TheAgitator.com
Foreign Policy Nuggets
Sunday, April 6th, 2003I had the pleasure of hearing Cato’s Ted Galen Carpenter lecture on U.S. foreign policy last week. Carpenter’s position on Iraq is similar to what you’ve read here — we shouldn’t have gone in because Iraq’s not a serious threat; but now that we have, we need to win, decisively, then get the hell out.
A few other interesting tidbits from my notes on his lecture:
1) The United States has intervened militarily overseas 9 times in the last 13 years — a rate almost unprecedented in U.S. history. And that’s since the end of the Cold War. Are we really to believe that the world’s only superpower was seriously threatened nine times in the thirteen years since our only serious rival imploded?
You’re nuts if you don’t think such frequent applications of force don’t have very serious consequences on how we’re perceived throughout the world.
2) Remember the “genocide” taking place in Kosovo that compelled Bill Clinton to unlawfully take military action without the approval of Congress? That genocide amounted to a grand total of 2,100 dead, including military. There’s already that many dead in Iraq (and no, I’m not likening the U.S. to Milosevic — I’m merely pointing out the absurdity of Clinton’s justification for war in Kosovo).
3) In the months after 9/11, I had found the “they hate us because we’re free and prosperous and capitalist” argument fairly convincing.
I find it less and less convincing these days. Nearly every journalist in Baghdad I’ve heard has said that Iraqis harbor no ill will toward individual Americans, or toward Americans in general — but only toward American foreign policy (particularly the sanctions that continue to starve them). Julian makes a similar point this weekend. Next time you see video of Palestinians protesting in the West Bank, look at the clothes they’re wearing. You’ll see all matter of western labels. You’ll see Michael Jordan jerseys. You’ll see Tommy tees.
It isn’t our freedom they hate. It isn’t our culture or our wealth or our materialism. They hate what they perceive to be our hubris. It’s our omnipresent military. It’s that each time missiles our bullets are flying at Arabs — whether in Iraq, the West Bank or in Gaza — they’re under the impression that U.S. interests are behind the gun or plane that fired them.
Think about this: the 9/11 hijackers lived in the U.S. for months — even years — before carrying out their attacks. They absorbed themselves into U.S. culture. They went to strip clubs. They gambled. Seems clear to me that they were motivated by something well beyond our amoral infidelities.
4) An interesting point Carpenter made: NATO was organized and instituted for two reasons: 1) to forge a bond among Western European countries to prevent infighting, and, 2) to present a united Western front against the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Western Europe hasn’t been in danger of infighting for decades. In fact, it’s basically one big country, now. And the Cold War has been over for nearly 15 years.
And yet in response to the accomplishment of the two reasons for its existence, NATO has only grown more ambitious. Where it should have faded into oblivion (or, as Mike Tyson once said, “faded into Bolivia), NATO has expanded, and is looking to expand more.
Proof that multi-government organizations — just like government organizations — never die. They constantly look for new reasons to justify their existence.
5) During the Q&A, I asked Carpenter about the humanitarian argument — particularly the WWII argument I often get from my readers — if you don’t think we should stop Saddam from killing his people, do you think we should have intervened to stop the holocaust if Japan hadn’t invaded Pearl Harbor?
Carpenter’s answer was no. And to explain, he quoted Gene Healy: “In the 20th century genocide Olympics, Stalin got the gold and Mao the silver. Hitler only got the bronze.”
Carpenter’s point — horrible things happen all over the world. Stalin and Mao each killed more people than Hitler did. But we never sent in our military to prevent the atrocity committed by either dictator.
Why? Because neither Stalin nor Mao at the time presented a direct threat to our own safety and security.
It’s impractical, ill-advised, and futile for us to attempt to use force to prevent brutality the world over, so it’s impractical, ill-advised and futile for us to pick and choose one example worthy of our intervention over another.
And, by the way, belatedly stopping the holocaust was only an added benefit of our victory in Europe. It was never a high-priority motivator in our military strategy — under either Roosevelt or Truman.
6) A number of you have criticized my criticism of the decade-old sanctions against Iraq — pointing out to me that it is Saddam Hussein, not the U.S., that has starved his people. Well, of course.
But didn’t we have a pretty good idea before imposing those sanctions that Saddam and his military and his government would continue to live lavishly after they were imposed? Did we really think that Saddam would realize that there’s soon to be a shortage of food and medicine, and would therefore ration what’s left out equitably?
Come on. Sanctions have never, ever, ever worked. Every time we’ve imposed them, the bad guys continue to live the good life, and the people we’re trying to protect starve.
Of course Saddam is evil and horrendous and brutal. And of course the blood of every Iraqi who starved or died of treatable illness due to sanctions is on his hands.
But it doesn’t make our hands clean. If you undertake a plan of action that every indicator tells you will cause innocent people to suffer, you aren’t free from blame from their suffering simply because you aren’t the dictator who hoarded what food was left.
Much as I think this war was a bad idea, I think the sanctions we’ve imposed against Iraq were far, far worse. The war at least will eventually get food and water and medicine to the innocents who need them.
I once heard a European commentator say of NATO: “Its purpose is to keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.”
With the current disengagement of the US from European diplomacy, it looks as though NATO is 0 for 3. Why not be done with it?
–G
Come on. Sanctions have never, ever, ever worked.
There is an argument to be made that sanctions did work against South Africa. I think that that was the example that the policy establishment had in mind when they started the Iraq sanctions.
Sanctions have never worked against a third-world country. But although it is easy to forget today, in 1991, Iraq wasn’t (or at least, wasn’t obviously) a third-world country. Policymakers were not unreasonable to engage in a bit of wish-fulfillment reasoning and expect them to work.
–G
Every African nation around S.A. traded with them; the sanctions were mostly symbolic acts by the U.K. and U.S. for internal political posturing. What brought that despotism down was the massive civil unrest which would have occured with or without sanctions. And it is safe to say Iraq was quite third world in 1990. They may have had oil revenues but those were sent mostly to Saddam and his associates. The average Iraqi lived in third world conditions then and more so now.
And isn’t it odd how everyone in the U.S. assumes that we would have eventually stopped the Holocaust at some point, even asserting a moral duty on us to do so? Even people who would be absolutely apoplectic at the thought of a USSR or Red China invasion believe this. Odd…
I don’t believe that sanctions were so ineffective for SA. For one, the trade with countries around SA was actually small compared to the amount of trade that happened after sanctions were lifted. Secondly it was and is still small relative to the amount of trade that both occurs and occurred between SA and First World Nations like the US and UK.
The sanctions also encouraged the exact opposite of a free market scenario – money would not flow in and could not leave leading to sub-par investment returns as cartels and monopolies came to dominate. The economy also became uncompetitive as trade barriers were slapped on imports to stop a current account deficit. Foreign disinvestment also hampered matters.
Inflation increased to over 20% per annum and the government defict soared towards double digits as Apartheid neared its end. The foreign exchange reserves also nearly hemorrhaged.
Since then, a lot of new ideas and development has flowed into the country. Travel is easier, the economic growth rate is faster and no below the population growth rate, trade is far higher than it was previously on all fronts, economic conditions across the board are better, there is greater access to technology that couldn’t be done without now and was denied previously and so on.
So in short sanctions effects on SA showed a lot of the symptoms of Soviet Russia’s economic collapse. Unrest did contribute to SA’s change, but many also understate what sanctions actually accomplished. Far right wingers still openly curse America for what it did to Apartheid.
Yes, but S.A. did have many “blockade runners” around them (Malawi, Zaire) willing to ship them goods from elsewhere. And some of the increased trade can be explained by the alleviation of what was a de facto civil war. And S.A., often pilloried as a “right-wing” regime, had followed a high-tax, corporatist-favoratist meta-policy for a long time before sanctions, leading to predictably dismal performance. In many ways S.A. was like your typical socialist third world state in which one ethnic group is privileged over the others.
And I am not a defender of old S.A. at all, but I still think sanctions were very, very wrong. After all, why not go after fascist Turkey which follows its own apartheid policy against Muslim Kurds and Christian Suryani (my ancestory) or virtually any other third world sh-thole for that matter?
Relax, it’s no problem. I don’t regard you as being a defender of the old SA. I’m merely focussing on the effects of sanctions and how they did hit their target in my reference to far right wingers cursing the US.
Yes, there was social instability but not so much as to deny the ability of industrial and commercial areas to trade with the outside world, which sanctions did. The civil unrest did cause many entrepeneurs to leave the country, but sanctions also saw companies like IBM, Mobil and Ford disinvest while no investment flowed in.
There were those countries that helped to break sanctions, but at most that was with respect to direct trade itself and even then they didn’t have the capacity to alter the economic constraints much besides the government trying to illegally ship in military technology through these constrained channels. Malawi and those nations partaking were and still are economic midgets compared to SA itself.
There were indeed also bad economic policies prior to sanctions, but the country ironically had experienced a 7% real growth rate just before PW Botha made his ‘Rubicon’ speech that saw the sanctions eventually enacted with all their effects. Also, sanctions denied the government the ability to finance its very overbearing and militaristic nature whoch would have been by borrowing foreign funds. Instead foreign creditors demanded their money back at high interest rates and no foreign loans could be obtained – hence the goverment began printing money resulting in that 20%+ inflation rate and soaring government deficit I mentioned. A further indicator was that there was also an unusual tax introduced known as a ‘loan levy’ where everyone was forced to lend the government money.
And yes, there is plenty of other global nonsense/carnage which the UN or other world organisations overlook (I’m no lover of the UN as well), but I don’t think that grants a nation committing such violations to cry foul on the basis of inconsistency compared to others, when it is still guilty of evil.