The Atlantic - Latest Comments in Liberal Interventionism

Re: Liberal Interventionism

Reality Man — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 11:13:54 -0000

"Didn't do much for the Rwandans or the Cambodians though, did it?"

Then again, our use of hard power in Cambodia - bombing locations throughout the entire country to get at Viet Cong elements there, and killing hundreds of thousands of Cambodians in the process, along with overthrowing a popular prince who wasn't doing our bidding in favor of a hated and incompetent military government - enabled the rise of the Khmer Rouge in the first place. If we hadn't destroyed Cambodians' ability to stand up to the KR, they likely would never have taken power.

Re: Liberal Interventionism

section9 — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 00:43:45 -0000

Soft power is a great thing.

Didn't do much for the Rwandans or the Cambodians though, did it? Nor, I might add, for the Marsh Arabs or the Kurds.

Soft power matters until the balloon goes up, as it always does. Liberals don't get this until a Democratic Administration takes power.

By the way, now that the Democrats are in power, you'll start hearing less and less about soft power.

Re: Liberal Interventionism

Jim — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 13:13:52 -0000

"Jim, our military presence in Europe, though greatly reduced from Cold War levels, or even the '90s, remains substantial (tens of thousands). "

Those are Corps and theatre logistics units, not conmabt brigades. There is maybe all of a division in Germany, and a division on it's own will vaporize on cantact with any force the Chinese will have to defend Tibet. Count on it.

2ID is going nowhere. It will stay on the DMZ until the Koreas re-unify. I think it would be wonderful to pull every last American out of Korea and leave the Koreans to bask in the fraternal glow, without American troops to around for their student parasites to demonstrate against. But it is not going to happen. Period.

And as you say twice - understrength, everyone of those formations.

By the way, I wouldn't cite Mother Jones as any kind of authority on military affairs. They may get the cruder part of a map right, but they tend to ignore the actually relevant information, like what kind of troops are where and what their capablities are, because frankly their readers are not likely to have a clue about any of that.

Re: Liberal Interventionism

Doug T — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 08:54:58 -0000

These discussions on the rights and wrongs of foreign military interventions for humanitarian reasons brings to mind this recent post by D-Squared, which is worth reading at least before you try to reference Rwanda as evidence for much of anyhing here.

http://d-squareddigest.blogspot.com/2008/11/rwandaland-particularly-annoying.html

"I've made this point about Turquoise before but it's important so I'm making it again. There is a really annoying tendency among the pro-intervention lobby to pretend it didn't happen and that "there was no intervention in Rwanda". There was an intervention in Rwanda, it was Turquoise and it made things worse. It was a somewhat politically motivated, terribly badly planned and wholly counterproductive exercise. Or in other words, the normal kind. Using the example of Rwanda as a data point in favour of unilateral intervention requires you to have a theory about why Turquoise can be considered as irrelevant or sui generis. Without that (or even worse, to make rhetorical use of Rwanda without mentioning Turquoise at all) is a particularly toxic strain of Afrobollocks."

As a side note, there's just about no situation that's so terrible that dropping a bunch of bombs on it won't make worse. And going in and toppling offending governemnts by force rarely produces a magical improvement in the quality of life of local citizens. If Iraq wasn't all the evidence you need there, you could look to the Congo for another example. Or just about any other civil war in Africa in the past 30 years.

In fact, it's awfully hard to come up with any example of a humanitarian military interventions actually producing a beneficial outcome. At best, you've got Kosovo, but the evidence there is inconclusive at best. Foreign military forces can be effective as peacekeepers. But they're not effective as peace-makers.

Re: Liberal Interventionism

Thomas R — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 00:42:34 -0000

The Tibet thing is complicated by the fact that, rightly or wrongly, they have moved a fair amount of Han Chinese to the area. So the Chinese do have some legitimate concerns about how even an autonomous Tibet might treat them.

The problem I have started to have with the "Free Tibet" thing is it may sound to them like just putting regions against each other. For a variety of reasons I think this might sound like "divide and conquer" or "Chinese people are the problem" to some Chinese.

China has many issues, Tibet being a serious one but not the only one. It's worth considering that focussing on Tibet in near-isolation might be ineffective or even kind-of missing the point. Reform in China ideally should lead to a better China for the Chinese, who are not exactly free either, as well as leading to less oppression and more autonomy for Tibet.

Re: Liberal Interventionism

Cobb — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 00:14:27 -0000

M. You should, in between effigy burnings of right-wing strawmen, wander over and investigate the controversy between William Burke and Warren Hastings, with the explicit understanding that we Conservatives owe a great debt to the mind of Burke. I don't think you'll find an societies owing any great devotion to King Leopold.

Nice try though.

Re: Liberal Interventionism

Reality Man — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:50:23 -0000

"I agree with Mark Steyn who says that the problem with liberals is that they feel quite self-righteous with their 'Free Tibet' bumper stickers, but get very quiet when they recognize that actually freeing Tibet means sending American soldiers.

Posted by Cobb | December 17, 2008 2:18 PM"

There's a reason why masturbatory self-righteousness cannot stand up to logistics. How would you deliver troops there in the first place? How would you re-supply the troops in rugged terrain? Who would be their translators? We don't have a lot of Tibetan speakers in this country, after all. India has probably been the most pro-Tibetan country, but they're not about to get into a shooting war with what is about to become their biggest trading partner and the only country to decisively beat them in a war since independence. What would bind Tibetans together as a people after decades of Chinese rule? Does the Dalai Lama hold sway over the people after living in exile for decades and being cut off from his fellow Tibetans? What to do with the fact a large number of ethnic Tibetans have moved to Qinghai province? Also, it's no longer "Free Tibet," but has instead been "Save Tibet" for at least a decade, reflecting the multi-ethnic reality of what Tibet is now.

When you come right down to it, guys like Steyn are just scared of the darker-skinned peoples of the world and use violent fantasies to overcome that fear. What pisses me off as a liberal minority concerned over things like genocide and the subjugation of women, gays, lesbians and ethnic minorities in the postcolonial world is that these real issues get hijacked by angry, mostly white, conservatives as a weapon to beat The Other over the hand with little concern for the actual victims. Think of how conservatives shrug off how Iraq's more theocratic state today vs. under Saddam isn't a clear improvement for women. Instead of figuring out how to get medical supplies, contraception (especially contraception meant to prevent or mitigate the effects of rape, such as the "teeth condom"), etc. to women who need it in patriarchal Muslim societies, they use the lot of Muslim women as an excuse to justify killing more random Muslims. Figuring out how to help people in foreign lands starts with listening to their stories and their concerns and how they think you can best help and then stepping back and looking at what is possible under the societal and material reality and logistics. Women being killed in honor killings are about those women. Those events are not about you, how they make you feel, how it feeds into your intellectual framework and history and what your reaction says about you. Putting your desires to dictate to oppressed peoples just trying to live their lives over their desires to improve their own situations just makes you egotistical and selfish.

Re: Liberal Interventionism

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 21:53:55 -0000

I am likewise squicked by the right's appropriation of such discourses as democracy, human rights, and so on, for their own nefarious ends, but I think it is important to take a longer, deeper historical view of this. Moving backwards through history:

The justification through which most European nations (and individuals, like Belgium's Leopold) present their colonization of Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was explicitly humanitarian. They said that they had to intervene to end the slave trade (which they had, of course, begun centuries earlier, but more on that in a minute). Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the history of Africa knows that this justification was as shoddy as anything the neocons say today -- colonialism was in fact slavery of the most egregious kind. But telling the church-going white folks back home that they were out "civilizing the Dark Continent" sure promoted support for it. Hundreds of years earlier, of course, these same European powers justified enslaving our ancestors because, they said, being enslaved meant that we were being saved from our heathen ways. The forced baptisms in slave forts and ships all along the coast were supposed to make this point, and there is rampant European writing and art going back to the 1500s designed to make it look like the European slavers were freeing Africans from being killed and eaten.

Orwellian doublespeak unfortunately has a long past.

Is it really unclear to anyone what produces an enables despotic regimes around the world? And does it make any actual sense to look towards the source of the problem for its solution, however compellingly articulated?

Re: Liberal Interventionism

Michael — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 21:29:49 -0000

If you are interested in intervention and have not read it yet, Thomas Barnett wrote an old but very interesting book named The Pentagons New Map. The situation is a little different now with the economic problems, but it is still worth reading.

Re: Liberal Interventionism

Katherine — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 21:27:52 -0000

This is not true. Speaking as liberal & for the people I know. "Free Tibet" to us does not necessarily mean a free nation of Tibet. All the libs I know personally would settle for some sort of autonomous Tibet. That does not require military intervention. It requires China to stop being so obtuse.

Eddy - I think, if you do NOT think Tibet needs to be independent (and not even the Dalai Lama does) it would be wise to find a better slogan than "Free Tibet", because the Chinese are certainly inclined to see it as demanding Tibetan independence, and it gets their hackles up. (As a Canadian, I would respond very, VERY negatively to "free Quebec" signs and definitely consider them supportive of Quebec separatism.)

"Autonomy for Tibet" doesn't have nearly the same simple ring to it, but it gets across a much more accurate idea of what you are supporting. "Free Tibet" is simply counterproductive.

I think China would be far more receptive towards the idea of "treat Tibet decently and respect their natural resources and concern for the environment and sacred sites" than they are towards westerners advocating the breakup of their nation.

Re: Liberal Interventionism

JordanT — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 20:20:02 -0000

Angela, if the West's capacity (cultural, economic, and political) for welcoming the 'masses yearning to breathe free' were infinitely elastic

And speaking about foreign intervention and nation building in multiple countries at a time assumes that the US can spend an infinite amount of money on the military and can somehow convince hundreds of thousands of soldiers to sign up to be shipped off to third-world countries. We can't intervene in all of these places because we don't have the money or the men.

Re: Liberal Interventionism

Hugo Pottisch — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 20:03:44 -0000

World police? The police does not start shooting into a crowd only to catch a murderer, does it?

Re: Liberal Interventionism

Neocon maudit — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 19:03:36 -0000

Jim, our military presence in Europe, though greatly reduced from Cold War levels, or even the '90s, remains substantial (tens of thousands). Many units formerly based in Germany have been relocated to the States, but some of them will return there once Iraq is done.

www.motherjones.com/military-maps/

[Am I allowed to post this?]

Rumsfeld advocated reducing our footprint and establishing smaller staging bases in places like Romania, but I'm not sure if this strategy is still go.

Okinawa hosts an understrength Marine Expeditionary Force, and Korea an understrength (well, some of the component brigades) 2nd Infantry Division. Not to mention the Seventh Fleet in Japan.

Re: Liberal Interventionism

Jim — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 18:32:00 -0000

" If our immigration policy was open, people could choose to leave the horrors, rather than fighting and dying over a disputed scrap of land. "

At first look this is inhumane - leaving their homes is the last option most people will accept, but in fact the pattern has often been that people leave, regroup and then return and fix the situation. This was the pattern with the refugees from the Potato Famine - of course most stayed, but it was (US) Civil war veterans who returned to Ireland and reversed the attack-and-die pattern of resistance to an attack-and-kill strategy - they formed the IRA. It took decades but in the end they prevailed.

The problem is that it takes a very long time, and it will be a very long time before the Lost Boys get to a position where they can force the Sudanese government to back down. There is a lot of death and suffering in the meantime.

"Don't make something that harms no one (crossing a line in the sand) illegal."

But - really, Angela, who are you to say that unrestricted immigration harms no one? Try that line on an Lakota reservation and see how far you get with it.

"As we tend to forget that we have thousands of troops stationed in Germany and on Okinawa, "

Cobb, your information is about 15 years out of date. Most of the ground forces that were in Germnay, that fought the Gulf War for instance, have been gone for a long time now. As for Okinawa, those are Marines, and there aren't a lot of them anywhere.

"It requires China to stop being so obtuse."

Well the point Eddy, is that China is not going to stop "being so obtuse' of its own free will anytime soon, as in several centuries.

However you are right, or talking in the right direction, when you say

"The point is a "free" Tibet does not require military intervention. "

Not so much because none of us really knows what it will take to get the Chinese yoke off of Tibet, but we can all agree on one thing: military intervention in Tibet is impossible, so it hardly matters whether it how necessary it is. There is simply no way that the US can win a land war in Tibet, and very likely no way that we could survive such a war.

Re: Liberal Interventionism

Cobb — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 17:20:11 -0000

I'm for, Angela, an Internal Empire. But considering how too many Americans are being obtuse about their responsibilities of citizenship, I have serious doubts as to whether they would engage constructively in crafting a proper framework for immigration. As far as I've heard, the distinction between legal and illegal immigration translates in their heads to 'obviously racist' or 'subtly racist'. Then again, we'd probably get a better class of respectful American by just opening all the borders. Sorry, I tend to gripe on this, and I live in Los Angeles.

--

There's absolutely nothing wrong with soft power, and geopolitical neocons like myself who are pro-interventionist are highly sensitive to the various roles that the military might play other than shock and awe. It is my fierce contention that, nevertheless, shock and awe is superior in most cases to assassinate and subvert.

I am something of a devotee of Thomas PM Barnett's concept of a global 'system administration force'. As we tend to forget that we have thousands of troops stationed in Germany and on Okinawa, these forces are not only positioned for big war, but as a deterrent. And as everyone knows from Phuket, there is no other resource on the planet like a US hospital ship.

As we speak, the UN has authorized the use of ground forces to chase Somali pirates onto the land should the situation arise. Analysts today are saying this is worse than doing nothing because when push comes to shove, we fully expect to shy away from actually having skirmishes in East Africa. This is precisely the kind of 'diplomacy' that makes hash of soft power.

--

As for Anthony Lloyd, he sounds like a sick adventurer - a thanto-tourist. I'd no sooner read his book than take meth and hang out with Crips.

Re: Liberal Interventionism

Neocon maudit — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 17:11:58 -0000

Angela, if the West's capacity (cultural, economic, and political) for welcoming the 'masses yearning to breathe free' were infinitely elastic, I would prefer this option to conquering the world. But I don't think North America, Europe, and the Anzacs could absorb even 100 million refugees, and that's a fairly conservative estimate for the oppressed of the Earth.

Not to mention, again looking to Europe, there are immense political and practical difficulties with implementing asylum policies. Do we admit any citizen of the Dar al-Islam who has succumbed to apostasy? Shall we let in, say, every homosexual on the planet (how many non-Western states tolerate openly 'gay' citizens)? What about every young person who wishes to enjoy his or her body (especially her) in a regime tolerant (officially or not) of sexual liberty ('promiscuity' or 'wantonness')? I know, Obamamania notwithstanding, most of our youth are probably far more concerned with taking advantage of the West's sexual freedom than, say, the right to vote.

'Democracy! Whisky! Sexy!'

Re: Liberal Interventionism

Angela — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:45:27 -0000

I have a different, totally serious proposal to suggest. Rather than looking at military intervention, we (as a country) should look at being a safe refuge. If our immigration policy was open, people could choose to leave the horrors, rather than fighting and dying over a disputed scrap of land. If they choose to stay anyway, that is sad. Just as a parent needs to look at their adult child sometimes making bad choices, we as a country could use our wealth and military to rescue those who want to leave. Help them get out.

Coming to this country as permanent residents, with the option of becoming citizens is not an easy path for people to take. Knowing there is an escape option might be enough to give people the strength to work things out. Knowing there is an escape option might make leaders a little more careful about being vicious despots since they could end up in charge of an empty country.

Can anyone argue the hundreds of billions spent on Iraq couldn't have been better spent helping willing Iraqi's relocate to the US?

Let us, as a country, get back to our founding principles: Open our boarders to those willing to live productive lives. Don't make something that harms no one (crossing a line in the sand) illegal. Keep the laws based on preventing and punishing harmful actions, but get rid of the ones that make people criminals for no good reason.

- Angela

Re: Liberal Interventionism

TKOEd — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:42:30 -0000

The point is a "free" Tibet does not require military intervention.

Re: Liberal Interventionism

TKOEd — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:33:54 -0000

sorry wrong thread

Re: Liberal Interventionism

TKOEd — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:33:04 -0000

anyone who thinks slavery isn't alive & well needs to get this book.

Re: Liberal Interventionism

Neocon maudit — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:28:18 -0000

And what of the Kurds under Saddam? The Bosnian Muslims under siege in 'safe areas' (or penned in concentration camps)? The Tutsi, the Fur, the Burmese under the rebranded SLORC? Did their oppressors simply need to 'stop being so obtuse'?

I've no interest in dispatching a Marine Expeditionary Force to the Tibetan plateau.

If the liberals would give up whingeing and unconstructive posturing (are we really going to impose substantive economic sanctions on China?), I'll give up my dreams of empire.

By the way, Carrington's remarks reminded me of what I used to feel was an essential truth: a universalist moral-political system eg liberalism (not 'multiculturalism', whatever that word means) requires us to remake the world, or permit the world to come to us. And Carrington should know, from looking at domestic politics in Europe, that the latter option isn't much more palatable to our voters than the former.

Re: Liberal Interventionism

TKOEd — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:03:14 -0000

"actually freeing Tibet means sending American soldiers."

I love when people make these sorts of statements about "liberals". In reality, as opposed to right-wing day dreams, most liberals are much more pragmatic, much less dogmatic & more willing to compromise than we are made out to be.

Re: Liberal Interventionism

Neocon maudit — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 15:44:07 -0000

I read the blog entry by the 'Ambassador at Large' which occasioned Yglesias's comments, and it seemed resignedly realistic to me. In most cases, 'soft power' pre-emption is clearly the best option, and if that fails, there's little that the West can do to make things better without making things ultimately worse. We could smite the bad guys with JDAMs and Marines and almost certainly halt the immediate genocide, but we've then assumed responsibility to rebuild the country, reconcile the factions, etc -- everything that soft power failed to do before outright massacres began. As Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated, there are good reasons why our leadership was obsessed with 'exit strategies' in the '90s.

We probably could have prevented Srebrenica, but I'm not sure we could have ended the Yugoslav wars in, say, '93 rather than '95. By 1995, the Serbs were exhausted, and the 'correlation of forces' had shifted considerably in favour of their adversaries (particularly the Croats). And now, a decade later, Nato and the EU still have forces in the Balkans, and both Bosnia and Kosovo could yet blow up in the future.

Nevertheless, for now the moral burden does rest on the West, with its incredible 'discretionary' military power (or 'security surplus'), to do something when it's clear genocide is taking place. But our nations are democracies, and I see no way to make humanitarian interventions palatable to the 'post-heroic' West unless the costs were kept exceedingly low (if nothing else, Clinton's political instincts were accurate). Outright invasions, whether 'humanitarian', 'pre-emptive', etc, yield imperial burdens. We've learnt at great cost that we aren't very good at managing empires, nor are we willing to pay the financial and human price (pace Niall Ferguson).

What makes me a Neocon rather than a 'liberal hawk': if we're not willing to do what's right, if it's practically or politically infeasible, then I would rather we shut up. The slaughtered dead have no need of our sanctimony.

Re: Liberal Interventionism

Carrington Ward — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 15:23:41 -0000

Point well taken. However, it is worth heeding one of the more significant and valid of the true conservative's aphorisms: "the road to hell is paved with good intentions."

We've long been taught about the essential wisdom of Woodrow Wilson's intervention in World War I. Done right, there is an argument for it. However, the historical reality is that we fluffed it, terribly -- our mistakes played a large role in the increasingly bloody and murderous century to come.

Frankly, the best response to a murderous regime is asylum, not intervention -- intervening commits us to keeping our finger on the scale in the ensuing years of reprisal and counter-reprisal, and in the end becoming a party to the violence.

Far better to endure the social disruption engendered by new refugees than the ongoing geopolitical disruption of 'constructive engagement' in another region of the globe.

Re: Liberal Interventionism

Tony Comstock — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 15:16:30 -0000

Boomers talk about Vietnam. I think about Srebrenica. Eight Thousand Three Hundred and Seventy Two.

Have you read Anthony Lloyd's "My War Gone By, I Miss It So"?