How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? You don’t, you ask someone from the international community to do it. And they will say yes, because “I know and understand foreign leaders and can work with them and…"
How will he bring these new allies along? We can assume that Kerry has ruled out coercion and bribery since these resources were presumably tapped out used by the current administration to get those international whores the Australians, the Poles and, of course, the great rent-a-thugs of the British Royal Marines. So, how does he get new allies?—by sticking it to the old allies. He has already done the hard part—dismissing allies like the British and the Australians entails a bit of political risk. Compared to that feeding the Kurds to the Wahabbis and Baathists will be a political gimme.
Some are worried that Kerry’s promises of an international conference to get more support for the Iraq effort will not pan out. I have the opposite worry. It will be all too successful. I am afraid that Kerry can make it work for precisely the reasons he states, that he does understand foreign leaders and agrees with them about the main problem facing the world: American power. And I am afraid he will be more than willing to pay the price the international community will demand: the humiliation and neutering of American power.
Of course it won’t be stated like that. The ostensible aim will be to bring Iraq back into the community of nations under the auspices of legitimate international bodies like the UN human rights commission and the Arab league—in other words, back under the control of Sunni thugs. It will not be because the international community is less than enthusiastic about democracy, just that the Iraqis aren’t ready for it. The Sunni thugs that are blowing up any groups of children gathered in a public place are proof of that? And who better to get these Sunni thugs under control than the Sunni thugs that ran such a tight ship under Sadaam? And if both groups of Sunni thugs seem to have an undecorously high degree of dual membership, well, that will only make them that much more efficient. Who can control a group of criminals better than another group of criminals? The same group of criminals!
It is so simple, why didn’t we see it before? There is really no excuse for missing such a simple solution, particularly when we see such fine examples of the process at work right in New York at the UN. Notice how subtle and nuanced way the UN is going about getting a handle on things in Dafur. Some dim-witted unilateralist like Bush might be tempted to barge in, but not the trained minds of the UN. They had the foresight to make the Sudanese the chair of the human rights commission. Now, when the human rights commission’s indignation boils over to a strongly worded rebuke all the tricky questions of implementation can be done away with. If only they had had the foresight to put Rwanda in the chair of the human rights commission before Rwanda decided to divest itself of its ethnic overachievers. The Rwandan government could have done a much better job of disarming itself (though the UN peacekeepers were not totally impotent, managing to disarm the victims that had taken the UN up on its invitation to take up residence in UN protective camps just in time to avoid some nasty gun battles).
That is the great thing about making the international test the loadstone of your foreign policy. Honor and principle and simple self-preservation are likely to oblige one to have to undertake some unpleasant tasks form time to time. With the international test you can always go with the flow. Bunch of Africans slaughtering unarmed civilians? A sternly worded resolution and some third world peacekeepers will keep the cameras away. A bunch of Arabs slaughtering African Christians? Elect the Arabs to the human rights commission, problem goes away and big multicultural brownie points in the bargain. The UN allows you to appease the powerful under the respectable banner of multilateralism. And if you get into real trouble we can always call on America…oh wait...
And there is the rub. We are the last man. If anyone takes this 'international law' business--I mean international law in its current meaning, not of treaties that are written down and signed by sovereign nations but of supra-national authorites with discretionary authority--seriously owes it to himself to really take a look at what the 'international community' is. The world is full of the graves of those who had no choice but to rely on the UN's decisions to protect them from genocidal governments whose representatives were seated at the UN. Other nations can afford to pretend to take the UN seriously in the knowlege at some level that the US is there to not take it seriously should the need arise. But who is our US?
2 comments:
"The world is full of the graves of those who had no choice but to rely on the UN's decisions to protect them from genocidal governments whose representatives were seated at the UN."
when was the last time US protected people from a genocidal government? was it in rwanda or sudan? or was it in iraq after the iran-iraq war? maybe you can say serbia - but both sides were genocidal there - how do you pick one? ironically US helped the muslim side in serbia - those same guys that purportedly train terrorists there now...Same with iraq in the 80s...
how many people would have died in iraq over the last 1.5 years if usa didn't go there?
after so many failed interventions isn't it time to think what would be if you don't interfere because if you do then you have to do it again and again and maybe on the other side and so on.
but of course the above is correct only if the goal of an intervention is what the politicians say it is. we all know it is not, it's all about the economy, oil elections, etc.
the european countries learned this lesson long time ago, even when they were the last man. or is it that they let the people there become too smart for governments to fool them.
history has a natural path - forcing it to go faster doesn't work. a social change must happen from inside - globalization provides enough incentives and information for underdeveloped and undemocratic countries to find their way - no more "help" is necessary. If the time was right for a change it would have occurred, an intervention on general principles without knowing anything about the country can be only damaging
"natural path"
that is a nice one. So we should have left Sadaam in because it was the natural path of Iraqi society?
Reality was once defined by Phillip K. Dick as what doesn't go away when you stop believing in it. Take away this natural path business and you are left with two groups of men. One passing out candy to children, one blowing them up. All you can do is chose a side.
Ghandi, who had to deal with real imperialists, didn't let his problems with the British Empire blind him to the fact that Hitler was far worse. I am sure if asked Ghandi would have preferred an impartial world body to adjudicate all the claims of nations, but the world he lived in offered him a choice of the a civilized power with faults and monsters.
The simple fact is that the people that have died in Iraq over the past year have not been killed by us but by the people we are fighting. The people trying to prevent Iraq from having an election are the people we are fighting. The people trying to impose a government based on violence rather than consent are the people we are fighting, but we are the colonialists? France is trying collect on the loans it made to a mass murderer for the guns they sold him but we are the colonialists?
Orwell described the way leftists defended the depredations of communist governments with the phrase "a mass of latinate words falls on the facts like soft snow." Used to be building socialism, now it is a "natural path." Either way cover we happen to be the good guys in this one.
Post a Comment