the Taliban: al Qaeda attacked America on 9/11, and the Taliban didn't.
bin Laden swore an oath of personal fealty to Mullah Omar, and the two organizations were clearly closely allied. The assassination of Ahmed Shah Massoud was also taken at the time as an al-Qaeda quid pro quo for Taliban support once 9/11 happened.
138: I'm playing devil's advocate. If the nation-state is to be the basis for international law, then let the rest of the world establish nation-states in the appropriate way.
if you don't think the benefits outweighed the costs in the case of Afghanistan, that's fine
Let's be clear here: we're not paying the costs in Afghanistan. The Afghans we've killed are paying the costs. As for the benefits, I don't even see what they are.
but to suggest that the principle of self defense doesn't at least offer a measurable benefit to the US that has to be weighed against the cost ... seems disingenuous.
How our we defending ourselves in Afghanistan right now? The Taliban didn't attack us; the innocent Afghans who invariably get killed in the crossfire certainly didn't. Bin Laden is in Pakistan now. The whole thing strikes me as a grotesque farce.
What seems clear to me is that the best way America can defend itself against terror isn't through military action, but through changing its foreign policy with regard to Israel, the Mideast, and the rest of the developing world. But no one in a position to do this is willing to do this, so the "practical" response becomes, let's hunt down and kill the terrorists! And "hunting down and killing the terrorists" always ends up meaning killing lots of people who aren't terrorists, which ends up, surprise surprise, creating more terrorists.
Except for the fact that Bush was already a demonstrable idiot with little to no interest in policy, who had decided to flush away a multi-million-dollar budget surplus on tax cuts for the rich as the country headed into recession.
Eh, demonstrating crappy economic policy doesn't really speak too much to foreign policy, IMO. Colin Powell was Secretary of State at the time, so you could make a case that there was adult supervision there.
Of course, to be more honest, I was paying approximately zero attention to what the Administration was doing before 9/11. I listened to Bush's speeches right afterward and said to myself "well, he doesn't exactly inspire confidence" but I probably would have given him my approval if polled, simply on national-unity and "you go to war with the president you have" principles. (If I'd known about My Pet Goat and the August 6 2001 PDB, that would be another story, of course.)
138: So let me ask you a simple question back. Do historical questions of the legitimacy of a particular span of control of a nation-state #1 ever change the obligations of nation-state #2 to react to threats to its sovereignty?
I was opposed, but resigned, to the war in Afghanistan, but supported the invasion of Iraq.
Yeah, you're a psycho, if that's really you. I cannot think of any worse policy than to instruct the American military to behave like Lassie.
Colin Powell was Secretary of State at the time, so you could make a case that there was adult supervision there.
Wasn't Colin Powell left out of meetings and summarily ignored until he resigned?
Why, exactly, has a discrete mission to wipe out a handful of al Qaeda terrorists evolved into an open-ended counterinsurgency against the Taliban?
The Bush administration certainly never billed the war as a "discreet mission to wipe out a handful of al Qaeda terrorists." It was a war to root out Al Qaeda and their state sponsors. Additionally, a lot of the discourse surrounding the war in 2001 focused on the claim that the only reason invading Afghanistan was necessary in 2001 is that we had abandoned engagement with the country after the 1980s and let the Taliban take power. Nation-building and a refusal to "walk away from Afghanistan again" seemed to be part of the mission from the beginning.
147: Yeah, well, that's why it was a stupid war. And I was stupid for supporting it at the time.
"138: So let me ask you a simple question back. Do historical questions of the legitimacy of a particular span of control of a nation-state #1 ever change the obligations of nation-state #2 to react to threats to its sovereignty?"
Don't begin to understand the question. What is the relationship between nation states 1 & 2? Whose control of nation state #1? And does the "its sovereignty" in the last sentence refer to nation state #1 or #2?