Flip-Flop :: Debate the other side :: Iraq

Aw, I saw this when I was busy and wanted to get in on it... it's over already?

Only between Craven and me. I think others should join in.

LOL! :wink:

Oh is it really over already? I was hoping it would go on for days. Mostly because I'd really like to weigh in, but I swore I wasnt going to spend any time on this board here tonight. Already violated my promise by posting a poll update ..

Fascinating. Wish I'd seen this earlier. Gonna think on it some ... Ahll be baack.

Likewise.

So, it's okay to invade a country to force them into democracy? So long as their president is unpopular, I mean.

My argument contained the democratic ideal as a component but the primary motivation I cited were the humanitarian concerns.

The additional component of humanitarian crisis is what justifies the war the most IMO and I would not necessarily advocate an invasion merely on the basis of the institution of democracy.



Saddam's infamy was one reason I cited for Why now and why Iraq because of the political capital his unique infamy generates but aren't a part of my motivations to find the war justified. Of course, I do think that he was infamous largely for the reasons (humanitarian crisis) that justify the war.

oic. Then we should decide where to draw this line. Nazi Germany, with its death camps, sure. What about torture political prisoners. Hmmm? And for humanitarian issues, shouldn't the invasion have broader, as in UN, support?

Drawing a line is a good point and Nazi Germany a good example of an obvious non-on-the-line event.

"Torturing political prisoners" would be a bit too inclusive by my estimation. That has happened in some very low levels on a scope that would, by my estimation, render a war a too drastic response.

To me, a simple criteria (that isn't necessarily simple to quantify) is whether the war will save more lives than not having the war will.

So, for example if the humanitarian crisis is such that only a few people have died a war might not be the best way to address it as many more would die as a result of the intervention itself.

With Saddam, I am not sure that the war directly prevented more deaths than it caused, as Saddam's large-scale humanitarian crisi seemed to have been behind him but it might serve to reduce loss of life through the exemplification his removal served.

Depending on how the trial goes it could be a powerful testament to the unwillingness of the developed world to tolerate the abuse he inflected on his region.

Of course, I would have preferred intervention when he was more active in causing death, "sentence against an evil work not executed speedily" and all that..

"To me, a simple criteria (that isn't necessarily simple to quantify) is whether the war will save more lives than not having the war will."

Okay, at least that's a definable standard, and I hold no one to perfect foresight. Heck, even in hindsight, we don't know how many lives would have been lost had we not intervened.

There is still the issue of who should be enforcing the standard. The US alone? The US and a couple of allies, and the nominal support of a few others. In other words, if we are not acting from the concept of defense of self or defense of others, it's hard to justify an invasion.

While I'd agree that the US might not be the best for this job I am not convinced that not having the best person for the job available invalidates the very necessity of the job itself.

The police may be the best people to enforce the law, but that doesn't mean stopping a rape is a bad idea.

Absent the appropriate entity perhaps less appropriate entities should step up.

OK, lemme try. One caveat, or question rather: does it count if you use many of the arguments you usually also use, but to argue the opposite case from the one you're normally making?

If not, this attempt will probably be judged wrong ...

----

I think it's highly ironic - and in a way, damning in its moral bankrupcy - for liberals to claim the mantle of ethical standards in a debate in which they have shamelessly opted for the basest of realpolitik considerations and methods.

For years now, people from the left have implored politicians to take heed of the lessons of what arguably has been the bloodiest century in the history of mankind. The combination of surging totalitarian ideologies with utopian pretensions on the one hand and modern technology and industrial-scope production on the other has brought us mass murder on unprecedented scale. All of us should take that legacy to heart, as these genocides could only happen because we let it happen. "Never again", the Left has therefore justly sworn, time and again.

How could we have just let it happen, these huge enterprises of killing in the name of ideological or ethnic/racial hatred? One part of the story is the way we have been blinded - the way leftists, in particular, have been blinded - exactly by the invokation of ideological goals by those perpetrating the killing. At least as major a part, however, is the sad but not coincidental confluence of totalitarian ideology and modern technology with that third "holy cow" of the modern age: the nation-state.

The nation-state was meant as a means for democratic revolution, the liberation of the commonfolk from their aristocratic tyrants. However, in the 20th century the concept of the nation-state has been travestized, used as it was by petty dictators and mass-murderers alike to exert exactly the kind of merciless, alienated tyranny over their subjects that had made pre-modern monarchies hated - but with far greater impact. The concepts of national sovereignty and territorial integrity have been used by mass murderers across the world to shield their torture chambers and killing fields from outside eyes and outside interventions.

For years, the Left has castigated us for giving in to such dictators, for spinelessly accepting their cowardly resort to such concepts and letting them be as long as they let us be. The Bush government is arguably the first Republican administration that has learnt the lessons of the bloody 20th century. With an ambitious program for tackling dictators and using military and diplomatic crowbars to force open areas of the world for democratic change that more cynical administrations had long given up on changing, the Bush government has shown a near-Wilsonian zeal for popular liberation and progressive change. No longer does the US President accept the inevitability of tyrannic backwardness in the Middle East in exchange for a safe flow of oil. It is ready to change the world, for the better. It will push allies like Saudi-Arabia towards reform, it will at the very least put the topic clearly back on the international agenda, and it will tackle ruthless dictators that past administrations were still ready to wheel and deal with.

For this, the revolutionary foreign policies of the Bush administration should have been greeted with surprised relief by the reverends of the left. But instead, they've done a double-take. Now it is they who are arguing that the liberation of millions of Iraqis from dictatorship is not "worth" a war. Now it is them arguing that one should compromise with tyrants if it is geostrategically advantageous to do so. Now it is them asserting the "hopelessness" of bringing democratic change to certain areas of the world, postulating on how the peoples there are "not ready" for such change or are somehow culturally not adapted to deal with it -- just like right-wingers would do when rationalising how Reagan c.s. left many a dictatorship in place. Unbelievably, today's left is even cynical enough to rally behind Jacques Chirac, the notoriously corrupt figurehead of the French Right, who has never shown any zeal for the cause of democracy and human rights, and is the unrivalled master of opportunistic quid-pro-quos for strategic gain.

That's how he profiled himself this time, too. Rallying an odd coalition encompassing Chinese communists, Russia's new authoritarian regime and Germany's electoral despair, Chirac has tried to block the road to progressive change in the Middle East - to sabotage a pioneering effort to go beyond Clinton's small-fry humanitarianism and nail the ten commandments of democracy and human rights to the doors of Axis of Evil dictators the way Luther once nailed his theses on the doors of the ossified Church. Chirac has us turning back to the 20th century postulates of national sovereignty, territorial integrity and geostrategical opportunism: you cant intervene in another country's business as long as it hasnt attacked you, no matter what havoc its dictator is wrecking against his own population.

And America's liberals and Europe's leftists have embraced him and marched down the streets demanding America to "stay in its place" - and leave those poor dictators alone. They sometimes openly express the underlying cynism of their argument: Saddam is bad, they admit, but if liberating the Iraqis means disturbing the global geostrategical equilibrium, it's not worth it. The concert of nations, in which the US is not allowed to establish decisive supremacy, is worth more to them than the costs of any humanitarian tragedy or tyrannical excess.

I say, in response, that they dont deserve the name "progressive" anymore. It is President Bush who deserves it now, after the brave determination he has shown in waging an impopular war in order to confront a man who perhaps better than any other present-day dictator symbolises the harm we have so scandalously allowed to happen throughout the past century. President Bush has sacrificed the unparallelled popularity he attained after 9/11 to do so, and anyone with a heart for the cause of democracy, progress and human rights should reward him for it.

---

Now can someone call Sofia in here? I believe I deserve a cookie ;-)

I've been busy cross-stitching your post.
Um, and I'm hot for you.
---

If the Great ME Plan was motivated by a desire to calm the boiling pot of extremism and exported terrorism--the plan was sorely incomplete.

With a massive military, and nowhere to show it off, the US gleamed their shiny aircraft, got new sand-colored fatigues and put on quite an impressive show. Yes, the war went very well--but was the goal met? Was the mission accomplished, or has America's unrelenting zeal to replace Saddam Hussein made the world, and Iraq, more dangerous than it was before they arrived? I'm not just speaking of the current chaos that reigns in the streets of Najaf, Fallujah, Baghdad--but the frightening future due to the premature handover of sovereignty.

The US started a war, and have given a handful of US appointed individuals the ungodly, overbearing responsibility to make decisions they are not qualified or capable of making, which has the potential to exponentially increase the problems they sought to extinguish. They have, in effect, left the balance of their job to others.

Where Bush erred was his impatience. Had he allowed the inspections to run course, and then approached the UN-- and recieved input from all-- the world could bring their best insight to the planning table--and Bush would not have been forced to hand Iraq over prematurely, possibly a political decision due to his increasing unpopularity, which coincides with the dismal outlook of his unilateral folly.
----
Bourbon? Straight.

LOL! And there you are.

This place is great ;-)

And so it should be. Who else but the Iraqis themselves are to best construct the country's new state structures?

It is easy to criticize the American occupation authorities for everything they didn't do or achieve. But it was never their task to create a Scandinavian welfare state on the Tigris. What American troops did was quite simple: take out the dictator, return power to the people. The aftermath may have taken longer than it should have, there may have been some problems underway. But those merely reaffirm that it's a good idea to just return power to the Iraqis themselves and see how they do. What else should be the goal?

The country, for sure, is in turmoil and order is vulnerable, despite the efforts our troops are making. But that's how things are after a revolutionary turnover of power. It would not have been any different if the Iraqis themselves had overturned their regime - the degree of chaos and unpredictability would have been the same. Because of the sheer oppressiveness of the Saddam regime, they did not have the power to free themselves from their dictator, so we did it for them. That may sound paternalistic, but the result is no different for it: Saddam is in jail, his regime is gone, a new government is in place, and now has the reins in hands itself again. We can predict doomsdays, but the sheer relief of Iraqi government ministers at their empowerment now that Bremer's gone suggests that they see lots of hope. Why shouldn't we trust them on that? Do we really know better than they do themselves?

Meanwhile, on the topic of terrorism, thats why our troops will still stay there for the moment. Making democracy work in Iraq is the Iraqi's task; we just facilitated the opportunity. Fighting terrorism is, after 9/11, still ours - and if the terrorists went to Iraq, then thats where we need to be as well, with the additional advantage of protecting the fledgling Iraqi democracy at least from outside threats.

I don't know if I can do this, I have a hard enough time arguing my own side and sticking to it. But I'll try because it seems so novel.

The invasion of Iraq was about much more than just taking care of any immediate problem caused by Saddam Hussien. It was about stoping any of Saddam's plans from succeeding, not just for the sake of United States but for whole world.

Saddam Hussien was getting offers from all the world and one of those times he would have accepted one of them. He probably knew there was a risk involved in doing things that gets the attention of the United States and allies but the sanctions and the continued bombings from the no fly zones were having the effect of restricting his freedoms and he probably wanted out from under it. So under that problem; former enemies like Osma Bin Laden don't seem as bad as staying under the thumb of the UN and the US. If he teamed up with terrorist such as Bin Laden or regimes from other rogue nations and shared his scientist and know how with them then the world would be in a position where networks of terrorist would be in possession of WMD.

Revel, having a hard time sticking to your own side 100% of the time just means you haven't given up on the thinking process.

Ok, Craven, there might be a time for a single country to go charging in like the lone ranger, but it's a bit like a jury of one, instead of twelve. Whatever country decides to go charging to the rescue had better be very right. And at least somewhat prepared for other countries to assume the same responsibility.

One of the problems in my opinion is that the current structure of the UN is not a true jury, the presence of veto-weilding states makes for a situation that I think makes jury nullification more attractive for the smaller players.

This was was controversial enough that the veto-weilding states themselves were not the sole impediment to the resolution's passing but I suspect that the current structure of the UN itself contributed to the smaller states unwillingness to accept what they saw as a manhandling of the system.

The UN needs to restructure the security council. Right now the balance of power in the SC is not a reflection of current geopolitical reality and the throwback to WW2 is something that I think might have made nation-states reluctant to support what they saw as our own adventurism.

That might have a lot to do with how we presented it, and I think that we could have done a better job at selling it worldwide, while the administration seemed reluctant to even try, preferring instead to sell it domestically. Our attempt to sell it worldwide seemed to me an element of the domestic sale, and only a perfunctory effort.

A more nuanced sale on the geopolitical level would have been nice, and I think it was possible. But then again that might have required more patience and the delay might have cut into the political capital we had from 9/11. Many have indicted the use of 9/11 as a forged relation of unrelated conflicts but at the same time a recognition of geopolitical reality is needed. 9/11 wasn't justification for Iraq, but it was an event that provided the political capital to act.

If the act itself was worthy I have a hard time faulting the use of 9/11's political capital because of a lacking direct relation to 9/11.

It's tricky to act without a broad base of support in such a controversial matter, and I would love to see a true jury evolve out of the current UN. But until this ideal is realized I think nations act with a recognition of the current realities.

And to hold America to the ideal of a true jury is a bit like asking us to respect rule of law that doesn't yet really exist. Acting now may undermine the development of the rule of law but not to a degree that it could not recover from. And until rule of law on a global scope is strengthened we are stuck with the status quo, in which there's really no significant downside to the use of political and military might over the objections of opinion.

In this state of rule of law's infancy there is a vacuum that we currently fill, for better or for worse. Until the other jurors start showing interest in the cases we face the vacuum will continue to exist. They might not like what we come up with but there is a dearth of other jurists coming up with measures to ensure global security.

A vigilante is not the ideal but a vacuum of authority sets the stage for one by nearly making it necessary.

You argue you flip flop side so well it is hard to tell how you feel.

As for me, I can't think of anything else to say on the flip flop side.