The Legacies of Our Interventions
Since the first log I threw onto this fire failed to catch, let me try pouring on some gasoline.
One of my biggest quibbles is, oddly enough, with Matt's take on Gulf War 1. Matt's version of liberal internationalism holds that that war "established a new, long-dreamed-of norm--the principle that aggressive war, long notionally banned by various treaties, would actually be repulsed by concerted international action." He also argues that "the Democrats' political problem with the Gulf War wasn't that they'd opposed it, but that they wrongly opposed it." I'm not sure either of those points is right.
Substantively, the first Gulf War has a much darker legacy than Matt makes it out to have. Matt prefers to draw bold, bright lines between that intervention, Bush père's decision not to go to Baghdad, the ensuing sanctions regime and no-fly zones, the Iraq Liberation Act, and the second invasion in 2003. Seen on a timeline, though, it's easy to see how the first war provided the opening for the second. As my Cato Institute colleague Christopher Layne pointed out at the time
Bush was trapped by his own moralistic new-world-order rhetoric, and, pressured from both political flanks, the Administration wobbled into making an open-ended commitment to the Kurds. As a recent Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff report said, "Unless the United States is prepared to abandon the Iraqi people, it will be involved in the Iraqi quagmire for a long time to come."
The "moralistic new-world-order" stuff sounds an awful lot like "liberal internationalism" to me. We (not an amorphous United Nations) were left holding the bag, policing no-fly zones and trying desperately to herd other nations into compliance with the shaky sanctions regime that was starving thousands of Iraqis. For a variety of reasons, this undesirable situation led Bill Clinton to sign off on the Iraq Liberation Act, which made it all the easier for the neoconservatives later to protest that they weren't some kind of wild-eyed fanatics--after all, regime change was Bill Clinton's Iraq policy.
Matt makes the world-historic sounding claim that the war established a binding norm that the international community would stop cross-border aggression, but he neglects to defend the actual policy. Were the sanctions a good idea? When confronted with the prospect that the sanctions had killed 500,000 children (in fairness, a claim that was probably mistaken), the Democratic Secretary of State at the time famously replied "we think the price is worth it." At the point when we've become so suffused with certainty about our own moral rectitude that we don't stop to question whether half a million dead kids is a price too high to pay, I'm off the bandwagon, sorry. If we're going to make the claim that a given U.S. foreign policy goal would be worth killing half a million children, it had better be for something more worthwhile than "containing Saddam Hussein."
Secondly, Matt argues that Dem politicians who opposed Gulf War 1 wound up "shut out of national politics," pointing out that Demo-hawks Clinton, Gore, and Lieberman all found themselves at the top of the heap. I don't know who he's referring to as having been "shut out," but if they were shut out, it wasn't voters who were demanding they be.
Bill Clinton didn't win the presidency because he was an Iraq hawk. In fact, as Kathleen Frankovic has pointed out "as early as three days after the war ended, foreign affairs had faded from the public's mind and was replaced again by economic issues." In the presidential election, foreign policy ranked behind health care, the deficit, abortion, education, the economy, taxes, and family values, with only the environment less important to voters. As for the 1992 congressional elections, Republicans had been hoping for big gains in the House, but instead they gained only 10 seats. With foreign policy off the minds of those voting for the presidency, it's hard to believe these seats were lost on the basis of insufficient support for war. If antiwar Democrats were marginalized, it wasn't at the ballot box--it was the Democratic leadership that did it to them, to their discredit.
1990 Demo-hawks? Antiwar Democrats?
Can we please get rid of this stale 1960s vocabulary.
The "antiwar Democrats" of 1990 weren't antiwar; they were anti-Iraq war. They thought we'd face a Paschendale in the desert and a Vietnam-type slog, thereafter. Tactically, they proved to be wrong -- and thus, unreliable (unserious in today's parlance) and subject to being shutout of the post-war debate, such as it was.
Saddam's invasion of Kuwait presented oil importing nations with a practical challenge to business-as-usual and was, as a challenge or crisis always is, sui generis. The response of those affected nations to that historical situation tells us nothing about how they 1) would or 2) should respond to a different situation.
April 22, 2008 2:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
Pennsylvania live blog has started at
http://darkcomedyhour.com/dcmacdaddy/
April 22, 2008 2:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
There is enough discredit to go around all sides of American politics. However, I think it's a UN resolution (7 and/or 51) that prohibits border intrusions (not that we don't do it all the time in all different ways), so Saddam should have asked the Security Council whether they would care, rather than a US ambassador, or whoever that woman was that he claimed said not to worry when he threw her a trial balloon.
Then, since the border transgression was rectified, the mission as defined by international law was completed. Regime change is not part of international law, except possibly for humanitarian reasons. I would say that most wars that we take part in are begun for propaganda reasons, in other words to fix a domestic political problem for whoever happens to be in power. But we are not alone in this... my favorite is the nephew of Napolean, Louis Napolean who figured he'd divert the country from economic problems by invading Germany. Much to his surprise, in about 3 weeks he had to escape to England since the German duchy's had other ideas. That particular war, the Franco Prussian War of 1870, is pretty directly responsible for both world wars, at least in my opinion.
So I guess my point is that the world might be a more peaceful place if countries obeyed international law and solved their economic problems some other way.
April 22, 2008 2:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
And once again we get somebody on our side, in this case Yglesias, arguing that people who were against Gulf War I were wrong. They weren't. Saddam had been our proxy up until that point. We went in to protect the Saudis, who Saddam wouldn't have attacked anyway. We killed a bunch of innocent people and spread spent uranium all over the place so that the thugs who ran Kuwait could retake their rightful places as dictators. How was the first Gulf War a good thing?
April 22, 2008 3:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
We (not an amorphous United Nations) were left holding the bag, policing no-fly zones and trying desperately to herd other nations into compliance with the shaky sanctions regime that was starving thousands of Iraqis.
Whoa, Whoa. This assumes that the policy of enforcing the international norm against wars of aggression automatically required the further policy of sanctions aimed at regime change. But it didn't. The US got greedy and spiteful, and let the international legal matter turn into a personal battle of wills. We should never have encouraged the Shia and Kurds to revolt, and should never have gone down the long regime change path from which there was no dignified escape.
However, we do continue to have a problem in that we have still not figured out how to punish rogue leaders for their misdeeds without punishing whole countries full of innocent people. I know some progress has been made on this, but it is a tough problem.
April 22, 2008 3:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
It could be argued that the transmogrification of Saddam into nothing more than a leader of an inconsequential third-world country was more the result of the fall of the Berlin Wall and of the Soviet Union and thereupon, Russia's withdrawal of its former support of his regime than it was of any U.S. IR practices of the 1990s.
April 22, 2008 3:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes. You made one of the points I was going to make in response to Justin.
There is another point on which I differ with Justin's reasoning and conclusion--when he wrote that "Bill Clinton didn't win the presidency because he was an Iraq hawk."
I don't know who was making that argument.
But the fact that Bill Clinton had not opposed Gulf War I arguably gave him the chance to obtain a hearing on issues other than national security.
Had he opposed Gulf War I, the Bush campaign would have aggressively sought to make the case that having Bill Clinton as CIC would leave our country unsafe, etc., etc., just a tailored version of the argument they make every presidential election of late. They would have tried to turn the 1992 election into a national security election. It is conceivable to me they might have succeeded in doing that. And had they been able to do so, it is also quite conceivable to me that Bush pere might have been re-elected, notwithstanding everything he had going against him in 1992, including himself.
April 25, 2008 12:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
Justin, why didn't you bother filling in your TPM Profile? Who are you? How old are you? Were you picked on in high school? You are out of high school, right?
Only kidding.
Because you come across as one of those twerps we all suffered through in graduate school seminars, concentrating too hard on the minutia and sounding important for the rest of us to get a good education. Loosen up, bro. This is a pretty garrulous bunch here. There's a lot of kidding and joking -- TONS of brilliant zingers -- and we all get to either think (and type) quickly, or we stay on the sidelines and enjoy the show; learn a little.
Are you open to learning?
In your first post you described yourself as "As an unreconstructed realist, libertarian, and lifelong pessimist," and that you "feel a bit like the proverbial cat among the pigeons."
When I see someone who looks less than half my age use the term "lifelong pessimist," I just want to cry. Ease up. Take off your jacket and tie. Smile. De-construct your realism, and actually enjoy the cat experience.
I'd recommend rolling in a barrel with genghis.
Maybe you'll get more replies to your posts.
(We won't tell anybody at the Cato Institute that you're playing hooky from drowning government in the bathtub! Honest.)
April 23, 2008 1:50 AM | Reply | Permalink
Hello, Justin "proverbial cat among the pigeons" Logan, are you still out there? Have you caught the avian flu?
You've joined our lively community, made two self-important posts, then disappeared.
There are so many pigeons in here! Mmmmmm... (Oh, none at your posts, but if you go to the TPM Cafe where the readers posts are, you'll find roast squab on every plate. Dig in!)
April 23, 2008 2:34 PM | Reply | Permalink