May 19, 2005
team america, world police?
After reading the comments I received for yesterday’s entry, I felt that they deserved a response. I’ll try demonstrate how a “thinking person” can also be a hawk.
Matt makes one important point (among a few snarky comments), which is, to what extent should America be the world’s police force? The easy flip answer to that question is, “to the extent that our nation is safe”. The real answer takes a bit more thought, which I’ll try to explore in the next few days.
The point from yesterday’s post is that it’s not easy to use great power wisely in order to exert influence in a group wherein the members have conflicting goals.
That in mind, there are multiple ways to exert influence, and it would do well to remind ourselves that the military is a *political* tool. If and when diplomacy fails, the only other resort to exert your influence is military action. Again, the rub is that it takes immense wisdom to decide when diplomacy has truly failed and that you need military action in order to get what you want.
So let’s ask ourselves a few questions and attempt to frame the argument. First, who are the threats to America’s security? To make this a meaningful question, you also need to sort them in rank order, most dangerous to least. Second, once the threats have been identified, what are their capabilities? Third, after you’ve identified the threats and capabilities, what is the intent or likelihood that they will exercise their capabilities to effect their threats?
That’s enough for today. Tomorrow, we’ll try and flesh out the framing a bit.
May 20th, 2005 at 12:59 am
I would say that the following statement is not really true:
If and when diplomacy fails, the only other resort to exert your influence is military action.
First of all, the definition of diplomacy can include not only direct contact with the country in question (Iraq in this case), but also exerting influence on the UN and other partner countries. Of course, in the case of Iraq, we had already established economic sanctions through the UN and put UN inspectors in place to look for WMD. However, I would contend that we didn’t *really* attempt to enforce these sanctions (as can be seen by the numerous ways that they were bypassed and which are being prosecuted today). Also, we tended to ignore the latest data from the UN inspectors for Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and make a case that went above and beyond the data available from the UN.
Second, other possibilities for influence include attempts to influence a country’s citizens or key allies. Influencing Iraq’s citizens probably wouldn’t have had much of an effect, but still might changed things. Attempting to influence their key allies/partners (Libya? Saudia Arabia? Russia? France? I don’t know, I haven’t really investigated this angle) might have had more of an effect, but it is quite hard to say. In the case of Iraq, it is clear that negotiations were happening between Russia and Iraq (for an oil pipeline), and possibly between Iraq and other countries. In this case, we could have exerted political pressure (think about the amount of money that we give to Russia) on our international partners to shut down alternatives for Iraq.
If some of these alternatives had been taken, Iraq may have actually buckled under economic sanctions instead of being able to ignore and work around them. We never *really* tried to enforce the sanctions that were in place.
I’m quite interested in the fleshing out that you plan to do on the issue of threats to America’s security. My initial reactions on this are that the *who* question is quite significant. In this case, I don’t think Iraq is really the answer, but Iran, Libya, Saudia Arabia, and possibly others are really the answer to ‘who’. The question I’ve got surrounding this is: Has the progress we’ve made with the aforementioned countries really made enough of a difference to discount the number of people (think *new* Muslim Extremists) we’ve pissed off.
That’s more than enough for now, but I look forward to your post tomorrow.
May 22nd, 2005 at 3:25 pm
Yes, most of my comments were trite, but hey I was on a phone meeting.
My feeling, based on readings and discussions was that Iraq posed less of a threat to us than did a) some other countries (North Korea) and b) terrorists unaffiliated to any nation.
After 9-11 we no longer had an enemy with a flag and borders, we had an enemy with a religion and many underground agents. These were our true enemies. Saddam, as bad as he was, did not allow religious fundamentalist terrorists to operate in Iraq, as this would have represented a threat to his power. Afghanistan did and they paid the price (a war which I support). However we never finished the job in Afghanistan. We took our eye off of the number one threat to national security (terrorists) and focused instead on a battle we knew (thought) we could easily win: Iraq.
We are trying to create democracy in Iraq, (I buy the theory of spreading democracy throughout the Middle East). This is a swell motive, but I am not sure the aftermath was entirely thought out. Now we have created the perfect training ground for terrorists. If you want to kill Americans, go to Iraq. Learn to make bombs, learn to shoot machine guns, and learn how to kill the infidel. Instead of being successful, we have only added to our number one threat: extremeist Muslims who are trained in terror and hate America.
In short, we have destroyed enemy number 3 (Iraq) and added to enemy number 1 (extremist islamic terrorists). (Enemy number 2 is North Korea, who not only has nukes, but has long range missiles).
Now, I dont want anyone to think that I, as some “doves” do, support pulling out of Iraq early. This will only lead to chaos, and likely an extremist government, or civil war. I think we are there and are in it for the long haul.
I have not even addressed the lies. Perhaps I am a “bleeding heart”, but it saddens me to think that soldiers and citizens have died because of a lie. I still may not have supported the war, but it would have been different if Bush had stated up front, “We are not sure if Iraq is an imminent threat or not, but we want to spread democracy in the Middle East.” Although I suspect he would have a lot less support for the war if that was his case.