Three years in
So here we are, three years into our adventure in Iraq. Our friends at Slate offer us dueling perspectives on the war here and here.
I'd like to throw an open Iraq thread to commenters: is the war in Iraq winnable? How do we win? Are we winning now? Losing?
I'd like to throw an open Iraq thread to commenters: is the war in Iraq winnable? How do we win? Are we winning now? Losing?
posted by Joshua @ 7:29 PM
9 Comments:
Well, it should be no surprise that I think that the situation in Iraq is an absolute mess, but I can't actually say that we're "losing," because that would imply that we have an understood goal that we're working towards, which we don't, in my opinion. We just have a mess, of our own making, with no clue as to how to clean it up. But I have a crazy, maybe ridiculous idea for how to solve it.
Iraq is not ready or prepared to fully take their destiny into their own hands - yet. I think they'll get there someday, but one of the keys to crafting a Jeffersonian democracy is having a Jefferson - and a Washington, and Addams, and Hamilton, and Franklin, etc. - with reason and will to have crafted it in their own nation to begin with. It can't really be forced upon someone, and if Iraq could have decided their own destiny, then Saddam wouldn't have been in power for so long. Sadly, for that region, someone like Saddam was about the best that could've been hoped for, as evil and despotic as he was. As a member of the minority, he understood that his state must be secular in order to prevent a majority overthrow and slaughter, but was strong (and violently devious enough) to maintain power against the majority hardliners who would see the state turn theocratic towards their own ends. Any government we can assist or prop up in Iraq will lack both of these qualities, and thus the country will fall frther into civil war without the presence of outside influence and force.
So my idea is this. Take the three Nations with the most interest in the future of Iraq - namely the U.S., Israel, and Iran, and sit them in a room until they figure out what the basic nature of their priorities for the region are, and can agree on a system whereupon each individual priority can be met with the armament of the nation with an interest in it. I intentionally leave out Saudi Arabia, because they're - again in my opinion - the only true enemy and threat that we have in the Gulf, and I know that the three I mention won't agree, but that's partly the point. If a situation can be made where Iran knows that it can defend it's ideological interests, while Israel can defend it's survival interests, and the U.S. it's economic interests, and where any of those is threatened (by Iran, to be specific) there will be consequences, than the peace process can begin as it must - hesitantly, but via diplomacy backed up with force.
Let me tweak this discussion a little bit and ask this:
What are the necessary conditions for U.S. military involvement in other countries, be it invasion, 'peacekeeping,' or some mix of the two? Based on what you knew then, did the Iraq invasion meet that criterion? Did Kosovo and the Serbian bombing campaign?
I'd like to hear some opinions on this and then offer my own.
Prometheus,
I used the Kosovo example precisely because Congress was not excited about the idea of intervention. Clinton asked for vague Senate support of a NATO 'resolution' for the bombing campaign, and even that got tepid support (Interesting links - as well as unintended irony from conservatives fearing executive power - to be found here and here).
Basically, since the Korean War, presidents have been saying "Oh, Congress, hey... I just invaded somebody. Thought you should know!"
Let me address your points, though, because they are good ones.
You said Kosovo was on the up-and-up because it was a humanitarian effort to prevent ethnic/confessional slaughter, and hinted that if Iraq had been billed the same way, it would have been a stronger case. I think this conflates somewhat the purpose of national and international obligations.
That is, why is it the responsibility of the U.S. Armed Forces to prevent civil slaughter in a far-away country? I agree that of the world's nations, we are uniquely able to intervene, but does that mean we have an obligation to do so? Because I don't need to tell you that if our sole standard is humanitarian, we're going to have a difficult time choosing between interventions here, there, or everywhere. The world is a messy place, with some countries messier than others.
Based on that, I think ideally humanitarian interventions can only take place under international agreements, either UN or NATO. Unilateral humanitarianism is just too rife with flaws and charges of hypocrisy (e.g. 'why Kosovo and not Darfur, America? Why Haiti and not Rwanda?' and so on). Here we confront the real problem: our international organizations are a complete failure.
You would think, based on international law, that the Iraq case would be a 'slam dunk.' Saddam had broken numerous UN Resolutions, was a known aggressor to his neighbors and his own people, and was violating sanctions. In addition, his removal - again, ideally - was a projected boon to the self-determination of Shi'a and Kurd. So what was the problem? Well, three members of the Security Council had a nice side deal going with the vile regime that they didn't want terminated. Recall also that it was Council members (Russia, China) who didn't want us to stop the Serbs from slaughtering the Bosnians and Kosovars.
Where does this leave us? It leaves us here: America-only interventions should be for a direct, provable national interest. They should meet the highest standards of rigor (the casus belli, for example, should be airtight) and be approved by Congress.
This leaves room for multilateral interventions (military or otherwise) done to fulfill treaty obligations and what-have-you.
While Tacitean has some good points, let me point out one flaw – if we were to only go into humanitarian missions if we had international support, we might as well not bother at all. I cite for example Rwanda, where by the time we got enough countries to agree to do something and figure out how to share the cost and the labor, the majority of the slaughter had already been done. Most humanitarian conflicts act exactly this way – by the time the stories of Darfur had gotten out amongst the international community, thousands were already dead. Hell, we still haven’t figured out what to do there because we’re trying to work within the international community.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of the UN and feel if it were to get some overhauls, would be a great force in the world. However, the UN acts pretty freakin’ slowly. Getting 10 nations (hell, 2 nations) to agree on what to name the various police actions is hard enough, getting them to agree what to do and how to do it takes weeks or months. We have a hard enough time doing that within our own country.
Of course, in Iraq we really could have and should have gone about getting more international support – in that case we weren’t exactly on a ticking time-clock of lives lost, and would have benefited greatly from more worldwide support. I think we would have gotten that support if they went with reason #2 for invasion (humanitarian) instead of reason #1 (vague terror/WMD/Sept 11 links).
Also, I agree that it’s difficult to distinguish between which awful world conflict is worth our time helping out in, and which isn’t. However, I think we can do a little better than only aiding in conflicts where we have interests. When we do that, we tend to pick and choose countries that either have natural resources we want to exploit, or countries that have a government that resembles communism, and those conflicts have rarely worked out well for us. Meanwhile, we wait and wait and wait for the international community to come up with a response to the crisis in Darfur, and just shrug at the people who weren't fortunate enough to have their lives threatened in an oil-rich area.
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The reason I'm having problems with the idea of unilateral humanitarian interventions is because they're really no way to do it right.
What would have happened if the U.S. had decided to stop the ethnic cleansing in Rwanda and had sent a few divisions into that country? What did happen in Somalia? We intervene with no clear long-term objective and it goes all to hell, because our vague objective is "fix the country so they don't kill each other." I think the USMC is pretty cool, but even they can't do that when there are 1,000-year hatreds at work. Invariably we have to favor someone over someone else, and away we go into civil strife with us in the middle. Then we withdraw after suffering suitable casualties and it reverts to total anarchy. The opposing view is that we basically rent out our armed forces to third-world nations, totally defeating the point of it in the first place.
I suggest another alternative, seeing as the UN is what it is: an alliance of free nations, modeled on NATO. Any nation in this alliance would have to meet certain basic standards of government and human rights, and membership guarantees those standards as well as defense from aggressors. Dispossessed groups in despotic regimes could petition this alliance for help, and the alliance would have troops from each member state dedicated to policing the alliance's decisions. Thoughts?
Actually, Rwanda offers a much more positive example of the utility of military force for humanitarian intervention, as most of the genocidaires fled the country because of the advance of the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) led by Paul Kagame. It was a military response, albeit one that could've been and should've been aided by the great powers, that helped bring the genocide to an end. Yes, there is no way President Clinton could've saved all of the victims of the Rwandan Genocide, but a military response on our part could likely have saved thousands of lives in a rather small nation. But that would imply that we learned anything at all from The Holocaust and that we actually gave a damn about any promises of "never again" we made. But would it really have been that difficult to have simply destroyed or jammed the radio transmitters that were used to coordinate the slaughter? No, most assuredly not.
At the end of the day, there are approximately 200 different countries, I see no reason we can't assess each situation differently depending upon the context, circumstances, and consequences.
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