| | Regi raises some very pertinent issues: He's right; I don't think we can ever live in a risk-free world, and it is dangerous to think we can actually control for all these uncertainties. That's why one of the most important functions that government can undertake in this current global situation is to be vigilant and accurate in the gathering and dissemination of intelligence. One thing the 9/11 commission shows us is that the tragedy of that horrific day was a tragedy for U.S. intelligence.
Yes, I believe that force is only legitimate when used in retaliation, but that does not mean that one must sit around waiting to be attacked. If your intelligence shows an imminent attack, you have every right to strike first before the damage is done, or to take appropriate defensive matters---if the time-line is too short---to minimize casualties, and to strike back with catastrophic consequences for the enemy.
It is because there is so much tyranny in the world, however, that one cannot base a foreign policy on the notion that governments should free oppressed peoples from evil tyrants. Rand made the argument that a free society has the right to take such actions; but I read that "right" very narrowly. A free society would have a voluntary military and voluntary taxation. The US is relatively free (compared to other nations), but it is not a free society as Rand envisioned it. So, as far as I am concerned, it does not have the right to just pick and choose who it will "liberate." But it does have the responsibility to defend the individual rights of its own citizens. That's the nature and purpose of government.
Not even Rand believed that the US should have invaded the Soviet Union, and we all know how much she loathed the Soviets. She was also against US entrance into World War I, and spoke very clearly about how the US should have avoided entering World War II, especially on the side of the Soviets. She was adamantly opposed to Lend Lease and to aiding Stalin and believed that Hitler and Stalin should have slaughtered one another. On Linz's grounds, Rand herself should have been called a "Hitlerite."
If you do not make imminent or actual threat to individual rights your guiding criteria for the retaliatory use of force, you are left with wishy-washy humanitarian arguments or with a wishy-washy debate over who has the right to liberate whom... and the criteria become non-objective. Why liberate Iraq and not the Sudan? The Sudanese government is currently engaging in bloody ethnic cleansing, where thousands of people have been murdered and more than a million driven from their homes. The Human Rights Watch claims that this is on a par with the 1994 genocide in Rwanda that resulted in the deaths of 500,000 people. Why not invade the Sudan? And what about Nigeria where Christian militants of the Tarok tribe have just killed 500 Muslims? Do we invade Nigeria? The list goes on and on and on. There is simply nothing to justify the invasion of one country and not the invasion of another if you believe that the U.S. has a right (though not the obligation) to be the world's enforcer of morality.
The question remains: At whose expense?
Presidential Candidate George W. Bush rightly indicted the Clinton administration for its forays into nation-building and humanitarian flights of fancy in foreign affairs. Now, President George W. Bush has become the Chief Cheerleader in defense of this policy of humanitarian "liberation" and "democratic" nation-building. I preferred Bush as a candidate. That Bush knew that the policy of nation-building was pure folly.
Joe raises some very good issues concerning colonialism and its goals. I agree: one cannot simply smash a regime and then walk away as if nothing happened. I may have been against this war in Iraq, but I do not believe that anything will be achieved by simply walking away and leaving a huge power vacuum there. That doesn't mean the US should stay there forever. And there is no guarantee that a new group of thugs won't take over anyway. Let's face it: the US has a long track record of empowering thugs in the Middle East. Perhaps if this government got out of the habit of empowering thugs to begin with, it wouldn't have to go back into these regions to attempt to clean up the mess to which it partially contributed.
And the joke is: Now, the US is in Afghanistan and is, once again, empowering warlords and former Taliban leaders. I suspect that some dark forces will prevail in Iraq as well. To the south, we have a Shi'ite majority that would like an Islamic theocracy. In the center, we have a Sunni population that yearns for the return of Ba'athist butchers. And to the north, we have the least militant group, the Kurds... who frighten both Syria and Turkey, both of which have sizable Kurdish populations yearning for the day when a Greater Kurdistan becomes an independent country.
The US has stepped into this minefield and, like Colin Powell said: The US now owns it... it owns the hopes and aspirations of millions of people, many of whom can't stand one another.
Let's be clear about one thing: Colonization never got rid of the terrorists; all it did was postpone the inevitable. The moment the British got out of India, the bloodshed continued between Hindus and Muslims. The British created Iraq out of Mesopotamia, and what has been left behind is a continuing tribal nightmare. Even the Soviets can be looked at as, essentially, colonizers; the moment the Soviet Union collapsed, all the old bloody tribal and ethnic rivalries re-emerged. They never went away.
This does not mean that I would have preferred a world dominated by the Soviets. But it does mean that what often happens is a simple turnover: The colonial power exercises its ability to retain a monopoly on the coercive use of force; it owns the weapons and subjugates the population, ostensibly to create regional stability. Inevitably, it becomes the criminal. And when it finally decides to leave, it opens the door to all the old criminals.
The British were most successful in countries where British subjects themselves settled and created their own British societies (take a look at America, Canada, New Zealand, etc.); they were least successful in countries where they simply tried to graft Western ideals onto indigenous populations. Most of those countries adopted British ways because their intelligentsia were trained in British schools, but they ended up becoming, for the most part, illiberal democracies always on the verge of catastrophic ethnic and tribal civil war.
So that's why I don't believe that colonization per se falls within the legitimate functions of government. And in the long-run, its track record is very mixed, and terribly expensive to human life, liberty, and property.
Note, however, that I am not an anarcho-capitalist. I rejected the argument against action in Afghanistan, even though I recognized that many of those problems were rooted in the US support for the mujahadeen. That did not stop me from advocating a swift response in the wake of 9/11. And, quite frankly, I advocated a similarly swift response back in 1993 when elements of the same group attacked the WTC the first time. If this country had responded with overwhelming force back then, 9/11 might never have happened. So much for me being an "appeaser."
Costs are relative, however. In Iraq, no fly zones and sanctions may have been expensive to maintain, but I see no problem with the logic of my position. These things were nowhere near as expensive as the incredible cost of $4 billion per month to maintain an army of occupation, or the hundreds of billions of dollars it is going to take in US taxpayer money to create a new welfare state in Iraq. (As an aside, this reminds me of that classic film, "The Mouse That Roared"... where a country on the verge of collapse declares war against the United States precisely because it knows it will lose, and that the US will financially support it forever.)
I should make one point about the first Gulf War, however. That war is but another portrait of US hypocrisy. The US encouraged Iraq to invade Iran because the US hated the Iranian theocrats who had toppled the oppressive Shah whom the US had hand-picked. I'm sure the Reagan administration thought it was legitimate payback for the hostage crisis. So, the US turned a blind eye, so-to-speak, to all of Hussein's murderous actions in that war; it gave the wherewithal to Hussein to produce chemical weapons, and it was during that period that we had to deal with the obscenity of a Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Hussein.
When Hussein turned his global ambitions to Kuwait, the US objected, belatedly. In fact, there is some conflicting evidence that the US may have actually given Hussein a green light on that invasion. But the US was not concerned with propping up Kuwait; it was far more concerned with propping up Saudi Arabia, and it was in Saudi Arabia's interests that the US launched the first Gulf War. Is it any coincidence that this George Bush is doing much the same in carefully guarding the US-Saudi relationship, a relationship that his own father prioritized?
Hypocrisy. This country sleeps with the Saudis; it is a relationship that goes back 60 years because of oil, because of monopoly oil concessions, ARAMCO, and incestuous business-government ties. And the US support for these relationships has empowered a regime that feeds on Wahhabi fanaticism, and that exports that ideology to the rest of the Muslim world.
The time has come for a new foreign policy, where the US stops weighing the better of two evils. It is time to stop choosing between evils, and to start doing what is right for the protection of the individual rights of American citizens.
But because there is an organic tie between domestic and foreign policy, as Rand herself argued, I think we must also recognize that such a fundamental change in the latter won't happen, until there is a fundamental change in the former.
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