TheAgitator.com
More on Cut and Run
Saturday, November 8th, 2003Jim Henley pays my post “The Case for Cutting and Running” the wonderful compliment of a long, sympathetic, yet trenchant critique. Those interested should read the whole thing.
Jim’s a minarchist, and I’m an anarchist most days, and that becomes clear pretty quickly when he rips into my contention that individuals owe individuals, but nations don’t owe nations. He argues that, at the very least, nations have obligations to individuals, both within and outside their borders.
In substance, I actually agree with this. My cranky anarchist streak often makes me insist on framing such obligations as obligations the individuals who run nations have to those affected by their actions. But this is, mostly, a potato-potahto issue.
And it seems Jim and I would agree, too, that Primum non nocere is king among those obligations. I don’t buy the anti-sovereigntist moral arguments for preemptive war because I think the US has a strong obligation not to bomb foreigners for any reason save defense or retaliation against actual attack or truly imminent threat thereof.
As to whether restitution for that bombing, in the form of rebuilding, is also an obligation: well, I said I was an anarchist most days. If A does B a great wrong, I don’t think A can really make it better by stealing from C (or C_1 through C_280,000,000) to pay restitution. Still less can A make it better by taking control of B’s life in order to teach B, with patient parental care, how to live in the modern, Western, sorta-liberal-sorta-democratic way that Everyone Knows is Superior. If we really feel the need to spend ten billion stolen dollars on Iraq, can we at least agree it’d be better to give it to the Red Cross (or to whomever will stay now that they’ve pulled out…) than to a mission civilisatrice?
Jim then offers very valid criticism of the “Afghanistan model” I suggest in point 2. I have only a very poor sense of just how much humiliation our activities in Afghanistan are causing among the locals vs. how much disruption of terrorist activity they’re accomplishing. I don’t know if anyone has a better sense of that, or any sense at all of how that tradeoff would be different in Iraq.
Then, too, saying I “favor” the Afghan option is perhaps too strong: I think it would be less bad than the current strategy. An outright pullout might be even better. In fact, I really, really want to believe it would. But “you’re just going to leave al-Qaeda the run of the place???” is a hard argument to answer, and an Afghan-type force would answer it and perhaps provide a good intermediate step along the road to a total exit.
I don’t think it’s your position, as Henley seems to suggest, that the U.S. should stay until they catch Saddam.
Or is it?
Um, yeah, actually, I guess it is. Note, however, that by “stay” I don’t mean “stay in its current nation-building mode”. I think that if catching Saddam and pursuing al-Qaeda, not nation-building or “regional stabilization”, were the primary aims of the force presence in Iraq, a much smaller presence would be needed.
But I’m loath to see repeated the mistake of 1991, when the US incited people to rise up against Saddam with the implicit promise of help, and then left them to his tender mercies. On the other hand, as I keep repeating, all options suck– make that, all options *really* suck– and it may be that even catching Saddam turns out to be a hopeless enterprise; but I’ve not *yet* given up hope on that one.
So: color me conflicted.
“Um, yeah, actually, I guess it is.”
But how is that consistent with what you said in your first point? “In particular, those of us who opposed the war from the beginning don’t owe it to anyone to be taxed to pay for the consequences of others’ folly.”
How can you advocate the U.S. staying in any capacity when you know folks who don’t want that will get stuck with the bill?
I too have a problem with your ‘A does B great harm’ example. You say:
“If A does B a great wrong, I don’t think A can really make it better by stealing from C (or C_1 through C_280,000,000) to pay restitution.”
The problem here is that there is no C. By separating yourself, C, from A, which I’m assuming is the U.S. government, you are either saying that the government is a ruling class to which you do not belong, you are not a citizen of C, or you are not responsible as a citizen of C for what you consider to be C’s transgressions and by using your tax money to deal with those alleged transgressions C is effectively stealing from you.
Perhaps you would prefer every citizen give verbal consent to such actions in the future. Of course, under your statement, one objection out of 280,000,000 should halt any and all actions because otherwise it would be theft.
Great idea.
John: For one thing, I think that even though there was no national-defense interest in deposing Saddam before the war, there is one in catching him now; the beast is now so irrevocably wounded that it’s got to be killed.
And, though I would love defense to be turned over to private providers like everything else– I’d much prefer a private mercenary catch-Saddam force to the tax-funded US one, and would contribute to the upkeep of the former– defense is by far the hardest to solve of all private-provision problems and it will not be solved anytime soon.
That is, we’re stuck with some theft for now and we’d best at least limit it to security and not altruism.
All this goes to demonstrate how difficult it is to reconcile an anarchist ideal with a practical program for the statist world that we have and will continue to have for our lifetimes. I can neither accept a citizen’s obligation to the state as a positive good– as Mark S. would apparently have me do– nor advocate immediate anarchy and damn the consequences– as John would apparently have. It is not only in the Iraqi situation that all options suck…
You’re still thinking like a collectivist, thinking you need to advocate a collective solution.
Mark,
“Perhaps you would prefer every citizen give verbal consent to such actions in the future. Of course, under your statement, one objection out of 280,000,000 should halt any and all actions because otherwise it would be theft.”
No, I’d prefer that every party to a supposed contract consented to it. You don’t need 280 million, you just don’t steal from those not party to your contract.