I've been meaning to get around to a discussion about the whole idea of liberal interventionism. It's a subject that is getting some very interesting treatment at TPM Cafe's America Abroad table. The main question is why were the liberal interventionists so wrong? Why did they think that it was a good idea to support this war in Iraq? Why were they so wooden in their thinking as to see it as the moral equivalence of what Clinton and NATO did in the Balkans.
Is the task of getting rid of Saddam the equivalent of getting rid of of Milosevic? To think so reveals the kind of obtuseness I have regularly complained about as being typical of a certain liberal, rationalist mindset. It's as if the entire matter were a question of principle and not of practical consequences. And it's naive if it accepts the abstract justification for the war as if it were the real motive for the Bush administration's going in. And blind as if it didn't matter that neocon ideologues were engineering this war rather than the more sane, consensus-oriented Democrats. As one of the TPM bloggers pointed out, just think if Bush/Cheney were in office during the Cuban missile crisis.
But let Dan K say it better than I can:
When I look at the dynamics that are driving the course of events in the Middle East region, I can't avoid the feeling that we are sleepwalking toward the abyss, and can't seem to wake up. We occupy ourselves instead with arguments of distinctly secondary importance. A fire is raging that is threatening to burn the world down. Yet instead of arguing constructively about how to put the fire out, people are consumed instead with arguments about (a) whether it is ever a good idea to light fires and (b) who told the lies that tricked some of us into lighting this one.
The liberal Iraq-hawks, I fear, just don't get it. The Middle East is a region in which the some of the world's most intense ideological, national, tribal and sectarian passions are superimposed over the geographical source of the basic fuel of the globe's material cravings. Every developed and developing country in the world jealously and warily eyes events in that region, and worries about its position in any major strategic realignment that may occur. Continued instability and power vacuums in Iraq will draw in nervous and diffident regional powers. Conflict among those powers will produce further instability and unpredictability, and if not brought to a quick close will inevitably draw in outside powers, who will be faced with the fateful decision of joining a bloody fight for their share of the spoils as part of the winning side, or being locked out of the economy that emerges.
So the liberal and the conservative hawks have lit a fuse that may yet blow up the world. My son, for one, is going to have to live in that blown-up world. And yet I still don't see that concern from the liberal interventionists about the political and military poison that has been unleashed. Instead, they have retreated into a cave to lick their philosophical wounds, and to articulate ideological positions that will help to shift blame, and distinguish them from the "bad" interventionists. And they are already moving on to the next intervention, and arguing about how to do that one right, rather than worry about cleaning up the mess they have already made.
The debate about Iraq isn't fundamentally a debate about Sierra Leone, or Rwanda, or even Darfur. It is about Iraq and the countries closest to it: Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Jordan, Turkey, and about the greedily-eyed land those nations sit upon. With regard to the liberal interventionists who supported Iraq, is not their principles that are at issue. It is their judgment about concrete historical circumstances, and the likely consequences of actions taken in those circumstances.
In other words, this region is the theater for World War IV. The instability in the Middle East has been severely aggravated rather than improved by our intervention there. And that's mainly because the foolish people behind this war had no sense of what they were getting themselves and the rest of the world into.
We've opened up Pandora's box, and whether we leave or stay, the spooks we've released will not go back where they came from. This region is going to be the source of huge problems and immense suffering for decades to come.
The America Abroad discussion also focused on a subject that I care a lot about, which is whether "progress" is something that is real and to be hoped for. I think it depends on how you define it, but that's a subject for another post.
Q