To date, the concern about "forum-shopping" has never involved gaining the approval of far-afield well-constituted international bodies, i.e. NATO approval to intervene in Panama, ASEAN approval to intervene in Darfur, etc. It's been the "coalition of the willing" thing, where you just get a grab bag of whoever's up for a war this year. For that reason I think this is all a lot of worrying about something that isn't likely to happen.

Posted at April 23, 2008 2:17 PM in response to Conceding a Bit Less

Don't you understand anything about covert ops? He was getting ready to parasail into the compound where the badguys had imprisoned their slave laborers and open a can of whupass on the mothers before rescuing the detainees in his hydrofoil. And he was lucky his wife was there with him, because when he was captured by the sweatshop owner drug dealer Islamic terrorists, his wife had to ninja infiltrate the vicinity and silently kung fu their asses just in the nick of time.

Man, liberals just have no idea what the real world is like out there.

Posted at April 23, 2008 1:12 PM in response to Today's Must Read

The main problem with the Kosovo intervention is that the Russians and Serbians, despite being completely wrong, are never going to shut up.

"in about 1996 the KLA got impatient and started to assasinate policeman (espececially ethnic Albanians who were cops). By 1999 they had killed about 500. The Serbs responded with counter insurgency tactics." - syvanen

Ridiculous. "Counterinsurgency tactics" which lead to the slaughter of 50 civilians at a time, including women and children, are war crimes. The fact that the US is now engaged in similar "counterinsurgency tactics" in Iraq does not excuse anything. When initial NATO bombing against Serbian military units led Serb forces to quickly ethnically cleanse the entire population of the province, the game was up. To ignore what was going on there, you would have to be an ignoramus who had paid no attention to what had happened in Croatia and Bosnia throughout the 1990s. Syvanen argues "sure, Milosevic's Serbian regime practiced aggressive war and genocide in Croatia and Bosnia, but Kosovo was different." Absurd.

Posted at April 23, 2008 2:17 AM in response to The Kosovo Precedent

Might it be apposite to note that Kosovo, like NATO, is in Europe?

Look. If the US decided to intervene somewhere in Latin America, and couldn't get UNSC endorsement, but it did get the endorsement of the Organization of American States and Brazil, Mexico and Colombia all contributed forces to the intervention, would anyone seriously have a problem with that?

Conversely, if the US wanted to intervene in Latin America and got the approval of NATO but not of any of the Latin American regional players, that would be a major problem.

Posted at April 23, 2008 1:17 AM in response to The Kosovo Precedent

So every Republican who buys tickets to a Bruce Springsteen concert is now a liberal, and hence ineligible to serve on any nonpartisan boards?

I like this solution! All we need to do is get every Hollywood liberal to ensure that 0.01 percent of the take from their next movie, concert or album will go to ActBlue. There won't be a single Republican left to be appointed to any civil service post. Problem solved!

"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out." - I.F. Stone

Posted at December 20, 2007 2:54 AM in response to Von Spakovsky Should Not Be Confirmed

The standard Democratic criticisms, however, don’t address the fact that the “global war on terror” is a failure of conservative ideology, and not simply a massive misappropriation of precious U.S. national security assets. The hot spots where terror organizations thrive around the world – Gaza, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan– are places that have many of the same things conservatives want for America: there’s no government, everyone has a gun, and extremist religion dominates the politics.

This should be tattooed on every Democrat's forehead.

"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out." - I.F. Stone

Posted at December 13, 2007 6:43 PM in response to Pakistan: The Real “Central Front” in Fighting Terrorists?

The domestic policies of private gun ownership and small government do not cause terrorism in the US

Yes they do. What you call "terrorism" overseas is the same thing you call "gang violence" in the US. In East L.A. as in Colombia as in Afghanistan, where the state is small, weak, and lacks popular support, tribal militias move in to take control over the economy and to contest the monopoly on legitimate violence.

When you argue that people need guns to protect themselves against state tyranny, you are arguing for a society that looks less like Mayberry and more like Baghdad. The Sunnis who were killing US troops in Fallujah were using their guns to protect themselves against what they considered the tyranny of an illegitimate state. Americans are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan because conservatives don't know how to engage in state-building, because they do not believe in the state or understand how it works or what it is for.

"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out." - I.F. Stone

Posted at December 13, 2007 7:23 AM in response to Pakistan: The Real “Central Front” in Fighting Terrorists?

I disagree. Sites like Pitchforkmedia and various TV fanboy sites have allowed the kind of informed fandom which used to be the province of the psychotic few to become the stomping grounds of the many. I think this has led television criticism, previously a rather arid and trailer-parkish affair, to develop some of the mad richness of the opera aficionado-ism of yore. In general, tha kidz today are versed and skeptical to a degree unimagined in my already ironic and postmodern youth, and I think they owe a lot of that to the ease of forming critical communities and disseminating recherche insider trivia via internet.

"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out." - I.F. Stone

Posted at November 15, 2007 7:45 AM in response to Hayek's Marvel

Whatever. Bush got a far higher percentage of the vote than Hitler did in 1932. A viciously nationalistic and hypermasculine GOP held both houses of Congress. It's a flaw in our historical instincts that we act as though the entire country turned conservative when only 49% voted for Bush, but it would be equally flawed to ignore that 49% did vote for Bush; and when the country was so prosperous and secure, it still seems bizarre that a party so focused on insecurity and bravado would even come close to a majority.

"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out." - I.F. Stone

Posted at November 10, 2007 10:56 PM in response to The Science of Insecurity

There's a case to be made that European countries have had a less gendered response to terrorism not just because they have more experience with terrorism, but because gender is less of a battlefield in European politics and culture overall. But this also seems to be a post-WWII development. The cult of masculinity in politics was everywhere in Europe during the insecure period of the '20s and '30s, assuming culturally appropriate forms in each country -- Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Churchill, Stalin. More recently, many Eastern European states turned in that direction during a period of similar insecurity: Ratko Mladic, the Limbaugh-esque Milosevic, and in Russia both Yeltsin and Putin following different models of Russian hypermasculinity. Meanwhile Gorbachev's image has been feminized in terms worthy of those applied to Jimmy Carter in the US.

But it is rather striking that the US elected the hypermasculine GOP to a legislative majority during the peaceful '90s, that we elected Bush in a highly gender-bound election while at the peak of our prosperity in 2000, and that we seem to be nearly as obsessed with the masculinity of our leaders as Russians are, despite being the richest country in the world and facing no significant threat of attack or civil war. Which suggests there may be something peculiar going on here, and maybe Faludi has a point.

"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out." - I.F. Stone

Posted at November 10, 2007 3:11 AM in response to The Science of Insecurity