All I'm doing these days is cutting and pasting

Badger and others on US Military Policy in Iraq

Global Policy Forum has a wide-ranging report criticising US-led military actions in Iraq for attacking cities, killing civilians, destroying cultural heritage, and so on. Bernhard at Moon of Alabama calls particular attention to Section 6 of the report, on attacking cities, with its description of walling off cities, forced evacuation, cutting off water, heavy bombardment, blockage of media coverage, attacks on medical facilities, civilian casualties, and on and on. Bernhard recalls the term "urbicide" was coined for this type of operation in Bosnia, and in the West Bank. The GPF report deals with this and other issues mainly under the rubric of violations of international law. And in a similar vein, Robert Farley at Lawyers Guns and Money says the US now appears to have gone back to "pointless and destructive" sweep operations...

"US Coalition forces have attacked and destroyed a number of important Iraqi cities, on grounds that they were “insurgent strongholds.” The attacks have resulted in the massive displacement of people, large civilian casualties, and colossal destruction of the urban physical infrastructure. In addition to Falluja, there have been assaults on a dozen other cities including al-Qaim, Tal Afar, Samarra, Haditha, and Ramadi. The attacks include intensive air and ground bombardment and cutting-off electricity, water, food and medicines. The attacks have left hundreds of thousands of people homeless and in displacement camps."

Here's the odd thing. It's happened before, to good effect, as written up in The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution. The Whig slant on English history was that the ancient Saxons had established a profoundly liberty-loving and essentially egalitarian society, whose values were more the true values of Englishmen than was any veneration of or obedience to royalty. It was the Whig historians whose books were predominant in the libraries of our founders, who believed in light of them that their task was to restore our ancient Saxon liberties, the natural rights of Englishmen such as themselves.

So go figure. Today's historians (on very incomplete evidence) will tend to argue that the Whig historians were wrong about the Saxons (partly on the presumption that no people has ever been exceptional). Even if today's historians are right in this, the historical fact is that the American Revolution was carried out not in the faith that something new could be brought to this Earth by way of society, but that an old and better society could be restored.

Since we are now at a time where restoration of rights and liberties is crucial, reading our own best progressive ideals into our history, in so far as we can, may once again make for a superior course of events - even if future historians again must frown on such political use of their art.

I held Dan K up just last week as my favorite foreign policy spokesperson here, and I loved David Rieff's contributions.  But can I say that for me it leaves out a dimension?

We've polarized the debate between those who think Slaughter's values exist and those who think they're shams (or at least not specifically ours). But how about other ways of seeing it? For one thing, Slaughter thinks of American values in the abstract. Surely some of them are embodied in institutions and in law. We have a Constitution and a Bill of Rights.  We had, before Bush, allegedly signed onto the Geneva Convensions. 

To me, all that's happened is that we've gone in my lifetime from one bad idea to another. We had we'll beat the you know what out of you if you're not sufficiently on our side against the red menace.  Then under Kissinger it was we'll do so if you don't accept our hegemony. Then it was we'll do so if you don't accept our system of government, or at least we'll pretend that was our motive rather than oil, world domination, or just a private chat with God.

But we don't have to cast doubt on our system of government to (a) accept the bad parts of our history and (b) to try to hope for some kind of liberal foreign policy after all those versions of The Truth. My quarrel with Slaughter isn't the myth. It's that she hasn't abandoned the garbage.

John 

http://www.haberarts.com/

Not only is it sentimental bunk, but it is dangerous and progress-thwarting bunk which prevents people from listening to the voices of their pre-tribal, pre-national, pre-patriotic consciences...

Wait, is this satire? Am I supposed to laugh at the contradiction of calling someone sentimental, and then going immediately to romantic notions of noble savages in their pre-civilized, morally upright natural condition? This is nothing but the myth of the Garden of Eden re-imagined as anthropology.

It is part of our national myths. It is civilization that corrupts mankind. The evil big city, Ya know. Us folks that are tilling the land are uncorrupted and pure. It is true, ya know. You can trust me. Well you could until I moved to the big city

Jack

Well, I think it is fair game to ask direct questions of Ms. Kleinfeld on her activities and draw one's own conclusions based on her responses.

But if one has facts to make a specific charge one should put them forward. Asserting that "she has done work that would make most of us a little queasy" is, I think, not quite fair, unless what is meant is that doing contract work for NSA or the CIA is per se objectionable (in which case, I simply disagree with that assertion.)

For me this discussion, insofar as Ms. Kleinfeld and her project are concerned, comes back to the question of what her foreign policy would look like, not just in broad generalities but on key specific policy matters. When I get some sense of what she would actually do (and not do) then I feel I can judge quite well for myself whether such policies embody, or don't embody, the Slaughter values she embraces.

As it is, I've had no success so far in getting even a few examples of policy specifics, on two or three key foreign policy issues of the day. To take one example, I asked her in an exchange awhile back where the Truman Project stood on the advisability of the Iraq war. She said opinions were mixed on that. My response was that, if the Project had no opinion on this issue, on what grounds should others take it seriously as a source of ideas and good thinking on foreign policy?

The deafening silence on this issue lends credence to the view that the group's real ideological purpose is to marginalize those it calls "the left" within the Democratic party (if it cannot purge their souls through homespun language lessons and rah-rah admonishments, that is) in the course of mutual back-scratching for foreign policy jobs in future Democratic Administrations.

Oh, I know, I am being cynical. Why do I suspect that, in private, Truman Project folks speak scathingly of those on "the left" as crazies who can't safely be entrusted with our national security?

It's a lot easier than engaging "the left" on substance and policy.

I have an only somewhat impish proposal: a debate between DanK and Rachel Kleinfeld on US foreign policy. I would make a point of tuning in for that one.

And, to be clear, I really have no idea where the two of them would agree and disagree, because I really don't have any sense of how Ms. Kleinfeld would apply her values and general statements on foreign policy orientation to specific issues.

That would be the point of having the debate.

Dan, thanks for clarifying that, I think I substantially agree with that, but then it's odd that Reiff would link approvingly to your comment.

My rejection of the naive romanticism of Rousseau doesn't entail flinging myself into the arms of Hobbes. Its clear from cognitive science that there is a neurological basis for empathy, and I think there's room also for a view that civilization enhances that -- for example, the egalitarian societies of Northern Europe.

Regarding your original comment, I agree with you that a foreign policy based on nationalism is not adequate. We need an ethic that recognizes a more universal, global perspective, but I doubt the myth that this perspective can be found in primitive societies, although I suspect it exists in potential, just as a Ph.D. candidate exists in potential within a first grader. But, its worth pointing out that for those whose morality only extends to race or religion, a nationalistic morality that recognizes citizens as worthy of moral consideration is actually an advance. Not that we want those people running the country, of course.

There is also the quote attributed to John Adams to consider: "We are friends of liberty everywhere but guardians of our own". Perhaps it is not the business of the United States to be blundering around the world trying to impose its values on others. 10,000 years of recorded history shows that such efforts almost never succeed and cause more collateral damage to both the imposer and the imposed than the improvements they were intended to achieve.

But that isn't a possibility that is allowed to be discussed in modern US political discourse.

sPh

LOL.

I see it as a type of speech - not necessarily a sham or garbage, John.  I have to go back to any early lecture in a poly sci class I attended (early 60s, that is) and the prof. said there were two types of causes for war, a precipitating cause and a real cause.  The precipitating cause is the speech offered to cause one to accept the sacrifice and danger of war, while the real cause is always economic.

In the destruction of the government of Jacobo Abenz in Guatemala was a cold war event, and of course the alibi spoken was couched in ideals and values - the clarion call of anticommunist propaganda of the 50s. Truthfully, Abenz was neither a communist or even a socialist.  His "crime" was rather benign - we wanted to tax fallow land that was owned by foreign nationals (and Guatemalans, for that matter.)  But both John Foster and Allen Dulles were heavily invested in Guatemalan agriculture.  Ike was off playing golf in Palm Springs.

So that was the real cause, obviously. But it was the discourse on ideals and values that made it possible.  Grenada was invaded because the new government announced it would regulate its offshore banks.  The Marines were there the next day.

That's how I regard this different type of speech about ideals and values.  As part and parcel of our ability to go to war.  The economic motive of the Crusades is ovbious, but it had to be put in terms of saving God to convince the warriors to face death in Jerusalem. 

Neoboho

Values are the fig leaves covering the genitals of wars for land and resources.

My authority would be Fustel de Coulanges, The Origins of Property in Land, which I believe you can read online of you google the name.  Another is Imre Sutton's works on (American) Indian land tenure.  After that are myriad anthropological reports where land tenure practices of an ethnic group were studied.  Incidently, more than on anthropologists acknowledge a language deficiency in the study of land-holding and resource allocation practices, since the academic terms employed are derived from Roman law, and often by connotation distort our understanding of a particuar group's practices.

De Coulanges book is particularly fascinating to me because he was attacking a widley held opinion in late 19th C. Europe that so-called "primitive" land tenure was communistic, a view I believe Marx also held.

On your second point, Hayden White's Forms of Wildness comes to mind.   It's published in his "Tropics of Discourse" book. Basically traces the European myth of the Wildman to its roots in Greece and Western Asia.  Outstanding essay.  But importantly, it describes the imago that Europeans projected on others they encountered in their travels to far away places with strange sounding names. And a two headed imago, as White demonstates.  Thus ethnic groups were often valorized and romanticized on one hand, and villified and kilt dead on the other.  As Campbell said...the power of myth.

I believe environmentalists who find civilization unatural do so from the stress of modern life.  The same happened in Germany in the Early Modern Era - the wild man theme predominated in the arts - offered as the "paradise lost" that stood as the model of a better life in the past that they enjoyed before the trauma of urbanization that was taking place at the time.  It happened again in Germany before WWI - the youth were all eager to "return to nature" to indulge themselves in dithyrambic rituals in resonse to trauma of Germany's industrialization. 

Neoboho

OK, I see the problem here. You are operating under a skewed definition of values IMO. Values are not passive inate qualities, they are beliefs, that simple. When you say "I believe ....." you are stating a value. All of your "I believe"s would be your value system or your values

for a more indepth look
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Values

It is inherent within beliefs for them to be goals, they are an idea you live up to not an idea you always accomplish.

In much the same way rights are also goals. Nobody is born with a full set of functioning rights. What and how many rights an individual has is determined by the society he lives in and in that societies values. A child born in western Europe or Japan will find he/she have many rights. A child born today in Bagdad will have far fewer. The right to life, in Bagdad, is a precious right not always attained.

Jack

I'm skeptical of the idea that tribal groups were respectful of individual rights. Particularly in a kinship setting, rights are often hereditary. Whatever limited individual rights were granted, the authority to grant and revoke them belonged to the chief as the sole recognized source of power.

But even if it was true, it doesn't refute my overall thesis. Tribal groups may indeed give the appearance of being bastions of freedom because the source of power is through kinship lines. It's unnecessary to have overt methods of social control, because they used shame, guilt, dishonor and social ostracization as a means to enforce social control -- the same means that were commonly used to enforce sexual morality before the 60s. And in those days, being rejected from society was often a literal death sentence. At a certain level of complexity, this can be done because humans can only remember around 200 other faces. When you have orders of magnitudes more people -- 2000 or 20,000 -- you have to have co-ordination and ultimately structures that restrict freedom to provide order. When everyone knows everyone else, you don't really need prisons, but as anyone who grew up in a small town will tell you, it sure doesn't feel free.

Secondly, I think its a mistake to associate an increase in liberty with an automatic increase in human welfare and happiness. Right now, people in Iraq and Somalia have very few constraints placed on them by society, so a theocratic dictatorship that took away rights would actually be an improvement for the vast majority of the population. I propose that we have to include at least two major moral modalities: individualistic and communal. Or in the language of psychology, idiocentric and allocentric. Or Lawrence Kolhberg's justice- and rights-oriented moral development and Carol Gilligan's care- and concern-oriented moral theory. I have a theory that Nash's equilibrium theory proves that these two are equivalent, but I won't bore you with that.

Yes, and even the term "manor" came to be in medieval times and meant the "commons" where the serfs resided - a feudal term.  Nevertheless scholars who are interested in these things use those terms to describe pre-roman land holding patterns also for, as they say, lack of a better term.  

Your second point is untrue.  You can look at de Coulanges work online if you wish to look at his authorities.  Just google "de coulanges origin of" and a link to a pdf version of his book will appear.  But it seems to me obvious that the Romans would be critically concerned with the political organizations of the people they were fighting and conquering.   

I personally think that the great debate between scholars over so-called "primitive communism" in the late 19th C. was very important.  In the first place, it addressed the very issue you've raised - the "tabula rasa" idea.  Marx used his interpretation of the so-called primitive to naturalize communism, after all.  Challenges arose - one group argued "yea, but mankind has evolved out of communism, so it's regressive."  But my heros were the ones who argued "wrongo - ancient people enjoyed private property just like we do."  Skepticism is always ok, - you just have to evaluate the points and authorities to decide for yourself if you can support one view over another.  

I can give you contemporary examples.  The popular view here is that American Indians held everything in common.  But I've spent several years working on various projects with the Yurok tribe in Northern California, who are more or less the southern extension of the Indians of the northwest.  These guys are super-materialistc - materialism is even incorporated into their religious lives.  I've never seen such elaborate institutions of private property.  On the Klamath river you own your songs, for example, as property that can be bought and sold, or inherited by your children.  Chinquipin and Tanoak trees out in the forest are owned by individuals, and patches of bear grass out in the woods (an important basket material).  But in their culture property always has social obligations.  You can own - buy, sell or inherit, a fishing hole on the river, but you are obligated to give the lion's share of the fish you catch to others who do not own fishing holes.  In other words, what is valued is the right to fish at a certain spot, not the fish.

Neoboho