That Dog Won’t Hunt

I found myself nodding my head when Andrew Sullivan described E.D.’s piece on the “democracy fallacy” as a summation of neoconservatism. So too, I felt, was E.D.’s post that was in direct response to my ruminations on Iraq a take down of neoconservatism, which was ironic insofar as the post I referenced and quoted was entitled, “Interventionsm = Neoconservatism? Articulating A Cleaner Interventionism” and was an attempt to formulate an interventionism beyond the canons of neoconservatism.

The hang up seemed to be on my mention of democracy in Iraq, which tied in because of the current situation in Iraq — the provincial elections were a useful and topical segue into the arena of discussion around interventionism in which E.D., Mark, and I had been previously engaged. Chris’ exploration provides a pretty persuasive argument about my over estimation of the possible outcomes of those elections in Iraq, and so in that regard I’m inclined to retreat some. I think it’s worth noting, though, that the title of the post was “Some Big Ifs”, indicating that I didn’t take the hypothetical therein presented to be a determinative prediction in any regard.

E.D. suggested that,

Scott takes an “ends justify the means” approach when musing over this matter of Iraqi stability and democracy.

Which I don’t think is exactly right. I went pretty well out of my way to acknowledge that the invasion of Iraq was as massive a blunder as common wisdom dictates and went so far as to call the decision, “a text book case of what not to do.” Insofar as the means were deeply flawed, I recognize that the ends have also been far from what one might have hoped for. My musing, then, was to wonder if the very contingent hypothetical I proposed were to come true, would it tell us something about an ability to realize an end to interventionism that could be achieved by a better formulated means. That might seem like the splitting of hairs on my part, but let me say unequivocally that at the time I deeply opposed the invasion of Iraq and that continue to see the decision as a stunning mistake both strategically and, more importantly, ethically/morally. That said, I feel obligated to observe the unfolding of events and ask questions from which we might learn something for future application, even if those questions come off as unpopular given the current political climate.

E.D. raises some serious concerns about my attempted formulation by saying,

Scott claims that “responsible interventionism is action directed at removing unwarranted impediments to the deeper forces of evolution.”  Let us for a moment pretend that our vision of geopolitical evolution is not that of an American, but rather that of a fundamentalist Islamic leader, or perhaps of  the grand maestro of terror himself, Osama bin Laden.  Would these visions align with our own?  Would the stated impediments be the same?  Or consider the Soviet interventionism into Eastern Europe during the Cold War.  To the Russians, liberalism was the impediment to “the deeper forces of evolution.”

My concern here becomes a slide into the malaise of complete cultural relativism where the differences between cultures and regions renders our ability to make any judgment about whether actions are good or bad null and void because the truth of such claims are culturally dependent. To be sure, I’m not suggesting that one ought to ignore the different cultural dynamics that form divergent world views, but neither am I willing to remain neutral on the slughter of innocent Kurds based on some notion that the actions are just the idiosyncrasies of a particular cultural perspective. But I acknowledge the tension here to be incredibly difficult to resolve, so neither do I want to address it from a place flippancy.

Shortly thereafter, E.D. says,

This is the fallacy of ideologically-driven interventionism.  It elevates an ideology not only above those of our enemies (and allies), it also elevates that ideology and its inherent idealism above the interests of our own nation.

I suppose the claim here is that my suggestion that there is a deep directional evolution to different societies/regions/cultures that is attended by not insignificant and in many cases structural surface level differences that will make the actual manifestation of such evolution quite different from region to region is ideological in nature. I don’t take it to be, but E.D. may have a point here. That points seems to sync up in some fashion with the suggestion from Roque Nuevo that my suggestion of decoupling notions of evolution and modernization from westernization are ultimately doomed because those ideas are western in nature/origin.

To E.D. I would respond that my ultimate goal was to attempt a formulation of interventionism that was distinctly non-ideological, and specifically a formulation that, again, broke with the dominant ideology of the time neoconservatism. I’m not about to hang any banners in regards to my attempts, but I think the idea still contains some merit and is worth exploring in a deeper and more sustained fashion.

To Roque Nuevo I would offer that if we take his claim to be true, and I continue to chew it over in my mind, I wonder if we can’t correspondingly say that notions of modernization and evolution, despite being western in origin, aren’t also transmutable. By which I mean that there may well be some formulation of modernization and evolution that can be applicable in a non-western context. There can be notions of modernization and evolution that cash out in meaning for, say, Islamic individuals wherein those meanings aren’t antithetical to those individuals’ worldviews. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I don’t think we have a closed case at this point.

In the comments of his own post on the topic, Freddie writes in response to Roland Dodds,

It is my opinion that the historical record of the United States demonstrates that, from a humanitarian and democracy promotion standpoint, intervention has produced far more failures than successes.

Which is fair ball. My own attempts at reformulating a more acceptable interventionism isn’t to deny that there are other forms of engagement that ought to be utilized in preference to military force, nor is it to deny that the application of such force with the aim of improving the situation in a given region is fraught with problems.

More forcefully in the post itself, Freddie concludes,

This is the bare fact: the consequences of American interventionism outside of wars of defense, in the 20th and 21st centuries, have been on balance so skewed towards destabilization, destruction and assaults on human rights that it continues to amaze me that we act as though there is any question about it. The number of places that have been the subject of nightmares brought out of American destabilization and manipulation are legion; the number that have had their societies genuinely trasnformed for the better by American military or espionage influence, vanishingly small. Only in the funhouse of American foreign policy debate could a political ideology bat for such an absurdly low average as interventionism has and yet still not have been discredited utterly.

Right, I think what is going on here is a difference in terms of conception about what we mean when we say “interventionism”. Fore Freddie, and I take it for E.D. as well, interventionism carried with specific imperialistic overtones insofar as the use of force is a means of spreading power and influence for a particular actor/nation state. That definition is the one from which I’m trying to get away, perhaps unsuccessfully.

What’s underwriting my own continued digging around in interventionism is a notion of obligation and responsibility which  has, at its core, a global class analysis at work. I take it to be somewhat uncontroversial that the developed nations of the world have realized a level of prosperity at least partially on the backs of lesser developed nations. That being the case (certainly up for debate, so fire at will), I think those developed nations enjoying said prosperity have an obligation to do what they can to enable other nations/regions to cultivate such a level of prosperity, or at least cultivate something that counts as a greater proximity to those levels of prosperity. Insofar as there are people suffering that we in developed nations can do something about, we therefore ought to try to do something. And indeed, I think there has been at least some nominal inclination to do something about it.

My continued engagement with interventionism in this regard is the belief on my part that some of those situations cannot be addressed solely through the use of soft power, that we may well have to address those situations through a use of force where there is the unrepentant use of force in maintaining that suffering against a population that is struggling unsuccessfully to overcome the given situation. Which is to say that I’m open to the idea that there remain some legitmate uses of force and that we should therefore put ourselves to the task of formulating an acceptable, non-ideological, anti-imperialistic application of said force.

I’m reminded of an article I came across a while ago with Lawrence Kaplan on Der Speigel Online in which Kaplan argued,

This is the $64,000 question. If one says that you can’t democratize Iraq because they are Iraqis or Arabs, one is really taking a step into outer space in the sense that you then have to embrace arguments about culture and pursue a certain relativism that I am not ready to embrace. We have to remember that there were also those who said that the Japanese and the Germans and the Catholics of South America could not be democrats. I still believe that all cultures are capable of democracy and liberalism. Everybody wants to be free. But obviously, in Iraq this assumption ran into a wall. Now why is that? One camp in the US argues it’s the implementation and the American incompetence that doomed the enterprise. Others, and mostly Iraqi liberals, say: No, you could have done everything in the world and Iraq would still be a mess because the Iraqis, as a result of their specific history, are not ready for democracy. So whose fault is it — the Americans’ or the Iraqis’? I think both. I also think that the Iraq experience has set back the cause of idealism in American foreign policy and the willingness of Western countries to intervene for humanitarian reasons. Take Darfur: I think it’s because of Iraq that nobody wants to intervene there. So on the whole the effects have been huge and overwhelmingly negative. I don’t see anything good that’s come from this war, I’m afraid.

Kaplan’s comments speak to my concerns around relativism nicely, though holding E.D.’s cautionary note in mind and with the caveat that what liberalism and democratization in other parts of the world may well look a great deal different that we know them at home. But what I took most from the interview was Kaplan’s point about Darfur and the realization that on top of all the terrible things that the decision to invade Iraq has wrought in Iraq and America, there is also the run-off consequences for legitimate intervention in areas that badly need it. So the exercise here is my own minuscule contribution in trying to bridge that chasm so that in cases where our “live and let live” attitude is actually a “live and let die” situation, we have the means to overcome the current hands in the air attitude. In certain circumstances, “not my problem” or more likely “where do I get off?” doesn’t cut the mustard, by my lights.

Which finally brings me around to the real conclusion of this post, which is that at this point in time the conversation is moot. If there is one thing that trumps all it is context. And the context right now is that with the devastating mistake of Iraq and the complexity of Afghanistan so squarely in view, notions of interventionism are so entangled with notions of neoconservatism that meaningful discussion about separating the two and reformulating our notions of interventionism seems all but impossible.

In the comments of my original post, commenter Bob asked,

Is it realistic to expect public support for an intervention, again, especially a military intervention, executed on some airy-fairy notion of “unwarranted impediments”? Could a president go before the public and say, “My fellow citizens, today I have sent your sons and daughters into AfPakastan to remove unwarranted impediments to the cultural evolution of that great nation. The fight will not be easy nor short, but we see it as our duty. May God bless our undertaking!”

The answer to which is: no, not currently. And reflection on all of the discussion that has taken place on this topic has lead me to the conclusion that it is probably best that we go into a period of anti-interventionism given the problematic way we currently envision and practice it. I still think the project of articulating a cleaner/better/more acceptable interventionism is an important one, but for all intents and purposes it simply isn’t a practical one at this point in time.

So, in closing, I cede defeat, at least for the time being.

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Tags | cultural relativism, geo-politics, ideology, interventionism, Iraq, neoconservatism, suffering, use of force