"I support the troops..." ???

tresspassers,

Attempting to find a consensus while declaring that any result other that your counterparts reaching the same conclusions that you hold or be irrelevant is leaning toward unchecked.

It is to our interest to seem checked, hence the consultations. Since the consultations did nothing to change our plans and since we declared from the beginning that we'd do it anyway with or without them we were not checked.

We tried to get support, we made it clear we'd do it anyway without the support. Getting support was deemed a luxury. It was determined that it would not effect the outcome.

That is unchecked.

"Consultation" that do not effect the outcome is not a check.

Craven - Your arguments aren't without merit, but they pretend that the US made no real effort to work with the international community, and I think that position is not supported by the facts.

And again, you can alter the meaning of the term "unchecked" if you choose, but I believe there are times when a country must act no matter what others think. If not, then our government is allowing others to rule us from without.

There is nothing unchecked about the way the US has used its power in this. It's a shame if you lack the perspective to see that.

Unchecked to me means that there is no mechanism to hold it in check.

We declared that we were goint to do it regardless of anyone's opinion. We also tried to get some support because it would be a nice, but not necessary thing.

Yes, we made an effort to work with them, as long as you consider "working with them" to mean telling them that if they don't agree with us we will do it anyway and villify you.

Yes, there are times when you must act with or without support. I do not feel this was one of the times, most of the world did not feel it was. We told them we would do it anyway.

If this is "checked" to you, we are operating with so vastly different a set of definitions that this is a pointless exchange.

That's funny. To me it means "unchecked", as in done without constraint.

And I think you are right. We aren't even speaking the same language. No worries.

Actually that definition is clear and makes it very easy for me.

Please define what OUTSIDE constraints our country has that could have deterred us from going to war.

The following is a preemptive post for the possibility that you do not come up with a significant third party check. If you do I will take it from there.

-----------------------------

If your point is that we generally check our own power I would agree but then we are back to square one, anyone CAN check their own power. And when they decide to loosen their self-imposed contraints they can continue to say they are checked. Yet this is only slightly different from being unchecked. At the risk of another logomachy:

Keeping one's self in check is a fickle as one's whim. Yes our form of government and famously the war-weary pacifists can keep our government from needless war. But what thrird party can do that? What contrains us from taking Iran next for e.g.

Self-constraint is important and for the power it has the US does very well in this regard. But my point is that if it wished it could not only ignore world opinion but thumb their nose at it as well and get away with it (until a economic block threatens us). I feel that some of the members of the current administration want to loosen the contraints and this worries other nations.

If your point is that the US pushed diplomacy hard I agree. But it did not push diplomacy with sequentialism. It pushed diplomacy as a parallel to the war march.

Our diplomatic effort in the Iraq case was never about consultations to help us make the decision, it was about telling people that we are going to do this anyway so you might as well stay friendly.

But let's simplify things and give each other even less wiggle room:

If the majority of the world's population is against this war, and yet unable to prevent it, what constraints exist? It's really very simple, I do not see significant outside constraints on our power in the current status quo. If you see otherwise please point them out.

Hm, TW, you said above that the US was trying to find a consensus at the UN. but trying to find a consensus does not mean that when those who you seek to find a consensus on something with disagree with you, you sack them and do what you wanted to do in the first place anyway. That is trying to persuade someone to take your position and then screw them if they don't. Consensus means adjusting positions of all sides, a little bit of give and take.

Which constraints have applied to the process in which the US government has determined its position on what should happen re: Iraq - and acted on that position at the time it chose?

In what way did the US government accept anyone to "check" how it decided to use its power in this?



When a country - and I do think you mean 'a government', considering it went against a then-majority in public opinion - acts "no matter what others think", it acts ipse facto in an unchecked manner, not?

I think I understand your point: it is that the US government has checked itself - it could have gone so much further, if it had wanted.

Which would be my point exactly - it could have. Apparently the US government now feels that it can go as far as it wants, that no one in the world can or should be allowed to check it in that - only it itself can.

Note that even a dictatorship can choose to check itself in its behaviour, if it is concerned with strategic setbacks or a possible popular uprising - but as a form of government, it is no less the very definition of "unchecked".

That is the position the US now seems to stake out in the world: it can choose to check itself in the power it has to intervene anywhere in the world - even, should they take a co-operative enough attitude, through the United Nations - but it claims the right to in principle not have to. That's as unchecked a world power as you've ever had, and that in a time when the US is factually the only world power.

The compromise formula would thus be: though one can argue that the US government's behavior was checked, in as far as the government had checked itself, the US government itself, by refusing anyone else to exert any constraint on that behaviour, clearly staked out its position as an unchecked world power. Which is exactly what scares so many of us in the rest of the world.

That Iraq still has cities and civilians, let alone a military, is conclusive evidence the US does not act solely in her own interest. If grabbing the oil were the objective, one missile silo in a Midwestern US wheatfield would have removed all hinderence to the grab, and done so in milliseconds. The US is capable of far more "Domination" than she exercizes.

Yes, timber-
but you overlook one obvious detail...

although this administration may be behaving like an imperialistic bully, even they realize that a pre-emptive Nuclear Strike would destroy their already badly damaged international reputation. And all the noises they make about "not making policy according to opinion polls" notwithstanding,
they don't want that.

The overtures they made to the UN were much more gestures to save face, than any honest attempt to avert war. Made solely because they don't want to look like warmongering, trigger happy cowboys.

That argument is based on the presumption that killing Iraq's civilians and taking their cities IS in our interest. IMO that makes it a poor argument. Economic colonization has replaced the physical variety. It's not to our interest to physically colonize most countries.



Once again, this is based on the premise that oil is our only motivation. I have never agreed with that position.



Amen, this is fact. And the US constrains itself. But what we were discussing is what OUTSIDE constraints the US has. Obviously we keep ourselves in check. There are lineswe do not want to cross. But what about situations in which we do not think we have crossed the line but the world does? Such as right now? This suggests to me that we are unchecked except by ourselves and since anyone can check themselves it is the bare minimum of constraint.

I also want to address the inadequacy of using the brutalization of the world as a criteria for what you deem as domination. Domination is not simply blood and guts. Domination is not having to listen to the global body you created when it nolonger suits your purpose.

Domination is not about using nukes. It's about not being shy to use your military, it's about using more pressure to create friendly econimic blocs, it's about undermining whatever institutions exist that could neutralize sheer military and economic power.

So, it's about undermining the WCC, and the UN whn they do not suit your purpose.

I haven't posted on any of the politics threads and this will probably be my first and last post about the issue of the war.

I don't expect real responses to this, but it's something I wanted to post somewhere 'just because'.

My friend is a Navy Seal and has been deployed in Iraq for some time. I received an email from him today. Here are some excerpts:

"...just returned from 3 days in the field, haven't slept, and heading out again after a bit of a rest. i'm fine, all the boys are fine, albeit hallucinating a bit from lack of sleep. spent the last few days in iraq, working around the clock pretty much. missions all successful so far, and no-one on our end getting seriously hurt.

know that the experiences i have had since the war has started have only reinforced my belief that i am supposed to be here, am lucky to be here, doing what i do."

I guess I'm just trying to say that no matter who beleives what, I'm glad there are people like that in the world and I'm glad he's my friend.

Safe home.

Smoooch!

Why lucky to be there? Just curious, that sounds like something my brother would say.

I don't think nuking Iraq or otherwise exterminating the "cities and civilians" of Iraq would have been in the strategic interest of the US. That they didnt do it therefore proves no humanitarian motivation whatsoever.

Also, you make my point exactly, without necessarily having gotten it. "The US is capable of far more "Domination" than she exercizes." Yes. The present US government may choose to check the unparallelled potential of world dominance it by now has - or it may not. It has made clear, in the run-up to this war, that it accepts only the constraints it imposes itself. It is therefore an "unchecked power", and as such, I would say, by definition a threat to the rest of the world. For we are asked to just trust the American President on his pretty blue eyes (as we here say) that it will continue - or return to - constraining itself in a way that doesn't risk our security.

You can ask of no sane people to accept a country's (political, military, economic) hegemony on the mere basis of trust in its word. In particular if the country in Q has a rather mixed record on respecting other people's democracies and human rights. To be able to 'trust' the US with its power, other countries will need it to accept some kind of procedures of international constraint, through which they can check any all too blatant violation of their security.

I would predict that if the US doesn't voluntarily accept institutionalised procedures (such as the UN could offer), then peoples / countries / political movements around the world will increasingly respond in kind, and try to limit the US's hegemony any other way they can. Considering nobody can match the financial-military resources of the US, the "any way they can" will be in the line of scattershot, low-tech, but devastating - terrorist - counterattacks. With the way it has come to launch the invasion of Iraq, the Bush government has exponentially increased the very danger of new 9/11s it purports to be addressing.

Indeed - or, nuclear western powers will combine together to form a power bloc that at least offers some of the same kinds of checks and balances to US power as the USSR once did, as they seek now to combine to form an economic counter-balance.

It is the "slippery-slope" thing that, I think, terrifies the rest of the world.

No sensible person would argue that the USA has been without self-imposed restraints, as well as the restraints that, in the past, came from a bi-polar power configuration. (Many would argue that, especially in covert form, they were insufficient - but that is not what we are discussing here.)

Now we see no real opposing balance - we see the USA beginning to act without its self-imposed restraints - is this not how the slide towards unchecked power and dominance begins?

One might safely assume that the trained and disciplined military units of Ghengis Khan's army agreed with him about their superiority and their rightful destiny as dominators.

You seem to be avoiding simply stating whether you think we are acting without restraint or whether you concede that we are acting with restraint. I think it is clear that we have shown and continue to show restraint, though I recognize that others would prefer more restraint or a different kind. (And I suppose a few are silly enough to claim that we are acting as an "unchecked" power, but there's no point in addressing such an unsupportable position.)

And all the rest is just noise.

The only restraint the US government has accepted in this is its self-restraint. This is the point several of us have tried to make, that you seem to gloss over still. It has rejected the checks put in place by the laws and institutions of international politics, by refusing to accept the authority of the UN Security Council and by adhering to an interpretation of its resolutions in the matter that the majority of the SC could not possibly share. It has rejected the notion that, in today's world, compromise is a duty rather than a mere optional choice, especially for the most powerful - showing instead no willingness during its attempt at 'the UN route' to accept any outcome other than the one it proposed itself.

If we are talking international politics - as I think we were - it has thus indeed acted as an 'unchecked' power, overturning a system of international checks and restraints. With which measure of its own choice the administration then chooses to use that newly claimed freedom from international restraints, is really not relevant. It can choose to limit itself in this way or that, or not - it can choose to compromise but rejects the notion that it should be obliged to - it's all it's own choice, which is what the point is, here. We now have a world power that refuses to be "checked" by anyone or anything but its own convictions on our hands. And that is a very basic reversal of the trends in international politics of the last fifteen years.

tress,

Any entity has self-restraint. If you are saying that the US is only checked by it's own desire to be then it is indeed unchecked. It can do what it wants, when it wants. All it needs to do is decide that it is ok to do so.

Let's move to logomachy breaking language:

I ask: If the US decides to do something, what restraints exist to stop that from happening?

Please answer that when you get the chance. I will answer your question:





I think we act without restraint. There is no impediment, what we desire is acted upon. I think we generally desire things that are reasonable and yes we could be worse, but this is not a restraint of any kind. It simply indicates a behavior pattern. A behavior pattern IS NOT A RESTRAINT.

E.G.

Fred the convict has not yet tried to escape. This can be called "self-restraint". Bob the warden is not stupid enough to determine that the fact that Fred has not yet tried to escape means that he does not need any impediment to such an attempt.

Bob places walls around Fred. Fred is now restrained. If those imposed restraints did not exist Fred would not be restrained except by himself, Fred would be free to escape.

Point: Self imposed restraint is no restraint. It simply means you have not tried it yet, it does not demonstrate an impediment. Restraint implies that one's will, desires, or actions will be checked. If one can make one's will, desire and actions a reality at will there is no restraint. A behavior pattern does not indicate an impediment. It indicates a tendency that can be broken, a tendency that is subject to one's whim.

Nimh, Craven-
If it's any small consolation, I understood you perfectly the first half dozen or so times you explained it, and I agree. Anyone who is not made a little uneasy by the bullying aspects of this administration either ain't paying attention, or is so ideologically in lockstep with it that they just don't give a phuk.