Don't look now, it's happening again

[Fenring]

The United States is a Representative Republic that nominally functions as a Democracy.

If by this you mean it functions as such in name only then ok. If you mean by "nominally" that it officially is exactly this then assessing its actual functioning is more relevant than determining what is written on paper.

This -

As such, the government, however dysfunctional as it may be

- does not logically lead to this:

represents the collective will "of the people."

Something can only represent the will of the people if it actually obeys the will of the people. Unless by "represent" you mean some metaphorical representation. No government can be said to represent the will of the people by definition; it only either does so in practice or it does not.

So even if I utterly despise the decisions being made on the part of particular persons in power within the government of the United States, it still remains as being a decision that "We the People of the United States of America" have made. For good or for ill, "we" own it, regardless of whether or not you can point fingers at certain specific special interest groups or even specific persons, as being the driving force behind it.

This kind of generalization is a standard gaslight to wash away responsibility for the actual individuals who do make high-level decisions "on behalf" of the American people. It is exactly the kind of lack of detail I was mentioning as a problem.

[JoshCrow]

So even if I utterly despise the decisions being made on the part of particular persons in power within the government of the United States, it still remains as being a decision that "We the People of the United States of America" have made. For good or for ill, "we" own it, regardless of whether or not you can point fingers at certain specific special interest groups or even specific persons, as being the driving force behind it.

This kind of generalization is a standard gaslight to wash away responsibility for the actual individuals who do make high-level decisions "on behalf" of the American people. It is exactly the kind of lack of detail I was mentioning as a problem.

Hee... just because I love hoisting people on their own pétard, here is Fenring arguing seemingly the opposite position with me in an e-mail about a high-ranking police representative speaking for "the police":

However the thing worth of note is that the lobbyist was in effect speaking for police officers across the country, and although I’m sure many or most of them personally would probably not agree with the request nevertheless their united power was effectively put behind that request. “The police” wanted it that way, as a group. Naturally in any embedded bureaucracy a few people take it upon themselves to make decisions for many, often not to the benefit of the many, but there you have it.

[Fenring]

Hee... just because I love hoisting people on their own pétard, here is Fenring arguing seemingly the opposite position with me in an e-mail about a high-ranking police representative speaking for "the police"

On the surface I can see how this looks like a contradiction, but the detail I'm referring to is the reason it isn't. The chief of a union or a national organization, when lobbying, acts as a unilateral voice representing many. It is a strictly hierarchical situation, and although there may be factions lower down the ladder it is the one doing the lobbying whose voice is heard. This would be similar to seeing the President as the chief of the U.S. system of government, except that a) that isn't actually the case structurally (since he is not the 'head' of the legislative or judicial branches) and b) the President doesn't, and in most cases cannot, make unilateral decisions on most issues. Even in a realm where he has considerable power it would be quite wrong to think that the decision was ultimately his, even though it's true on some level that the responsibility is ultimately his.

If President Obama was personally responsible for all decision-making in the U.S. I think your analogy would hold and my statements would be a contradiction. But my post to TheDaemon is precisely about the fact that this is not the case. I'm trying to highlight that people other than the President can have a strong or even controlling influence on which actions are taken in a given instance. Knowing who those people are matters; reducing it to "America" did X doesn't tell very much. In the case of a union with a singular chief one is much more able to reduce choices made to "the union chose to do X." And even then I would agree with you that there should be shades of grey there where factions below the chief may have had some influence, so if I were to amend the statement made in my email to you it would be in that manner.

[Wayward Son]

History is riddled with such "no brainers". Remember when the poor helpless Afghans were getting bullied by the evil Soviets? Of course we should train thousands of Afghans how to fight against a sophisticated military run by a powerful state. What's the worst that could happen? Oops.

Of course we should assist the helpless Cubans against the evil Castro. We'll just give some half-assed support to some guys in Florida and... Oops.

Of course we should help the Somalis. Warlords are stealing international assistance and killing people left and right. Someone should put a stop to it. Oops.

As opposed to other "no brainers," like we don't get involved in Cambodia (even though we started it).  Oops.

We don't get involved in the Rwandan Genocide.  Oops.

We don't get involved in the second World War in Europe--but fortunately the Japanese attacked us.  Or else, BIG OOPS. 

Not assisting can lead to just as bad, or worse, results than getting involved.  If we don't get involved with opposing ISIS, or at least providing support to those who do, do you think they'll leave us alone?  Or should we wait until there are some major terrorist attacks?

No, it never works out perfectly.  It rarely works out the way we want it to.  But not intervening also never works out perfectly, and sometimes worse than the way we want it to.

You lose either way.

[TheDrake]

Rwanda was a bad situation. Brought on by, you guessed it, Belgian intervention and colonialism. They elevated the Tutsis to power and the Tutsis (a political elite, not an ethnic minority) sowed the seeds of that hatred. Belgium even documented who was a Tutsi in 1933, cementing the divide, and gave them identity cards so they would be sure to know what side they were on.

Was it right the way that the Hutus systematically killed them? No, absolutely not. But they were actual

At the time, the US had just botched everything in Somalia and it was (briefly) considered a good idea not to repeat that situation. And then there's always some stuff like this:

On August 5, 2008, an independent Rwandan commission said France was aware of preparations for the 1994 Rwanda genocide and helped train the ethnic Hutu militia perpetrators. It accuses France of training Hutu militias responsible for the slaughter, helping plan the genocide, and participating in the killings. The report accused 33 senior French military and political officials on Tuesday of involvement in the genocide. Among those named were François Mitterrand (the president at the time), Édouard Balladur (the prime minister), Alain Juppé (the foreign minister), and his then chief aide, Dominique de Villepin. "French soldiers themselves directly were involved in assassinations of Tutsis and Hutus accused of hiding Tutsis," said the report, which was compiled by a team of investigators from the Justice Ministry.[17][18]

So I guess maybe we should have some boots on the ground in Paris? Naturally France denies this, and I think it probably has limited credibility, but it makes you wonder.

I also wonder exactly what the endgame was going to be. Would it be like Vietnam or Somalia, with a protracted and escalating involvement? Or would it be like Bosnia?

We have yet to exit Western Europe, Korea, Japan. I guess maybe you get better outcomes if you just stay forever, but that does get expensive. Just ask the Romans.

We could build a scorecard of all historic events and try to figure out which interventions were well-intentioned failures, successes, stupid choices, etc. As I had said initially, we should default to NOT killing people as a rule no matter how much we might think they deserve or need killing. This goes for direct military intervention, supporting coups, supporting rebellions, supporting sabotage, and knocking people off with drone strikes.

[AI Wessex]

Here's a flash from the future past, where leaders in the early 2000's admit that they didn't really understand what the *censored* they were doing.  But no worries, they're beyond the reach of any sort of submission to a court of recourse:

Tony Blair has admitted he profoundly underestimated the forces that were going to be unleashed in Iraq after the war, and says his understanding of the Middle East is much deeper now than at the time of the invasion in 2003.

He also revealed the extent to which the mistakes in Iraq had led him to call for a much more evolutionary solution to regime change in the wake of the Arab spring.

Blair has made similar admissions of culpability before but these remarks, weeks before the July publication of the Chilcot report into the war, are likely to be seen as his chief line of defence.

Speaking at an event sponsored by Prospect magazine in Westminster, he said: “For sure we underestimated profoundly the forces that were at work in the region and would take advantage of change once you topple the regime. That is the lesson. The lesson is not complicated. The lesson is simple. It is that when you remove a dictatorship out come these forces of destabilisation whether it is al-Qaida on the Sunni side or Iran on the Shia side.”

He added: “To be honest my understanding of the Middle East is a lot deeper today than it was when I was prime minister, quite frankly.”

How nice.

[Seriati]

This is exactly why calling the police to break up a fight is the right decision even if in a specific circumstance they screw it up and make matters worse.

Where this analogy breaks down is in the fact that you have to consider "calling the police" to actually imply this: that you call not the police, but some guy you know who's really tough, to break up a fight between strangers he has no authority over, and further, that your friend will invariably kill at least one of the people fighting. This is much closer to what "calling the police" implies in terms of foreign intervention in "a fight."

Fenring that's not the analogy breaking down, that's changing the analogy, but you're missing the point in doing so.  The use of the "police" in my example was included solely in response to a change in the prior analogy I had presented to include an element of personal danger that would interfere with a rational decision about personal intervention (ie changing it from protecting a child, to intervening between two persons).  I'm not blindly advocating intervention or recommending bringing in a broken "authority" to kill one side.

I can't see any reason I would prefer to bring a killer to resolve a fight where neither party may die.

What you're actually arguing is that intervention may be unwarranted.  Go back and look at what I said about when and how we should intervene, I almost always qualified it in two ways.  First I said, we should intervene if we deem intervention warranted (ie we've decided that the result of non-intervention is bad enough and the likely or potential results of intervention are great enough that its justifiable), and second, that we should put boots on the ground and not arm factions, which expressly states that I'm calling the police not an armed tough. 

The criteria to consider are not merely whether the fight ought to be stopped, and whether helping people in general is a good policy, but also whether the guaranteed death that will result from your intervention is better than whatever possible outcome would have ensued otherwise.

I would agree with that, if that were a certain or probable result.  Did you think otherwise?  Adding additional certain elements changes the rational decision.  However, there are no true certainties in life and accordingly, the idea that we can be certain that intervention will be worse (which is what you're implying by requiring that it result in a death) is largely false.  If we rationally believe that intervention WILL be worse we should not intervene.  I'm opposing the concept that we should never intervene, that seems to get an intellectual pass from the left, I'd be even more opposed to the concept that we should always intervene (oddly, an idea that on the domestic level often gets a pass from the right, and contradictally from the left as well, depending on the issue).

[Seriati]

Would you be quick to claim no one should?  I used the child reference because its easy to see the right and the wrong (and thus a fair test for those that oppose all intervention) and because it's a context that motivates people even where they may risk their own safety.

History is riddled with such "no brainers". Remember when the poor helpless Afghans were getting bullied by the evil Soviets? Of course we should train thousands of Afghans how to fight against a sophisticated military run by a powerful state. What's the worst that could happen? Oops.

History is riddled with no brainers, both for and against intervention.  The one thing that is certain about history, is that looking back we can always see a better possible solution.  That's not a very good argument for not acting in the present.

I've never advocated fighting by proxy.  I believe our goals are best served by retaining military training and technology to westernized people who share, at least loosely, our morality and goals.  Training radicals just because they're willing to fight and it's politically easy compared to acting ourselves, is in fact a policy that has been demonstrated to have consistently bad results.  It's the exact scenario that Fenring is talking about where instead of calling the police you call in a killer.  It may  occasionally be better than the status quo, but that's almost always a coincidence.

Of course we should assist the helpless Cubans against the evil Castro. We'll just give some half-assed support to some guys in Florida and... Oops.

Agreed, that's another good example of proxy intervention.  If you believe enough to intervene you should do it yourself.  Would the Cuban people have been better off if we'd actually invaded?  There's not the influx of outside forces there as there are in the middle east.  It's hard to imagine they would have been objectively worse off as a client state of the US without having to deal with the impact of the embargo.

Of course we should help the Somalis. Warlords are stealing international assistance and killing people left and right. Someone should put a stop to it. Oops.

Or maybe, we shouldn't dump international assistance into uncontrollable situations in the first place?  That's an example of a different kind of least efforts approach.  Either stabilize the situation or don't go in.

This "insular" people actually spends more of its treasure on foreign development assistance than any other nation on earth. 1.4% of their GNP.

And?  The fabulously wealthy have provided alms for the poor as a civic duty for eons, does that mean they view those people in the same way they view other wealthy people?

The simplest test, to me, is if you treat violence at your neighbors house as fundamentally different than violence in another country.  If you believe you have a right to intervene in people's lives, regardless of any difference of beliefs, inside your own country, and believe it's immoral to do so across a magic line on a piece of paper.  If you "believe" in gay rights, but think another country killing gay people is a cultural difference that we can't do anything about.  Or that women are your equals, but across a magic line they become the property of their husbands.

It's all part of the same puzzle, I don't accept that fundamental morality changes depending on where you are on the globe, others are paralyzed by their inability to judge between conflicting moral positions held based on culture.

A little under 10x more than the United States. Meanwhile, the US spends 3.5% of GNP on our military, compared to 1.1% for Sweden. I think 20x differential between development aid and military is sufficient to support my claim that we are not willing to spend anywhere near the same amount of money on non-military aid as military expenses. The ridiculous amount of money that you refer to is about $23 billion. Compared to nearly $700 billion in military expense.

Frankly, it's a silly measure to start with (as you're doubling down on again treating people differently across imaginary lines by excluding local spending), but even as used it's a fake measure.  You're only looking at US government spending in that comparison and not the totality of the chartable spending that originates in the US.  Even discounting the amount of people who donate time that's a still a far bigger number.

Well except for the sex slaves, and the people who get beheaded, everyone else will be better off, oh wait, not the children who are executed for playing during prayer time either, or you know the ummm... people who think they should be able to make their own choices about their religion, or lack thereof, or about which gender of people they want to love... and pretty much it sucks for everyone.

Yes, those are all Bad Things. I wonder if it is preferable to have bombs dropped on you daily. I wonder how we would enjoy having somebody start bombing us because of our state-sponsored executions. Or our aggression in other parts of the world.

Never advocated just dropping bombs though did I?  I said boots on the ground.  And honestly, if my daily life consists of seeing my wife and kids raped and murdered at the whims of an unpredictable dictator, I'm hoping for someone to intervene.

You're really focused on bombings.  At best that's punitive measure not designed to effect real change.  I think the better method would be enforce our laws and arrest and try anyone that has authorized a "state-sponsored execution," well at least to the extent we're talking about a real crime and not for instance application of the death penalty after a fair trial.

Note that Afghanistan under the Taliban was very much like this, and you'll recall we set them up to run that country.

I think that's a massive revision of actual history.  I remember when the Taliban actually took over in Afghanistan.  I was one of the very few people I know who advocated intervening immediately.  It was enough for me that they imposed a regime that was oppressive on the rights of women.

Huh. What's Pakistan doing in there? Didn't we give them billions of dollars, even though they were allied with the Taliban and good indications that they harbored bin Laden? Oops.

Real Politik sucks, I agree.

I agree with your arguments in theory. It would be nice if there were a global adult to set things to right. As it stands, we're just the biggest kid with a mean streak.

We are, whomever we choose to be.  I'm not a big kid with a mean streak, so unless you are, that's not a reasonable claim.  I start from the simple principal that all people have inalienable rights, and that any government that systematically denies the fundamental rights of its citizens is not legitimate (fundamental rights, there's plenty of latitude for disagreement on other rights).  I don't see any reasonable argument for staying out of a situation where the government (or nominal government) has stated its intention to support slavery, or sex slavery, or the execution or prosecution of people because of religion or sexual preference.  ISIS fails all of those tests, and plenty of other countries fail in part.  That doesn't mean we have to bomb everyone, or invade everyone, but those should be options that are on the table for the worst offenders.

[TheDeamon]

Would you be quick to claim no one should?  I used the child reference because its easy to see the right and the wrong (and thus a fair test for those that oppose all intervention) and because it's a context that motivates people even where they may risk their own safety.

History is riddled with such "no brainers". Remember when the poor helpless Afghans were getting bullied by the evil Soviets? Of course we should train thousands of Afghans how to fight against a sophisticated military run by a powerful state. What's the worst that could happen? Oops.

History is riddled with no brainers, both for and against intervention.  The one thing that is certain about history, is that looking back we can always see a better possible solution.  That's not a very good argument for not acting in the present.

I've never advocated fighting by proxy.  I believe our goals are best served by retaining military training and technology to westernized people who share, at least loosely, our morality and goals.  Training radicals just because they're willing to fight and it's politically easy compared to acting ourselves, is in fact a policy that has been demonstrated to have consistently bad results.  It's the exact scenario that Fenring is talking about where instead of calling the police you call in a killer.  It may  occasionally be better than the status quo, but that's almost always a coincidence.

I like how in this the initial "beef" that Al Qaeda had with the United States isn't being mentioned in all of this. Their initial fatwa against the United States was specifically directed towards the presence of United States troops on the Arabian Peninsula, specifically Saudi Arabia, as the nation which contains the Islamic Holy Site of Mecca.  Troops which were there to serve as both a deterrent and tripwire should the Iraqi government start feeling adventurous again. That they also served as a convenient operating base for Operation Southern Watch didn't hurt, but that wasn't their main objective.

But yes, very much a hindsight being 20/20 "oops" moment there, as one of the means we used to encourage recruitment of foreign fighters to go into Afghanistan during the 1980's was the concept of Islamic soil being controlled by Muslims, so going after the Soviets in Afghanistan was going after "the infidel Crusaders" after a fashion. Little did we know that in the following decade, due to a (former) ally of convenience, we were going to be setting up shop with significant indefinite-term military bases in the same nation as their Holiest of Holy sites.

[scifibum]

The simplest test, to me, is if you treat violence at your neighbors house as fundamentally different than violence in another country.  If you believe you have a right to intervene in people's lives, regardless of any difference of beliefs, inside your own country, and believe it's immoral to do so across a magic line on a piece of paper.  If you "believe" in gay rights, but think another country killing gay people is a cultural difference that we can't do anything about.  Or that women are your equals, but across a magic line they become the property of their husbands.

It's all part of the same puzzle, I don't accept that fundamental morality changes depending on where you are on the globe, others are paralyzed by their inability to judge between conflicting moral positions held based on culture.

I'm a bit surprised to hear you reducing national boundaries to "magic lines" and suggesting that any intervention that is moral at home is moral in another country. 

If you had simply said that beating your wife is wrong regardless of where it happens, I'd agree, but "intervening" across national borders tends to involve killing people, and we never limit ourselves to killing the people that deserve it.  So the moral calculations get a bit more complicated than you're allowing for here.

[TheDrake]

I believe in the right of self-determination, and its ultimate benefit. If a sovereign nation wishes to imprison gay people, stone women, or many other reprehensible acts, I still don't believe that makes it okay or a good idea to deploy the 3rd infantry to shut them down. People rally against foreign intervention, so the people doing Bad Things wind up with more support than ever before. It leads to mistrust for people in other nations who wonder when they will make the list. It is horribly expensive to occupy another nation, and it leads to moral decay within our own ranks as observed at Abu Ghraib. Typically, it results in armed resistance.

If I did allow for such a moral mandate, my next logical conclusion would be that if you are going to make those interventions and never leave, you might as well go ahead and annex the territory and rule it. This harkens back to the colonial period, and British affirmation that they must rule India in order to civilize it. Was it a good thing that the practice of Sati was outlawed by the British? Yeah, its probably a good thing to stop people from being burning widows alive. But still, that wasn't England's call to make.

This is not to say that I think we should do nothing when people are being oppressed or killed, or that we shouldn't support freedom. We should just avoid using bullets, bombs, missiles, grenades and shells to do the persuading.

[Fenring]

Historically we've seen that the best method of reforming delinquent nations is to develop them and create a strong economic base with which to enmesh them in international trade. Once that's done the opportunity cost of a nation devolving into human rights abuses becomes prohibitive. We may note that China has become more and more capitalistic over time, within limits, and this never required attacking them for their autocratic method of rule. Reducing a nation's economic base through sanctions and bombardment/invasion only sends them further back in time developmentally unless steps are taken afterwards to build them back up; e.g. Germany and Japan. Physical assault is therefore simply not a solution to abuses going on in other countries. It punishes those who previously did them, but it neither halts the practice nor does it prevent it happening again unless, as TheDrake points out, you decide to become a permanent occupying colonial force (aka a conqueror).

As a side note to Seriati, I was not, in fact, specifically alluding to arming insurgents in my comments to you about hiring a killer rather than a policeman. I rather meant that even the U.S. military is the equivalent of sending in an unauthorized killer because no legal force on Earth can explain how the U.S. has legal jurisdiction to enforce law in other countries. If Saudi Arabia bombed New York City to punish the U.S. for "abuses" in letting women go to work, I'm sure you'd not agree that they have the moral or legal right to do so based on their perspective of right and wrong. Whether or not you subscribe to their way of life or ours, international law does not grant any nation the right to set policy unilaterally in other nations, even when those policies are horrendous. This isn't an argument for or against intervention per se, but I'm noting that in the case of an intervention that is not justified by some semblance of law (such as a U.N. resolution that a genocide is occurring) the only way to categorize such an action would be as vigilante justice rather than policing.

[Seriati]

I'm a bit surprised to hear you reducing national boundaries to "magic lines" and suggesting that any intervention that is moral at home is moral in another country.

Well that's oversimplification, and I qualified it expressly by the admittedly vague concept, of requiring a violation of fundamental rights.  However, this is response to the TheDrake as well, nation's don't have rights, only people do, and if any government is violating its own people's rights it's not legitimate.  I really can't see how it's anything but complete hypocrisy to, for instance, insist you have the right to force a religious person in this country to violate their religious beliefs to provide services to a gay wedding, but completely wrong to intervene in a country where they execute gay people. 

If you had simply said that beating your wife is wrong regardless of where it happens, I'd agree, but "intervening" across national borders tends to involve killing people, and we never limit ourselves to killing the people that deserve it.  So the moral calculations get a bit more complicated than you're allowing for here.

I'm certainly allowing for the complexity of the moral calculations, why would you think otherwise?

I do happen to think it's worth dying to correct the moral injustice of a country where women are the property of men.  Alternatively, I'd be content if the women were allowed to freely emigrate from such country, that any that chose to stay had made an informed decision.

[Pete at Home]

Our track record is bad enough that staying home and staying out of things should be assumed to be no riskier than intervention, absent radically different approaches that don't enrich the same people or types of people and don't kill thousands of innocents.

That's generally my view, as well.  Coincidentally, I'm packing up this week to move out of my house and am going through old boxes.  In among all sorts of things I can't remember why I held on to (unused napkins?  a single shoelace? ticket stubs that don't even say what show they were for?), I found several issues I'd saved of our local paper from 2003-2005 where they published letters of mine objecting to the Iraq war.  Not to say I told you so, but I *censored*ing told you so and still am saying it.  The next time we pick up a rifle to solve a cultural problem in a faraway country we don't speak the language or understand the customs, I'll probably write another few letters.

I objected to Iraq too.  Did you object to Kosovo?  i also object to  Hillary keeping company with Maddie "cluster bomb" Albright.

[AI Wessex]

I objected to Iraq too.  Did you object to Kosovo?  i also object to  Hillary keeping company with Maddie "cluster bomb" Albright.

I didn't understand the situation in Kosovo at the time as well as I might have, and I still haven't researched it enough to be sure about what I think.  As for Albright, every Secretary of State in a time of war is probably guilty of war crimes, but eliminating SoS's won't stop the crimes from happening.

[Pete at Home]

Didn't proposing eliminating the SoS.  Just saying that I have concerns with Hillary using an advocate and practitioner of recreational genocide, as a campaign talking head.  It bodes badly for the sort of person that she might appoint.

Kosovo is without any question whatsoever where America rebooted the cold war with Russia, screwed over Yeltzin, and set up Putin as Russia's dictator for life.  Putin was still talking about Remember Kosovo when he took the Crimea.

[AI Wessex]

...Hillary using an advocate and practitioner of recreational genocide

It would be interesting to have a conversation with you, but you would have to drop the random (meaningless) incendiary adjectives.  It complete negates the rest of your points.