Jon Chait makes short work of the argument that if you think it's sometimes a good idea to intervene to stop genocide, then you must be a hypocrite unless you support the indefinite continuation of a fruitless war in Iraq.
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Against The War? You Must Love Genocide!
14 Jun 2007 11:46 am
Comments (7)
If Chait was making short work of the argument, I think he probably should have made slightly longer work of it. Not a very convincing piece.
There are about a zillion reasons why advocating a continued American presence in Iraq is different than advocating an American military intervention in Bosnia was. Chait notes one: in Bosnia, it was Serbs killing Muslims; the intervention would have been to protect the Muslims. Then there's the honest-broker problem: having invaded the country for unrelated reasons, and precipitated the whole crisis itself, the US military cannot now justify continuing its occupation as a "humanitarian intervention". There's the state-sponsor difference: in Bosnia, there really was a state sponsor of Serbian genocidal violence; it was called "Serbia", and the US could have retaliated against it -- the idea that the Bosnian Serb state/army was an independent entity was a fiction. In Iraq, we WISH there was a state sponsor -- we're trying to pretend Iran is sponsoring the insurgents just so we have someone to retaliate against. There's the geostrategic difference: Bosnia, some may be aware, is on a continent called "Europe", and Euro-American intervention there did not antagonize a billion anti-colonial co-religionists across the Muslim world (particularly where that intervention was to defend the Muslims). It ticked off the Orthodox Slavic world a little, but really not very much -- it's the West's sphere of influence.
Chait should have been a little more thorough with this.
For one thing, it's a good idea to intervene to stop genocide if you have the practical capacity to succeed in stopping gneocide at a price you are willing to pay.
If, on the other hand, intervening to stop genocide leads to a bloody clusterfuck,kills more people than would have died if you did not intervene, and severely damages your ability to deal with other problems, some of which may be more dangerous than the original genocide . . . well, then, intervention is a very bad idea.
This isn't particularly complicated, Mr. chait . . .
You didn't mention Peretz this time, but I was just thinking that TNR writers might be divided into those who harmed themselves by working for TNR, and those who got a big lift from working for TNR.
Chait and Foer would be better respected and have better futures if he didn't have the Peretz albatross around his neck, whereas Beinart and Krauthammer and Michael Kelly were lucky to rise as high as they did. Kinsley and Sullivan break more or less even; they have the taint, but they would have been exactly that way anyway, without Peretz.
YMMV. This could be a fun party game. You can only say much about the Singer Sewing Machine son-in-law.
"their necks"
John Chait should read Christopher Caldwell's op/ed It's Best to Stay Out of Darfur.
As Caldwell writes:
"Some people seem to be nostalgic for the pre-September 11 days when the west could fight symbolic wars against marginal countries in the name of human rights. Others see a chance to restore the west’s humanitarian credentials, after the political quagmire in Iraq. This betrays a short memory and mistakes the war’s outcome for the war’s rationale. Iraq, too, was once a humanitarian cause.
"But the lesson – not just of Iraq but also of the debacles in Somalia and Kosovo that made it possible – is that there is no such thing as a humanitarian invasion. The west can destroy the Sudanese government and punish its leaders, as in Iraq. It can support one group of brigands over another, as in Kosovo. It can feed people for a while, as in Somalia. However, humanitarian their motivations, though, military operations turn political the moment they are launched, with consequences that are wildly unpredictable."
I find myself in agreement with the op-ed cited by Fred above. In particular I think Chait's piece is severely weakened by his glossing over the current situation in places like the former Yugoslavia and Somalia, where humanitarian intervention was actually put into practice. Specifically, he fails to make any note of the fact that the interventionists who wailed inanely about how Melosevic and his "genocide" had to be stopped have yet to show even a fraction of such indignation over the hotbed of human-trafficking, warlordism and ethnic cleansing that is modern-day Kosovo. And that's the say nothing about the current sutation Somalia. IMO, the left-wing Wilsonians who pushed "military humanism" were in fact way ahead of their neocon counterparts who proved that they weren't prepared to deal with the actual consequences of the policies they advocate.
Comments closed June 28, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
Chait's rests on the belief that people in charge of governing and making policy should be concerned with pesky things like facts and reality. Clearly this is wrong, because having the appropriate grand vision can always overcome such trivialities. Just believe harder!
The pro-war people remind me of Vaclav Havel's (I think, but can't seem to find a source in a quick search) definition of a Communist. Something like, "A Communist is someone who subscribes to a particular ideology and believes that anyone who doesn't subscribe to that ideology must subscribe to a competing ideology, because he can't imagine anyone not subscribing to an ideology."
Indeed. How can we possibly make our decisions on an individual basis instead of fitting them in with our grand scheme? Does not compute.
It's perhaps unfashionable to say the pro-war crowd suffers from serious intellectual limits (instead of just being wrong), but if they can't recognize this, there's no other appropriate conclusion.
Posted by jhupp | June 14, 2007 12:06 PM