Matthew Yglesias (July 17, 2007) - Hypocrites Everywhere (Foreign Policy)

"But it's not actually hypocritical to favor interventions to prevent mass slaughter where you think such interventions will be effective, but not otherwise."

This seems like a rather obvious point. Not sure why people continue to miss it. Maybe she just needed to fill a column.

Posted by Ben | July 17, 2007 11:34 AM

Stopping massacres when all warring sides hate each other and are armed to the teeth is a difficult proposition. WTF happened to deposing Saddam, assuring there were no WMD and then painting & refurbishing all the schools so every little boy and girl could flourish and blossom in a progressive, democratic society? Haven't we done all that? What? That last task is FUBAR? OK, I know we got the first two done. Now let's leave.

Posted by steve duncan | July 17, 2007 11:57 AM

"how many people arguing for withdrawal for Iraq really are advocates of large-scale insertion of US ground forces to Darfur?"

It's not that people advocate for that per say, it's that they respond to humanitarian arguments to stay in Iraq with the line that Iraq is preventing us from pursuing other humanitarian interventions.

I agree with your reasoning regarding whether that's hypocritical, but the fact is that there is no genocide taking place in Darfur at this point. There's instability and a huge problem with displaced peoples, but compared to the massacres likely in Iraq if we leave - there is nothing close to genocide occuring in Darfur today.

Posted by odb | July 17, 2007 12:14 PM

I myself would feel uncomfortable watching the Shia kill a couple million Sunnis, and trying to tell myself, that even tho I was partly responsible, that even attempting to mitigate the genocide would be the more immoral choice.

Just me, I guess.

Posted by bob mcmanus | July 17, 2007 12:16 PM

Anne Applebaum is the female Fred Hiatt of the WP editorial page. They both cheered on the war and demonized its opponents. And now their criticism is directed towards people who want to end this nightmare, not the people who started it.

Remember the Hiatt column MY commented on a few weeks ago where Hiatt argued that Romney and Obama basically had the same foreign policy? Well, he has a new column now arguing that Bush/Clinton/Levin all have the same position on Iraq.

Posted by DonB | July 17, 2007 12:30 PM

If 70% of the Iraqi people wanted us to stay and protect them from this looming genocide, I could make a moral case for staying. But that is not the case. The Shia and Sunnis both want us gone asap with only the Kurds expressing any desire for us to stay. Who am I (or you) to tell the Iraqis that I know better than them what needs to be done in their country?

Posted by Th | July 17, 2007 12:34 PM

I can imagine that when Applebaum is riding in a car careening towards a cliff, she would say, "Tut, tut! Let's not get hasty about jumping out of the car, slamming the breaks, or turning away! There are no good solutions here! None of you other riders should do anything radical! I shall remain neutral!"

Posted by Tyro | July 17, 2007 12:36 PM

Until the neocons and other Bush-supporters loudly and actually lobby for our insertion into Darfur, they're prohibited from bringing genocide into the debate. There are, in fact, people who want us to intercede in Darfur. Darfur doesn't become an issue AFTER Iraq: it's an issue now.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | July 17, 2007 12:41 PM

I myself would feel uncomfortable watching the Shia kill a couple million Sunnis, and trying to tell myself, that even tho I was partly responsible, that even attempting to mitigate the genocide would be the more immoral choice.

Well, McManus, you've advanced in your reasoning to the point at which you are at least willing to recognize that you and your ilk are "partly responsible" for the Iraq disaster. When can we hope for you to recognize that more of what caused this mess in the first place is not going to fix it?

Posted by rea | July 17, 2007 12:44 PM

What was the reason Mr. Clinton and the Europeans did not intervene in the former Yugoslavia earlier?

He is the kind of man to be sure who would return to his home state during an election campaign to turn the execution of a functionally retarted man into a self-aggrandizing media event. And they are the kind of people who will mute their criticism of the massacre in Chechnya because they need Russian oil.

But that doesn't mean there was much that Clinton and the Europeans could do about Bosnia before the Bosnians, Serbs, Croats and the rest decided to make a separate peace. I think Iraq is like that too.

Posted by Linus | July 17, 2007 12:52 PM

"I myself would feel uncomfortable watching the Shia kill a couple million Sunnis, and trying to tell myself, that even tho I was partly responsible, that even attempting to mitigate the genocide would be the more immoral choice."

Sadly, we have empirically demonstrated that we are not qualified to mitigate this disaster. It is immoral for us to attempt to help. We know full well, from practice, that our attempts to help, hurt. We are boy scouts treating a head wound by applying a tourniquet to the neck.

Posted by Njorl | July 17, 2007 1:01 PM

WTF does any of this matter?

The issue for the US is control of the Iraq's immense energy reserves, and it will let go of that when its cold dead hands are pried off, one finger at a time. This is due to start happening next spring, when the US military effort will start to collapse for simple lack of bodies.

We heard this same stream of shit about Vietnam: 'Oh Lordy, we can't leave, the natives will slaughter one another without our boot on their necks!' Well, the US left and the bloodshed did not begin, it stopped.

Between now and the time the US is driven out, if that ever happens, it would be just swell but is obviously too much to ask, if the US could refrain from murder/rape/torture itself.

Posted by RLaing | July 17, 2007 1:17 PM

Iraq did give a lot of interventionism a bad name, including liberal interventionism, especially when so many humanitarian arguments were offered in support of the war.

So I get the feeling a lot of what is going on now is people trying to avoid the conclusion-- which they don't like-- that we ought to be a lot more cautious about sending our troops all over the world.

Posted by Dilan Esper | July 17, 2007 1:41 PM

There must be something in the water in Moscow. Both Applebaum and Hiatt did their turns there, and both have become such Administration codpieces. Too bad their Cassandra yelps at Putin's reassertion of Russian totalitarianism had no measurable effect on noted Soviet "scholar" Condi. Heh.

Posted by harumph | July 17, 2007 1:43 PM

Thank you Th!

I'm quite willing to intervene in Darfur with a no-fly zone (I do think that anything on the ground will have to be AU). So I think it may be effective to intervene in situations that Matt Yglesias wouldn't. Even so, I'm not going to intervene when the people I'm intervening for don't want my help. In Bosnia, Kosovo, Darfur, and Rwanada there were groups that wanted our help in large majorities. Totally different situation.

That said, I do support granting refugee status to those Iraqis that helped us. Because I think past experience with withdrawals (even past experience within the Iraq war) shows that removal of U.S. support gets these people killed.

Posted by Greg Sanders | July 17, 2007 1:46 PM

Both Applebaum and Hiatt's recent columns demonstrate the pathetic point they're at right now: they've lost the argument so completely that they've decided to create totally new discussions in which they argue with themselves so they can't lose. They have removed themselves from the real policy debate, and absurdly seem to think that this preserves their intellectual relevance.

Hiatt is doing this by bizarrely asserting that almost everyone is right, while Applebaum has decided that it makes her feel better to assume that everyone is wrong.

Posted by Jake H. | July 17, 2007 2:23 PM

This is a mixing or issues.

Iraq was war - the Full Monty with bombing, tanks, invasion and occupation. That is not like Darfur or several other trouble spots where order has broken down before any intervention.

They would be similar if we went into Darfur, sanctioned a new government, and that was followed by general internal fighting and resistances abetted by external groups such as AQ.

I think Police Action is the best term for what is needed in Darfur. It should be obvious that there is no peace to be kept. The UN view of peacekeeping is mostly to observe and protect refugee camps and aid workers.

The US is not well prepared to police the world alone. And we should not wish to or be expected to. If effective police actions are to be undertaken the other stable nations are going to have to become very much involved.

Yes, China, Russia, the EU, Japan, and India among others must decide how situations such as Darfur are going to be settled, and they must be willing to act if action is what they want.

Posted by K | July 17, 2007 3:20 PM

I find this discussion overwhelmingly callous. Regardless of where you find yourself on the political spectrum, the United States is responsible for this tragedy in Iraq right now. And our responsibility as a nation is the point, as is our responsibility to not allow Iraq to slide further and further into a fanatical anarchy.

I did not support this intervention and occupation of Iraq -- to call the initial "shock and awe" win over the Baathist regime a war is ridiculous -- yet we lost the discussion and now we are left with the disaster our leadership forced us into. You can check Commondreams.org for my op-eds.

If the U.S. does pull out of Iraq, indifferent to the consequences to the Iraqi public, and there is a genocide, how can we retain the scarce goodwill we have internationally? Hasn't the U.S. done enough already with its support of the Baathist Party against Iraqi socialists and communists, its blatant support of Hussein's regime, ill-advised sanctions, and an ill-advised intervention that attracted the likes of jihadists everywhere?

Sure, the international community wants us out of Iraq now, but if a few hundred thousand Sunnis die at the hands of the Shia, and the fragile Kurdish experiment with something approximating democracy falters up north, then where does this leave us? More importantly, where does it leave Iraqi democrats?

I'll tell you where, to be slaughtered by Sunni and Shia fanatics as they slaughter each other.

Moreover, do any of you really expect any administration -- Democrat or Republican -- to allow the Middle East to explode like that?

How will the Sunni countries surrounding Iraq respond to this? If they intervene, will not Iran?

I find the utter lack of solidarity and empathy with the Iraqi people disquieting from people who no doubt call themselves liberal or left.

Sometimes there are gambles too costly to even ponder: Genocide is one of them.

Which leaves me to ask: If a genocide does occur, what will the response be of the withdrawal left?

To blame it on Bush? You'll be no doubt partially right, but there will be no doubt that an American withdrawal allowed insecurity to deteriorate further into a religiously built Hobbesian hell.

Posted by Matt Harwood | July 17, 2007 3:25 PM

Matt, just in case you haven't noticed, *we* have brought Iraq to where it is today. We put in a large military, and thrashed around killing people, and what you see now is the result. With the same people who predicted victory any day back then predicting it any day now.

Now, under what circumstances in your personal life do you stick with such proven liars and brewers of disaster?

Posted by Barry | July 17, 2007 3:43 PM

"...which you are at least willing to recognize that you and your ilk are "partly responsible" for the Iraq disaster."

Golly, I am sui generis and have no ilk. You obviously don't know me.

I would at this point sacrifice 10 or 100 American lives to save each Iraqi child, if there was some method of making the exchange. I would personally make the choices, and perform whatever actions necessary. I think MY is dead wrong about the US prolonging and increasing the Iraqi violence, the Sunni Umma, all billion of them, will never surrender Baghdad to the Shia, and I guarantee unending violence with or without our presence.

The Iraqis don't deserve this. America does.

America was damnable and damned before we entered Iraq, and will continue to kill innocent people around the rest of the world, directly and indirectly, for as long as America or the rest of the world exist.

Posted by bob mcmanus | July 17, 2007 3:46 PM

Of course the US is morally responsible for what will happen after withdrawal. That's why it's important to get out of "Bush's fault/immediate withdrawal" mode and to think constructively about how, when and under what conditions to withdraw and how to prevent an even worse situation than the current one after withdrawal - there can be no certainty in these matters but one should at least try, and some on the left are doing just that. If you don't even pretend to do that, then you're indeed callous. Should another Dallaire fax reach the UN, this time from Iraq, what are we going to do?

Posted by novakant | July 17, 2007 4:07 PM

Matt, for a person who finds the arguments for withdrawal an act of callousness towards the Iraqis, you don't exactly quote any, as in not a single, Iraqi about staying. Now maybe those Iraqis, childlike creatures that we have to stay and protect, just don't know what they are saying, poor critters, but since I haven't seen a poll in quite some time where the majority of Iraqis favors Americans staying and you do, it seems like you are putting the anti-war callousness against your patronizing attitude, and of the two, I take the callousness.

In fact, I think your concern for the Iraqis is more concern trolling than concern for the Iraqis. Your argument gives us zero reason to think that the Americans are controlling or mitigating violence, rather than spreading it around - you might have noticed that the late surge in Baghdad, far from ending Iraqi violence, merely moved it North; you give zero consideration to what the Iraqi opinion is - for instance, the Iraqi parliament actually passed a resolution calling for the Americans to set a timetable; and you make the traditional liberal interventionist gesture of calling upon your progressive past, as if now you have a moral credit account to advocate the continuation of a bloody and disastrous war. I find these factors lend your own comment an overwhelmingly callousness or a determined obliviousness. Surely withdrawal should be coupled with mitigating the violence within Iraq, and the Americans should do that, but since the American interest is controlled by Bush, it is unlikely that anything the Americans do will be in the interests of Iraq. So perhaps the best they can do in Iraq is STFU.

Posted by roger | July 17, 2007 6:30 PM

"Regardless of where you find yourself on the political spectrum, the United States is responsible for this tragedy in Iraq right now. And our responsibility as a nation is the point, as is our responsibility to not allow Iraq to slide further and further into a fanatical anarchy."

When you have a majority of the people in a foreign country calling for the withdrawal of your troops, supporting attacks against your troops, believing that your troops' presence is making the violence worse and when over 40% and growing of your troops believe that the locals do not deserve to be treated with respect, you have no real way of controlling the situation. When the government your troops are propping up can't agree on anything and refuse to compromise, you can't control the situation. When the Pentagon says that our ground troops' functional capacity will be broken in less than a year, you can't control the situation. What are we doing in Iraq? The mission has now rested on the mantra of training the Iraqi military, which means we are training the death squads that are most likely to be the instruments of future genocide. Considering how much of the mission is also defined as defeating the Sunni insurgency, this will only make the Sunni vs. Shia fight worse for the Sunnis as they will have lost the militias that could possibly defend them. If you are really serious about pre-empting a genocide in Iraq, there are really only two options 1) calling for a huge UN-backed international force or 2) allying with the Sunnis to smash the Shia control of the instruments of state violence, meaning declaring war against the Iraqi government in favor of the same insurgents we've been fighting for years. Our very conception of the mission in Iraq is part of the problem that makes genocide more likely and our staying only compounds that.

Posted by Reality Man | July 17, 2007 7:54 PM

the question is simple: how is Iraq going to function as a country after a withdrawal?

let's work on that now

Posted by novakant | July 17, 2007 8:45 PM

"the question is simple: how is Iraq going to function as a country after a withdrawal?

let's work on that now"

What tools do we actually have to shape that in a meaningful, macro, not-just-at-the-margins way?

Posted by Reality Man | July 17, 2007 8:58 PM

In response to a few replies, I should have made explicit that I wasn't arguing per say with Yglesias, but arguing against the reactions in comments, which have no regard for Iraq's future, but which advocates a flip of the coin as to whether genocide is possible. A 50/50 chance of genocide is much too great risk to be nonchalant about, and I believe the possibility is much worse.

Also, I only make note of my "progressive past" and provide evidence to head off any insinuations of neoconservativism. It has become a nasty habit of the so-called liberal-left to label anyone that disagrees with their analysis a Bushie or a neocon.

Never in my comment did I say the U.S. is not a major player, if not the main, perpetrator of violence in Iraq. It is. By extension of its bolstering of the Iraqi government, it's acting in the Max Weber sense as trying to gain the monopoly of violence needed by any proto-state. Am I happy about the this role that the Bush Administration has given the U.S. military? No, but that's where we are. Is there really any disagreement on this point, besides we should have never have experimented with regime change in Iraq?

Yet, many of the U.S.'s targets are renegade militias, extremists, and al Qaeda inspired jihadists. And maybe this is my callousness, but many of these players deserve detention or death. I do not believe them to be revolutionaries or third worldists opposing oppression and repression, but retrograde Baathist remnants and jihadists, both of whom will provide peace not worth the price if the U.S. withdraws. In regards to the U.S. moving the violence north because of the surge, are the jihadists and Islamist militias and ex-Baathists not subjects in this drama as well? When the Allies pushed Axis armies out of whatever region they occupied in World War II, would you say it was the Allies responsibility for the violence that came with the Axis army's movement?

And while I agree with Reality Man that a good option to fill the void if the U.S. withdraws would be a U.N. backed international force, it is an illusion. There is no push for this anywhere really. Tell me which country would pledge enough troops for such a mission? Which countries would pledge the hundreds of billions, if not trillions, in aggregate, to secure Iraq?

And yes, while I do see how my argument can be seen as patronizing towards the Iraqi public, I am more afraid of Iraq turning into the next holocaust. If Iraq does indeed fall into genocide, will not the call for an international intervention come from the same Iraqis that want the U.S. to withdraw now?

And yes, there are Iraqis that want U.S. forces to stay, and yes, they are in the minority, besides in the Kurdish north.

And many may say the key word is "international" intervention, but are we really operating under the assumption that there is a single power or bloc of powers able to intervene, even remotely, in the interest of Iraq?

I do take some criticisms of my comment seriously. This is a debate with the future of many peoples, if not the region, at stake. The future of Iraq in Bush's hands is a disconcerting fact, and while this Administration is vile and naive and incompetent, it is still better than the many worse alternatives -- genocide or jihadist rule in many areas or regional war or all three -- Iraq confronts today.

There is no good policy option in this mess. I just fear we will make the wrong decision, pull out too many troops, and plunge Iraq into a worse nightmare that will only lead to American troops once again on Iraqi sands. Only this time, millions may be dead.

Therefore any timetable for withdrawal must confront the genocide question adequately. Besides, people of good faith are not arguing whether withdrawal is capitulation to the terrorists, but asking honestly, what do we do if genocide is unleashed? If we can agree a phased withdrawal is necessary, can we also agree that if the whiff of genocide takes to the air, the withdrawal stops?

Posted by Matt Harwood | July 17, 2007 10:39 PM

"Therefore any timetable for withdrawal must confront the genocide question adequately."

Except that's not what you're doing here. You talk about us making a Weberian state, except that a Weberian state would be the most likely instrument of genocide in Iraq.

"Yet, many of the U.S.'s targets are renegade militias, extremists, and al Qaeda inspired jihadists. And maybe this is my callousness, but many of these players deserve detention or death. I do not believe them to be revolutionaries or third worldists opposing oppression and repression, but retrograde Baathist remnants and jihadists, both of whom will provide peace not worth the price if the U.S. withdraws. In regards to the U.S. moving the violence north because of the surge, are the jihadists and Islamist militias and ex-Baathists not subjects in this drama as well? When the Allies pushed Axis armies out of whatever region they occupied in World War II, would you say it was the Allies responsibility for the violence that came with the Axis army's movement?"

Except then who are the armed Sunnis who can fight off Shia death squads. Fareed Zakaria made the point a while ago that the worst thing that can happen in Iraq is that we end up actually beating any form of Sunni resistance because that would then leave the Sunnis completely defenseless vis-a-vis the Shia-dominated government. Similarly, in Rwanda the Tutsi-dominated RPF were a bunch of murderous thugs, but they were Tutsi murderous thugs who ended up fighting off the Presidential Guard and the Hutu-dominated military government behind the Rwandan genocide. Would our intervention into Kosovo have gone more smoothly if we ended up fighting both the Kosovo Albanian-dominated KLA and the Serbian military at the same time? We aren't in an El Salvador-style ideological Civil War; we are in a Nigerian/Biafran-style ethnic civil war. In such a civil war, there are only two questions that matter 1) who is also of your tribe and 2) are you armed. Everything beyond that is naiveté. If you want to prevent the Sunnis from being the victims of genocide - and it is the Sunnis who are the most likely victims - then you have to be willing to fight off their potential enemies. This means fighting off the armed Shi'ites, or as they are more commonly called, the democratically elected Iraqi government. Are you willing to call for this or would you rather pretend to be moral and posture?

Posted by Reality Man | July 17, 2007 11:19 PM

What's particularly priceless about Anne's lament is that, basically, she wants to stay in Iraq even though it's a bad idea, just to deny the "I told you so" crowd the satisfaction of being proved right, even though they are, you know, right.

Posted by Alan Vanneman | July 18, 2007 8:09 AM

"We aren't in an El Salvador-style ideological Civil War; we are in a Nigerian/Biafran-style ethnic civil war. In such a civil war, there are only two questions that matter 1) who is also of your tribe and 2) are you armed. Everything beyond that is naiveté. If you want to prevent the Sunnis from being the victims of genocide - and it is the Sunnis who are the most likely victims - then you have to be willing to fight off their potential enemies. This means fighting off the armed Shi'ites, or as they are more commonly called, the democratically elected Iraqi government. Are you willing to call for this or would you rather pretend to be moral and posture?"

Reality Man (this is a really bad name by the way), I think your points above are strong and disconcerting. We are also getting into a conversation much more nuanced than where it started, but I will try to give you my thoughts.

I disagree that there isn't an element of an ideological war going on there. It's not a tribal war primarily but a sectarian war between two rival views of Islam -- this I cannot stress enough. If this weren't true, AQIM wouldn't bother to attack Shia mosques to unleash more religious cleansing -- which has occurred.

However, this doesn't really change your argument and I concede I'm stumped as to what the alternatives are here. In a sense the U.S. is now training and arming Sunni gangs and militias to fight AQIM and other jihadists, which most probably will not only be used against Shias, but U.S. forces.

For a while now, I believed the most pragmatic decision would be to create some sort of federal model for Iraq. Yet this has the potential, and likely, seeds of violence as well because of the ethnic clash between mostly Sunni Kurds and Sunni Arabs over the oil rich city of Kirkuk.

So if you expect me to give you a path toward a unified, harmonious Iraq, I cannot, nor would I try. We destroyed that possibility a long time ago, if one ever existed to be honest.

Yet, I still feel a large enough U.S. troop presence in Iraq to stave off genocide is the only moral thing left for us to do.

You know my feelings on this ad nauseum already. I've conceded my plan to keep U.S. troops in Iraq to stave off genocide won't secure or stabilize Iraq, although maybe in provides enough room for a political process of some sort to dig in and come up with a solution, even if it is partition.

Yet, I feel you duck my major point which is if the U.S. does pull out and genocide does occur, what does the U.S. do if the international community won't do anything?

Do we, as a nation, from across the political spectrum, watch as our disaster turns into a holocaust and do nothing?

I can't help but think this is the most horrific option of all.

But maybe I'm just morally posturing as you so despicably stated.

Posted by Matt Harwood | July 18, 2007 10:46 AM

What tools do we actually have to shape that in a meaningful, macro, not-just-at-the-margins way?

well, the usual political, diplomatic, economic, humanitarian and - in the case of actual genocide - military tools

Posted by novakant | July 18, 2007 4:05 PM

"Well, the US left [Vietnam] and the bloodshed did not begin, it stopped."

Uhhhhhh ...

Posted by Knemon | July 20, 2007 3:55 PM