Hmmm, you think we should have troops in Darfur? Now? Even though our military is over-extended?

Darfur's a dangerous place. Everyone we send will not come back. We also risk a proxy war with China.

But, fact is you haven't called for a pullout of Iraq, so we don't have the military capability to do what you want. Even if we did pull out of Iraq, the American people would not be happy to see those troops immediately redeployed to Darfur (Or Rwanda, which you also mention).

For all your talk on morality, I don't see you dealing with two fundamental moral issues: 1) having a foreign policy that reflects the will of the American people (and would thus be less interventionist than you prescribe) and 2) Asking our military for only reasonable sacrifices directly related to our own security (and after the last 7 years, we owe those people).

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

There's hope.

He's not going to go away. He's going to keep pushing this point of view until he can get some one to listen. And then he won't apologize when it leads to all manner of violence and costs in terms of both lives and money.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

Nations bent on empire building may and often do hide behind democracy-for-all when their real quest is for land, cheap labor, natural resources, markets...There are very few peoples in today's world who do not see through the ruse. (Besides, gone are the days when men arriving on horses are seen as gods.)

When the real motives are economic supremacy, it is a bit naive to believe that the natives won't be hell-bent on hanging on to what they have or joining in the fray to perhaps get what their neighbors have. Picture sales' tables in Macy's basement the day after Xmas - hardly democracy in action.

Well, his claim that insecurity causes crime is somewhat unusual...

Here's something funny -Etzioni cites this in his bio:

"In 2000 Etzioni was named among the top 100 American intellectuals as measured by academic citations in Richard Posner's book, "Public Intellectuals, A Decline".

Personally, I wouldn't add that to my resume, would you?

No, not really. His underlying core message is that those Russians/Iraqi's/etc., are simply primitive savages at heart and can't handle the responsibilities of freedom and democracy. They're just too backwards.

Give them a colour TV and they'll just hitch it to an ox and start trying to plow with it.

Thus, they need a firm and loving hand in the form of an appropriate despot who will act as a benevolent enlightened dictator and enforce peace, order and good government for the benefit of all.

Of course, couched in such naked terms, the book wouldn't sell at all. So he sugar coats the sentiment and wraps it in so many layers of cotton batting that its hard to really tell what lays at the core.

What comes out is some vague flatulence about security and insecurity and how it seems that democracy only promotes insecurity as a natural state in people who aren't ready for it, so maybe we shouldn't be so eager to give it to them.

Essentially, it's cuddly fuzzy fascism, although Etzioni has so attenuated his message it's difficult to discern any meaning at all. He's reduced himself to the level of vague generality that goes:

"Hmmm, mothers are great, don't you think so? I'm going to go out on a limb, I don't care how controversial it is, motherhood as a broad and general principle is on the balance of the whole a good thing for the most part."

It's hard to beat a guy up for that. It's hard to come up with anything substantive in response to that, except perhaps 'sure dude, whatever.'

Having reduced his thesis to mush, Etzioni must back up to his significant ideas.

He does this by recasting past and current foreign policy as an unrealistic idealistic quest to spread democracy like pollen around the world.

Of course, most of the actions he refers to have more to do with realpolitik than democracy, but he's perfectly willing to adopt the usual windy speechifying as credible motives.

Thus the Iraq action was not motivated by oil, regional oil/resource issues, need to dominate the persian gulf, or even wmd's. Instead, it was motivated by the desire to bring the gift of Democracy.

Etzioni would have us believe that the Bush administration is nothing but a bunch of pot smoking bare footed hippies, wandering from country to country not taking baths, growing their hair long and twaddling to irritated locals and cynical opportunists about 'peace and lurve.'

All this while at the same time cautioning us not to spend too much time blaming or dissecting current and past policy mistakes.

No, better to ignore it and simply accept Etzioni's glib and facile misrepresentations of foreign policy.

Because here lies his true message. What he's really saying can be found as the opposite mirror image of the misrepresentations.

In short. Etzioni says that the real problem is a failed hippy policy of peace and love. The obvious solution, the working response is a new riot cop policy of chewing gum and kicking ass.

No more 'un-realism' and sentimental affection for democracy for everyone. It turns out that most of them just couldn't handle it, one way or the other. So now, democracy only for the deserving (obedient) and firm guidance (control) for the rest.

Honestly, it's just such a waste of time to deconstruct this empty headed booshwah.

I used to love cryptozoology, fortean phenomena, conspiracy theories, new age whiffery. I found it amazing that people could construct and believe in such immense but entirely unsupported intellectual edifices. Too much exposure to this stuff spoils that harmless pleasure.

People like Etzioni are just tiresome. It's like watching a Dung beetle rolling its ball along.

Destor and Valdron make good attempts to characterize what's being said, and they come out at almost opposite extremes. That's a validation of Valdron's fine characterization of the mushy rhetoric, which is almost as disturbing as the message. I'm not sure I can split the difference on the message, but I see it something like this.

Like Destor, I see him as putting security first. If that seems amoral, it should not seem all that unfamiliar. Basically he's simply reasserting the Realist case against the Neocons. The Realists are scary as they were under Kissinger, and some like one of the many Kagans used it to press for Bush's war in The Atlantic. Some sense of how loony the Neocon case is comes from the war's being initially sold on security grounds. And the looniness allows Etzioni to sound sensible in decrying the idealist aspirations. 

However, he's obviously not quite comfortable with this amorality, especially as it, too, was used to march to the present war, which every so-called expert now has to distance himself from. And as Valdron notes, the Neocon position had a lot of "realist" self-interest in it. To qualify it, then, he switches as Valdron notes to a language of superior Western values after all. The reason we can't always take a swat at people is that they're not capable of appreciating being swatted it.

Now personally I don't agree the war was primarily about oil. They had a cushy supply as long as their best friends were Saudis and they'd put industry connections first in their dealings with Saddam Hussein. They now have less reliable connections. The Neocon dream was more a kind of Realism without the reality, a way not just to pursue our interests, which might involve things like containment, as to control the world, the kind who, like Goldwater, were not content unless they could roll back Soviet power. (And don't even get me started on whether there's a love conservativism with ingegrity they betrayed, so I don't talk about Goldwater and race, say.) So they took a swat against what they saw as the easiest target from which they could branch out to surround Syria or Iran, say. The first Bush, they figured, had just been too cowardly to take that target out. 

So in this sense, Etzioni's mix of Realism and intense vision of national destiny may offer some sops to humity, but it's very close to the Neocons in basic moral framework.  Of course, if I have him wrong, I would not be surprised. We're pinning down the proverbial blob of rhetorical jello.

John 

http://www.haberarts.com/

I could agree that security is first on some hierarchy of needs but I could not more totally reject his concept of security. Security to me is a safe environment - at home, health care - at home, a living wage - at home, financial security in old age - at home and the Minnesota National Guard - at home.

One, called the Palmach, in which I served, was close to the social-democratic labor party, Mapai, to which David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meier belonged. The other, Irgun, was close to the right-wing Heruit, predecessor to Likud. The Palmach's strategy was to destroy the bridges and police stations and other assets that the British used, but often only after they were warned to leave.

I couldn't read much further than this.  I skimmed a bit, and then gave it up altogether.  What Etzioni poses as the solution...what has it really solved in that part of the world as we look at it sixty years later? Do the Israelis feel secure?  Does anyone? 

aMike

I'm amazed that we are all putting so much effort into a subject so undeserving.

I suppose one of us might buy his entire book just to see if there is anything in it which isn't a mushy right wing cliche.

I'd answer, but I digress...

John 

http://www.haberarts.com/

this is actually informative in many ways -- if you don't read it from a biased point of view.

He's been proven wrong in his assertion that you first have to guarantee there will be no regime change before disarmament by North Korea. In a stunning turnaround, they actually have shut down their reactors, and Bush certainly has given them no guarantees of any kind.

The difference here was China. They forced North Korea into a corner, and they had no choice. In the case of Iran, China is waffling and so is Russia, so Iran will be able to escape tough sanctions.

So, the real-world lesson is when you have all 5 permanant UNSC members solidly behind an agenda, they can resolve the toughest problems through diplomacy. If we had the same resolve vis-a-vis Iran, there would be no need to even mention a military threat. Iran would have to submit or face the collapse of their economy.

Dr. Etzioni makes several points with which I agree, in some cases strongly. But life is short, and it is always more interesting to debate areas of disagreement than to utter tedious strings of responsorial “amen”s over the spaces of agreement.

First, I would dispute the notion that the foreign policy Dr. Etzioni is recommending amounts to a “180 degree turn”. I’m not sure exactly why he says that. He seems to suggest that an emphasis on security first, as opposed to democracy promotion first, would amount to a radical shift in US foreign policy. There are at least are two problems with looking at matters this way.

First, while there are certainly tensions between promoting democracy and promoting security, and while there are clearly many occasions in which the promotion of one could be destructive of the other, the two are hardly polar opposites, lying 180 degrees apart. Surely not even communitarians, with their heightened appreciation for social order and respect for the sources of moral authority and tradition, endorse such a radically antidemocratic philosophy, and recognize that there are many situations in which democracy and security are mutually supportive. So choosing to emphasize security would not require turning the ship of state 180 degrees away from the goals of democracy, especially when we understand “democracy” to include all of the forms of participation in self-government.

But the other problem with this formulation is what it seems to presume about the actual past practice of US foreign policy. Dr. Etzioni says:

And instead of taking us into nations such as Grenada, Panama, or Haiti, the "Security First" approach to foreign policy would have taken us into Rwanda and Darfur--where millions of lives were and still are threatened.

This gives far too much credit to the influence of the propagandists for democracy promotion on US foreign policy practice, whether those propagandists have been sincere or cynical. One would have to be extremely naïve to believe that the primary motivation for US interventions in Grenada, Haiti and Panama was the promotion of democracy. These interventions are part of a long history of US assertiveness in the Western Hemisphere that has been only tangentially or adventitiously connected with democracy promotion. Just as often, these interventions have been connected with security concerns, though not so much security in the grand systematic sense, as with the security of US commercial and financial interests, the security of US political control over Latin American satellites and client regimes, the security of US military basing rights privileges, the security of the US homeland and “way of life” in the face of perceived threats in the form of the drug trade, revolutionary agitation, potentially aggressive foreign powers, etc. In short, these interventions are generally about control, and are not substantially different in motivation from the interventions throughout history of other large powers, democratic or not, in their neighbors’ affairs.

Dr. Etzioni speaks at the end of his post about fostering moral culture. But for one country to foster moral culture inside a very different one is just as challenging as promoting democracy – actually much more challenging, since democracy partly involves legal institutions and formal social practices that can be established by deliberate decision-making. Moral culture is based on the collective internal dispositions of millions of people, dispositions which are the fruit of centuries of historical evolution and development, and contingent formational experiences. It’s really a fool’s errand to attempt to effect deep cultural changes in another society.

What we can do more easily is work with the governments of other countries on clearly identifiable common challenges like preventing war and minimizing the chances of violent conflict; managing the global energy economy; attending to global public health and basic human economic needs, and protecting the environment. We’ll have to leave it to the people of those countries however, to work out their own cultural future and moral outlook.

Phelicity's point is well taken. Amitai Etzioni has not really presented much here that is substantial in and of itself but he has spoken of "democratization" as if had actually been an ideal we were striving towards when we invaded Iraq.

It is a telling fact that among our first great acts of "democratization" in the country was Paul Bremmer's imposition of Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 3, described here in a piece in the Washington Post:

The flat tax, long a dream of economic conservatives, is finally getting its day -- not in the United States, but in Iraq.

It took L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Baghdad, no more than a stroke of the pen Sept. 15 to accomplish what eluded the likes of publisher Steve Forbes, Reps. Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.) and Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.), and Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.) over the course of a decade and two presidential campaigns.

The flat-tax has not seemed definitively democratic to the overwhelming majorities of Americans who refused to vote for presidential candidates who campaigned upon it. Grover Norquist admitted as much in his comments from the same Washington Post piece:

"It's extremely good news," said Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform and a Bush administration ally. Bremer's vaguely worded edict leaves open the possibility that Iraqis could face different levels of taxation below 15 percent, but "they told me it's a flat rate and it appears as though it's a flat rate," Norquist said. The tax fighter added: "It might be a hint to the rest of us."

I can't believe that I was the only one wondering, at the time, just which population Order Number 3 was intended to "democratize".

In a still more bizarre twist, it would seem that the order was one of the few aspects of the peace that the Bush Administration successfully managed to plan ahead for:

John B. Taylor, undersecretary of the Treasury for international affairs, said the Iraq flat tax was discussed before the war as preliminary planning was done with the help of some Iraqi exiles.

But then, to the victor go the spoils and the Republican right had won...

Among our last acts of democratization, it would seem, we intend to have oil sharing legislation, from the Iraqi parliament, which will leave US interests in control of 50% of the country's oil resources.

As the Bush Administration has failed more and more miserably to gain greater control over mideast oil, via spoils and cowed regional governments, or the installation of favorable regional governments, and the price of oil has risen to $74+ per barrell, it has tried to redirect attention to policy aims that began as tertiary considerations at best. "Democratization" never was a consideration in anything but the Ayn Rand-ian sense that is the foundation of the Neocon version of democracy.

Even now, the struggle to include the Sunnis in the Iraqi government is no more democratic than any desperate attempt to avoid the collapse of an entire region due to acts one has unwisely committed in the name of "national security." A collapse of the region, encouraged by an Iran greatly empowered by our own greed and incompetence, could easily arrive at $100+ per barrell oil. At the very least, the administration is desperate that this eventuality should be ascribed to the Democratic Party. Thus the President's unwaivering determination.

Etzioni could have written a smashing book about this dynamic but appears to have chosen to do otherwise. There's too little info in his post to be sure. His acceptance of the "democratization" myth, however, does not bode well. It's difficult to see how he can have untangled himself enough from it, in his book, to have presented a vital line of reasoning.

Fair enough, but I could see neocons using Etzioni's language and reasoning instead of their own and coming to the same ends. One of the problems is he seems to buy the right's rhetoric that they're "spreading democracy." But what if that's not the right's strategy at all and is just language used to tart up what would otherwise be unpopular? The right could just as easily claim they're trying to spread "security" around the world. Though, they'd look silly saying that, given how bad they are at it.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

Really smart observation.

I support NPT too.

But the technology exists. And, it's a natural technology, based on the manipulation of a fundamental particle. It can't be stopped or even contained. At best, it can be guided.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

Care for some spice coffee, or does your garden need Worm droppings?

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

I've never understood why NPT in addition to our current foreign policy, wouldn't actually foster proliferation. It really is meant to be an agreement that says "we'll always be more powerful than you" and since it was made up at a time when we and Russia and a few others had the power, people had to accept. But that's exactly the kind of agreement that is made to be broken.

Especially when we know North Korea is developing and do very little about it but think Iraq might be and we invade the place. One lesson other leaders have probably learned is that to be called out for developing nuclear weapons is a dangerous thing but that to actually have them is a deterrent.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

Might be interesting to couple proven PAL and other confidence measures with Security Council membership. Since the Council is pretty much the publicly nuclear crowd, (which makes sense since the members can do the most damage), new nuclear powers should be brought in.

Oh yeah, baby, baby!!

Bomb me, bomb me hard!!

You know how I like it!!
Beat me, whip me, f*ck me!!

Oh, oh, yeah!! War porn!!

Is it good for you too?

Hermann Kahn once said to a military planning group: "Gentlemen, you do not have a war plan. You have a wargasm."

That was, perhaps, a dose of reality that started some of the movement to the Plan that Formerly Was SIOP.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

Yes, I used the phrase "PAL and other confidence measures", meaning all C3 and Hotline systems.

In any case, both the NPT and the makeup of Security Council are asking for irrelevance, not that I buy most of Condi's facile assertions. The way to upgrade them is not to walk away.

This may be a good blog or Discussion Table subject. I haven't ever seen a discussion linking the NPT and the UNSC, much less PAL technology.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

Foreign-policy theories always run into reality. Here's more reality, thanks to Boston University geologists. A huge underground lake has been found in Darfur. Things will be very different soon.

HCB has pointed out the head geologist, Farouk El-Baz, was also head for NASA, and every prediction for the Moon was correct.

I couldn't disagree more. Most (if not all) communist countries were kleptocracies. Some of them got rid of that after the fall of communism better than others.

Russia was an extremely corrupt country in tsarist times, it was corrupt under communists and it's corrupt now. Nothing new there.

But communist system of government did promote corruption everywhere. The system was thoroughly undemocratic and unelected officials wielded tremendous power with zero oversight. There is no better recipe for corruption.

It is true that with no tabloid press and no celebrity-obsessed media, the wealth and power of communist upper class was not very visible, and perhaps not so openly flaunted. That doesn't mean it wasn't there.

Quite interesting, and potentially plausible. But then again, almost anything is plausible in the labyrinthine world of 'spooks R us' which relies on deception, misinformation, third party agencies and black flag operations.

However, assuming that this is true or partially true, some thoughts.

First, the Saudi's have to be recognized as separate actors from the United States. So is it the Saudi's who were funding the freelancers alone, and if so, what does their change of pace mean? Are they shifting into the American orbit, or are they investing in different clients?

Were the Saudi's funding freelancers with the approval or at the urging of the US? If so, then does this mean that the US is shifting its policy? Or are the Saudi's breaking from American policy.

If the Americans were funding freelancers, how long were they doing so? Is this a major shift of policy, or proof of erratic and uncoordinated policy?

Is this policy sensible? Mind you, getting in bed with a radical salafist group is not sensible. Ditching such a group is sensible. But is it a viable strategy to build the Lebanese Army as the counterweight to Hezbollah? Or as the challenge to Hezbollah? Can the Lebanese Army do to Hezbollah what Israel has failed at in two wars and a long bloody occupation? Or will a revitalized Lebanese Army simply incorporate Hezbollah and pose a radical threat to Israel? How likely is it that the Lebanese Army, no matter how its constituted will be either (a) effective, and (b) a tool of American/Israeli/Saudi interests.

With respect to Gaza it is hard to see Hamas victory as anything but a strategic disaster for Israel and America, and one which materially undermines the political process in the West Bank.

With respect to Iraq, it's Baghdadi and the ISI are self evidently a sideshow.

So the picture of 'Spooks R Us' is once again blundering and incompetence.

A little information goes a long way.

"With respect to Gaza it is hard to see Hamas victory as anything but a strategic disaster for Israel and America, and one which materially undermines the political process in the West Bank."

"It's hard to see..." anything if you don't pay attention.

Recently someone on this site wrote "I'm still trying to learn about Iran" and then proceeded to state an opinion. I responded that it really wasn't that hard to learn about Iran and gave a list of things to read or look up. He responded "yeah, I just already have a stack of books to read and I don't even have the time to read them right now. Basically, reading and posting here is a stress reliever for me."

How can anyone respond to that?

Hamas’s number 2, Abu Marzook, writes an Op Ed in the LA Times

The sticking point of “recognition” has been used as a litmus test to judge Palestinians. Yet as I have said before, a state may have a right to exist, but not absolutely at the expense of other states, or more important, at the expense of millions of human individuals and their rights to justice. Why should anyone concede Israel’s “right” to exist, when it has never even acknowledged the foundational crimes of murder and ethnic cleansing by means of which Israel took our towns and villages, our farms and orchards, and made us a nation of refugees?
Why should any Palestinian “recognize” the monstrous crime carried out by Israel’s founders and continued by its deformed modern apartheid state, while he or she lives 10 to a room in a cinderblock, tin-roof United Nations hut? These are not abstract questions, and it is not rejectionist simply because we have refused to abandon the victims of 1948 and their descendants.
… Israel, which has never formally adopted a constitution of its own but rather operates through the slow accretion of Basic Laws, declares itself explicitly to be a state for the Jews, conferring privileged status based on faith in a land where millions of occupants are Arabs, Muslims and Christians.

Well, I just feel it's obvious that Donald Rumsfeld, Frank Gaffney, battlefield nukes, nukes in space, etc. are not helpful when it comes to convincing other countries of the importance of nonproliferation.

Tom

I think the common worry here is that simply walking away from existing treaties is the wrong way to achieve any improvement. A new concept or policy that can do the job of regularizing at least some nuclear activities beats the alternative of no rules.

When Condi says a treaty is obsolete, it means we're glad to be free of it, instead of meaning the treaty needs improving. I prefer mend it, don't end it.