don’t just do something, sit there
Props on the title go to Eunomia commenter Grumpy Old Man who was commenting on the second of two very strong posts from Daniel Larison regarding the Iranian riots. Larison worries that too much enthusiasm over these elections will invariably lead to our doing something stupid – some statement or symbolic gesture, such as Obama wearing a green tie (the color of political Islam) out of solidarity and thereby further propagating the myth that he is in fact a Muslim. Obama’s a sharp guy, though. I doubt he’d do anything quite so silly, though he really ought to wear a green tie next St. Patrick’s Day. In any case, as Larison notes:
One of the great problems with a foreign policy that takes global “leadership” as a given is that it seems to compel the U.S. government to have an official view on every event and crisis around the world. The idea that there are events that have nothing to do with us, and which we have no business concerning ourselves with, is so alien to our policymakers that I am fairly sure that it never occurs to them. Certainly, if it ever did, they would dismiss it immediately as unacceptable “inaction” in a “time of crisis.” Discretion sometimes truly is the better part of valor.
Now, I admit to having been very caught up in these elections and the subsequent protests, riots, and so forth. I felt that a less hostile Iranian regime would put a damper on all this talk of invasion – both in Israel and in the United States. Then, too, despite my generally non-interventionist stance, I nonetheless feel a great deal of empathy for the people in other parts of the world who feel powerless in their political process. I sympathize with a populace who cares enough to go to these lengths after what they perceive to be a stolen election. Once upon a time Americans had this passion, but we’ve lost it along the way.
My enthusiasm, I think, was mainly one of contrasts. I was enthralled with the flood of information – however scattered and incomplete it may have been – that came in via youtube, twitter and the blogs. The silence on mainstream outlets was deafening. The lack of interest in so many of my fellow citizens was startling. Then again, I remember talking to a young lady just before elections and asking her who she was voting for and she shrugged her shoulders and said she wasn’t interested in politics. So apathy over Iranian elections is hardly surprising. [Read more →]
June 16, 2009 10 Comments
The Humanitarian Empire
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.
Earlier, Scott quotes Lawrence Kaplan, whose opinions on Darfur seem to nicely align with this evaluation.
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.
First, Kaplan is wrong–about this, and about so much more. The reason nobody is intervening in Darfur is China, plain and simple, though Iraq certainly has rendered the option even less palatable. As others have, Kaplan also brings up the notion that other non-Middle-Eastern peoples were once considered inhospitable to democracy, like the Germans (who had already successfully implemented democracy) or the Catholics of South America. This argument fails to note that these people were never forced into democracy against their will, or that Germany and the South American countries in question all had some piece of democracy in their traditions, or some connection to democratic patron states, etc. Everything is situational, and the complexities of any given people or conflict are almost inevitably too diverse and culturally impenetrable for a foreign power to fully understand.
I think the trick with interventionism, even of the most idealistic, “humanitarian” variety, in practice, if not in theory, is that we’re always playing with one house of cards or another. Remove one piece, and who knows what will fall? This is something I struggled with for a long time in my own political evolution. Seeing the crying babies or burned villages in photographs from from whichever war-torn African country, or hearing of one genocidal struggle after another, how could we not want to intervene in this or that nation’s brutal, futile civil war? Of course we feel compelled as the richer, stronger nation, to let our might be felt, to topple dictators and implement our own sense of justice and freedom. [Read more →]
February 8, 2009 10 Comments
