----- Original Message ----- From: "Doug Pensinger" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Killer Bs Discussion" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, May 10, 2004 11:08 AM Subject: Re: What America Does with its Hegemony
> Dan wrote: > wrong with overturning a genocidal dictator. > > I think the world needs a mechanism to deal with these crisis. This would > obviously require the cooperation of many disparate nations and after the > current debacle is more of a pipe dream than ever. What Bush has tried to > do is to tell the world how things are going to be and I think that the > lesson we are learning is that no matter how powerful we are, we're not > going to get the Middle East or any other region of the world to tow the > line based on our say so. To be fair to him, I think what he was trying to do was change the nature of the game. The thought was, just like Japan and Germany, people would be happy with a good representative government in Iraq. This happiness would make them very protective of that government, and in short order we'd have a shining example of what could be in the mid-East. This would be the first step in "draining the swamp." In principal, it is a worthwhile goal. Our own Gautam has been trying to risk his life to help accomplish this goal. I think that the folks who pushed for this from way back are idealists...complete with the blindness to reality that some realists have. I fault the Bush administration for acting as if, once Hussein was overthrown, things would work out very straightforwardly. They were horrendously unprepared, and acted as a typical leadership team caught up in management by wishful thinking. They considered those who pointed out real difficulties nay-sayers and either ignored them or pushed them out. So, let my put forth a hypothetical. Lets assume this was done by an administration that had shown a real sucess rebuilding Afganistan, and had a very good team ready to work in reconstructing Iraq, and had laid out the real costs to the American people and gotten buy in. Lets suppose that Bush had not exaggerated the level of certainty for WMD from "there are very strong indications...even French intelligence thinks so" to total certainty. In this case, with proper preparation for sucess, would completing the Gulf War have been wrong?...especially since it faded into a often violated cease fire agreement instead of ending in '91. > Our action in Bosnia was the culmination of a problem that had festered in > eastern Europe for a decade or so. It wasn't just the 'cleansing' that > was taking place at the time that prompted the action, but the fact that a > series of atrocities had occurred over the years and it became obvious > that the cycle of violence had to be ended. And the fact that the UN repeatedly insisted on not acting. As Gautam said, stopping the slaughter violated international law. This brings up the obvious question: what is the value in international law when it requires us to, when asked, stand aside so genocide can occure? Are we required to follow the wishes of the UN and allow genocide to take place, or are we morally compelled to stop genocide. (I will argue strongly that the third option, getting the UN to stop genocide is often not a real option.) While I'm asking questions, I should explictly give my own position here. The best thing to have happened was for NATO to intervene with all force necessary immediately...with Europe in the lead...with or without UN blessing. The next best thing was for the US to prod Europe into doing this. > Rwanda is probably the most persuasive argument for a policing mechanism. > There is very little political interest in these poor African nations and > just as importantly there is little interest in the press. The AIDS > epidemic is a festering wound and our lack of decisiveness to combat it is > going to come back to bite us. Big time. So yes, we should have taken > action in Rwanda and I think that if Clinton had tried to he could have > made a huge difference there. Its a black mark on his record, and no one > knows it more than he does. I agree that the US should have intervened. Do you agree, if it would have done so, it would have been dissed by a great deal of the world for imperealism? Should we have been willing to violate international law to save half a million human lives? > Iraq was (and remains) a much more difficult problem. In basing our > economy around oil we have accorded an importance to the nations of the > Middle East that they would never have achieved otherwise. One of Bush's > big mistakes, IMO, was to reverse the trend towards trying to develop > alternatives to the oil that fuels this exaggerated importance. You might > recall a post that JDG made about how we are much less vulnerable to > inflation as the result of a fuel shortage than we were in the late '70s, > reason being we are _less_ dependant on that fuel. Well, yes and no. Natural gas was always available. Oil imports are now a greater fraction of total use than before. The main impact is that energy is a smaller part of the economy than it was 30 years ago. But, Bush is actually pushing the real alternative to oil more than the environmentalists. Now, it is possible that material science research will progress to the point where there is actually a practical solar cell. But odds are that only 1 in 20 or 1 in 50 breakthroughs like the one reported to the list earlier will actually result in something practical. I'm strongly for the research because the odds are long that 100 2%-5% changes will produce one sucess. But, we cannot count on it working. IMHO, doing so is doing exactly what Bush did with post war Iraq. > But with the emergence > of China as a consumer nation and the maturing of other populous nations > such as India, the demand for fossil fuels is rising quickly, and the > importance of the Middle East - the relevance of the Middle East is > rapidly rising. > What does this have to do with the invasion of Iraq? Everything. No > matter how desperate the condition of the people in Iraq, any intervention > there had to be approached with the utmost delicacy. Our motivations, > even with the best of intentions, are automatically suspect by the Iraqis, > by all Arab/Middle East nations and indeed by the entire world community. > That's why it was even more important to line up an air-tight coalition > prior to intervention for humanitarian purposes. But, we couldn't. It was in a number of country's best interest to keep Hussein in power. Why would we expect them to forgo their own best interests? > Of course, despite the smoke and mirrors thrown up by the supporters of > the invasion after the fact, the stated reason for the invasion was not > humanitarian in nature. So the question really goes back to did Iraq pose > a threat to us and in retrospect, they did not. They didn't pose an immediate threat, so we could have back burnered it for a while. But, we would have had to fight the world to keep the sanctions and kept the no fly zones...and allowed the slaughter in Iraq to continue. You know I reluctantly favored this, because I didn't think we were ready to handle post-war Iraq. I take no joy in seeing my views validated by events. But, I don't want to mimic Bush's blindness to the costs of one's own position. I appreciate you further clarifying your position Doug, and I hope I've laid out my position in a fairly clear manner. Please feel free to ask me further questions in order to either better understand my position or to point out risks/trade offs that I missed. (The same invitation goes for everyone else.) Dan M.
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