[lit-ideas] Re: dealing with the Slobodan Husseins
- From: John McCreery <mccreery@xxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2005 13:14:37 +0900
On 2005/07/20, at 4:39, Eric Yost wrote:
Those of us who opposed America's invasion of Iraq from the outset
can take no comfort from its catastrophic consequences. On the
contrary: we should now be asking ourselves some decidedly
uncomfortable questions. The first concerns the propriety of
"preventive" military intervention. If the Iraq war is wrong―"the
wrong war at the wrong time"[1] ―why, then, was the 1999 US-led war
on Serbia right?
Bill Clinton made the following case.
Military intervention must satisfy three conditions:
(1) Humanitarian purpose
(2) National interest
(3) Being doable
His argument was that Kosovo satisfied all three.
In contrast, for example, the liberation of Tibet seems to some a
laudable humanitarian purpose. But the case that getting into a war
with China would be either in the national interest or "doable" is
weak to non-existent.
In situations like Rwanda and Darfur and northeast Zaire, the
humanitarian purpose seems overwhelming. But would intervention have
been or be in the national interest? Was (or is) it doable? Cold-
blooded foreign policy realists could (and probably did and do) say
"No."
What then of Iraq?
(1) Topple Saddam Hussein? Spread Democracy? Good ideas both from a
humanitarian point of view.
(2) National interest? The answer is simple―OIL.
(3) Doable? Crushing Saddam's military was always going to be a piece
of cake―exactly the kind of combat that the US military is superbly
trained and equipped for. Occupying and pacifying a country with a
population of 25 million of people violently opposed to foreign
occupation and divided into religious and ethnic groups hostile to
each other, with only 130,000 troops? That has turned out to be, as a
good many component military people said before the event not a good
idea at all.
What all of these arguments evade, of course, is the principle of
international law that forbids invasion of a sovereign state's
territory in the absence of a prior attack from that state or,
stretching a point, a clear and present danger.
In any case, authors like Judt, who set up a this-or-that straw man
need not be taken seriously, however serious the questions that
motivate their effusions.
John McCreery
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