On the merits of cruise missile kisses as an acceptable expression of empathy: A Reply to Juan Cole from 'the left'

Juan Cole has published an open letter to 'the left' - specifically those on the left that oppose the intervention in Libya and I presume the left categorization covers everyone from rank and file democrat through anarchists.

Cole's letter has several aspects to it that I'd like to respond to. First, he uses manipulative language that is eerily similar to the right-wing refrain about not caring for Iraqis if you are opposed to invading their country to slur anyone opposed to bombing Libya as uncaring about Libyans. This is probably not worth responding to in the main of this post other than beyond this because there are more substantive points that he raises, but I wanted to at least make note of it.

Before proceeding, I should mention that Cole offered supported the Iraq invasion back in 2003 on a delusion that military force would lead to constructive change and later expressed hang dog regret about his unrealistic expectations.

Cole's argument about Libya runs along on two axles. The first is making deterministic predictions about the consequences of intervention and non-intervention that conveniently support his position. The second axle is list and critique of the plausible reasons to oppose intervention.


Cole writes,

Among reasons given by critics for rejecting the intervention are:

1. Absolute pacifism (the use of force is always wrong)
2. Absolute anti-imperialism (all interventions in world affairs by outsiders are wrong).
3. Anti-military pragmatism: a belief that no social problems can ever usefully be resolved by use of military force.

There is a very important consideration missing here, Cole is using a gross simplification of opposition to intervention to make his position look stronger. Cole's arguments for intervention make no such simplifications. Here is what he writes about supporting the bombing,

The implications of a resurgent, angry and wounded Mad Dog, his coffers filled with oil billions, for the democracy movements on either side of Libya, in Egypt and Tunisia, could well have been pernicious.
...
 there are some problems that can’t be solved unless there is a military intervention first, since its absence would allow the destruction of the progressive forces.

Cole is making predictions about the consequences of intervention that are beyond the immediate situation, a bit of foresight that he does not allow the anti-interventionists. There are two lessons from the history of warfare that are inescapable.

1. the expected/promised outcomes of using force are never met.
2. the use of force leads to unpredictable consequences. Sometimes these consequences are echoes of the original problem, other times they are amplified.

Unexpected outcomes should be familiar enough, look at the original thinking behind the Iraq war. The war was supposed to be a first step in the long march of remaking the entire region, a popular phrase in Bush's foreign policy team held that 'real men go to Tehran.' Generals and politicians promised that the war was going to pay for itself and in a worst case scenario would not be very expensive. And the war would take just a few months. These arguments should be familiar enough to anyone reading this that I don't have to substantiate them beyond passing mention.

I don't mean to impugn integrity or honor of the humanitarian interventionists, but the most pressing question of their faction right now is whether an expression of concern can contain gun powder. The humanitarians who favored invading Iraq and Afghanistan felt sure that we were going to improve the lives of Iraqis and Afghanis. How did that work out? If the west helps topple Qaddafi, then what? Does the fall of a repressive government promise that another won't replace it, or that the country will fall into mini-dictatorships of warlords?  If they fail to oust Qaddafi, then what? Qaddafi returns with an even greater vengeance or the west is now in the position of using economic embargoes to strangle Libyans - not Qaddafi - and a no fly zone. In the mean time, toppling Qaddafi is going to require the bombing of cities and infrastructure, dumping toxic metals and ordnance all over the country. The west is gambling with Libyan lives, that is our humanitarian intervention.

The second point about repercussions is the entire story of the 20th century and maybe all of human history; using violence to solve immediate problems leads to much greater suffering and violence later. After WWI, the Treaty of Versailles helped destabilize Germany, giving rise to the Third Reich and WWII. WWII led to the cold war and its related conflicts, including Vietnam. Its not just the big events, within each of these broad brush summaries are causal chains leading back to previous conflicts. For instance, who would have thought that overthrowing Mossadegh in the 1950s would lead through a bloody chain of related events to a decade long occupation of Iraq in the first decade of the next century?*

* Mossadegh gave way to the Shah, who was overthrown in 1979. The U.S. turned to Iraq as a counterbalance, leading to a long war with Iran and the first gulf war. The U.S. stationed troops in Saudi Arabia as part of that war, which incensed many hardened men who saw it as an occupation of holy land, these men were the backbone of al qaeda. They later flew a plane into the twin towers, leading to the second Iraq war.

Cole predicts that had we not intervened in Libya, the effect on other protests in the wider region would have been "pernicious." The opposite prediction is just as true. The rebels caught Qaddafi off guard in the first few weeks of the conflict before he rallied. The west had enough time to intervene and Qaddafi looked weak. What lesson do despots draw from this? To crush dissent brutally and quickly before a foreign power can intervene. This is going to have a chilling effect on any kind of reform movement in every country of the world. Despots have good reason to believe that they should sniff out anything resembling a protest movement before letting it build to the point that they look weak and risk becoming another Libya. Similarly, dissidents and rebel groups now have motivation to prolong fighting and provoke crackdowns and violent repression from governments if they believe their is a chance the west will eventually intervene.

My understanding is that exactly that situation happened in Turkey over a century ago. The Armenians believed if they caused problems, then Britain would eventually intervene on their behalf. Britain didn't, of course, and the Turks put an end to it by trying to kill every last armenian. The genocide and lack of international attention for it emboldened Hitler to consider his own final solution to the Jewish 'problem.' The Armenian Genocide remains a live political issue today.*

*Updated to correct the Turk-Armenian brain fart swap.

My point is not that intervening in Libya will lead to Hitler, it is that these consequences extend far beyond what is predicted. Another example of 'unexpected' consequences is the war on terror, which has only created more terrorism.

Cole dismisses another consequence of this intervention,

I also don’t understand the worry about the setting of precedents. The UN Security Council is not a court, and does not function by precedent. It is a political body, and works by political will.

This, frankly, calls into question Cole's intelligence and I say that as someone who has found his informed comment quite informative over the years. To pretend that establishing precedents is not a concern is shockingly ignorant about how power entrenches and expands its reach by incrementally adding to and defending the status quo. That is how we got from a Constitution that clearly defines a Congressional-Presidential process for making war to the president deciding to bomb a country and inform the people later or not at all  in a couple of centuries. Indeed, that reality provides a creepy back drop to this entire exercise. Cole and I are both pissing in the wind. Debating the decision to bomb Libya after the fact, as though our input has any relevance to decisions already made, is an example of how power expands and establishes a new status quo -  to argue like this is an implicit endorsement of being a completely inconsequential part of the decision making process to go to war. That is not a new reality, but it is a precedent that is being set and reinforced at every turn.

There are three acceptable justifications of the use of force under international law.

One is defined in UN Article 51 as the right of self defense from attack or imminent attack. A second is UN Security Council authorization. A third, and far more tenuous, is 'humanitarian intervention', which must still be legitimized by the UN Security Council to be considered legal.

Humanitarian Intervention is a relatively new concept, but it is very familiar in world history. It is, essentially, the codification of the colonialist white man's burden as law. Humanitarian intervention is embodied just as much by the Vietnam era statement that "we must burn the village in order to save it" as preventing the genocide in Darfur.

One glaring problem is that people and states almost always frame their aggression in self-serving rationales. This is true of Nazi Germany, its true of Japan in World War II. It was true of the European genocide and conquering of America, as can be seen in the first seal from the Massachusetts Bay colony in the 1600s. It is certainly true of the American led assaults on Iraq and Afghanistan. The last honest conquerer might have been Attila the Hun.

So humanitarian intervention is an important tool for the powerful, as it allows them to get 'legal' authorization for the use of force for anything as long as they say they are doing it on behalf of the domestic population of the country they are planning to attack.

One of the most oft-cited examples of humanitarian intervention is the Clinton led bombing of Kosovo in the 1990s. Unfortunately for the humanitarians, its not a very good example as it exacerbated and caused the humanitarian crisis it was ostensibly meant to imitate. If one digs a bit into the documentary record of discussions between power brokers at the time, one of the major incentives for action was maintaining the credibility of NATO.

Cole closes with this,

I would like to urge the Left to learn to chew gum and walk at the same time. It is possible to reason our way through, on a case-by-case basis, to an ethical progressive position that supports the ordinary folk in their travails in places like Libya. If we just don’t care if the people of Benghazi are subjected to murder and repression on a vast scale, we aren’t people of the Left. We should avoid making ‘foreign intervention’ an absolute taboo.

Walking and chewing gum at the same time to me means that we should not just consider intervening in Libya in the terms set forth by western powers. Walking is considering the immediate proposal, intervening in Libya. Chewing gum means that we consider the immediate proposal in context. What does the history of western interventions tell us? What do current western interventions tell us? What about the unforeseen consequences and predictable effects will the intervention have? Cole wants you to avoid all of that context as irrelevant and devolves into absurdity; according to Cole, the less one thinks about the western bombing of Libya in the context of western imperialism, the more nuanced and considered their position.

Cole's last bit of advice to 'avoid making' wars of aggression 'an absolute taboo' is both chilling and completely out of touch given the contemporary history of American foreign policy. Well, I guess if I want to be a respectable 'leftie' I better get over it.

Fuck yeah America! Let's kick Qaddafi's crazy ass! Bombs Away!