One possible consequence of the disaster in Iraq is an America that is much less willing to intervene militarily in other areas of the world. In the short-run there are practical reasons for this: the military needs to be rebuilt and reequipped, and we’re low on money. But there may also be a change in the national zeitgeist away from the idea that America can impose its will with little risk and with unquestioned righteousness. This prospect is alarming to Ivo Daalder and Robert Kagan. Yet, they insist, such worries are misguided.
Is the United States out of the intervention business for a while? With two difficult wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a divided public, the conventional answer is that it will be a long time before any American president, Democrat or Republican, again dispatches troops into conflict overseas. As usual, though, the conventional wisdom is almost certainly wrong. Throughout its history, America has frequently used force on behalf of principles and tangible interests, and that is not likely to change.
Or, they hope it won’t change, because they have plans for our armed forces.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, the situations in which an American president may have to use force have only grown, whether it is to respond to terrorist threats, to curb weapons proliferation, to prevent genocide or other human rights violations, or to respond to more traditional forms of aggression.
They’re like children that get caught sneaking out at night with the car and then ask that their regular driving privileges not be revoked. Daalder and Kagan recognize that their excellent Mesopotamian adventure has crushed American hegemonic legitimacy, but they have a solution.
Who decides whether the threat is directed against a specific state or whether it threatens regional or international security more broadly?
The traditional answer, the U.N. Security Council, no longer suffices, if it ever did…
…If not the Security Council, then who? The answer is the world’s democracies, the United States and its democratic partners in Europe and Asia.
In other words, if Daddy is going to suspend the driving privileges, they’ll just cut Daddy out of the deal. They propose that the UN Security Council be supplemented with a Concert of Democracies that can bestow legitimacy on U.S. intervention when the U.N. refuses to go along. It’s a repackaging of the New Europe Coalition of the Willing. Daalder and Kagan seem oblivious to the fact that the democracies of Europe either refused or quickly regretted aligning themselves with the neo-conservative plan.
Iraq’s lesson for America is that we cannot afford, let alone succeed, with a strategy of military intervention in the absence of truly compelling international consensus. If we gain nothing else from the debacle in Iraq, we should gain humility.
And we should know enough, now, to suspect the motives of those that argue against learning humility. Those that continue to rattle sabers and call for interventions…humanitarian, or otherwise, need to have a financial audit to see which war contractors and energy companies are financing their rhetoric.
War is a business that benefits no one but arms dealers and their enablers.
The news is reporting how many AK-47s have been lost. But we don’t use AK-47s. They must be purchased from (mostly international) arms dealers. To whom were we planning to give them?
we always arm people with AK’s. During the Cold War it was for plausible deniability. To arm the mujahideen we set up knock off factories in Egypt and China to make Russian armaments, especially AK-47’s. The AK is a very common weapon in Iraq and I think it was the weapon of choice for the Iraqi army. Nothing really out of the ordinary in our supplying AK’s. But the arming of a country at war with itself is a problem…especially when you have no clear idea which side you want to win.
I presumed that…but are we arming the Sunni or the Shi’a…or the militias that constantly kidnap and kill? I’m just asking moot questions, because the whole situation is so depressing.
In fact, the press report of the incident didn’t indicate that they were arms bought to distribute, but suggested they were arms we were using ourselves.
well, we can ask some special forces guys, but I don’t think we use AK’s for anything unless we want to make it look like someone else is behind what we’re doing.
“are we arming the Sunni or the Shi’a…or the militias that constantly kidnap and kill?“
You may be aware already that starting in 2004 the U.S. has recruited, equipped, trained, and supported “militias” – more accurately called death squads. You may also be aware that one of the most active, if not THE most active of the militias that are attacking Sunnis is the one associated with Maliki, Al Hakim, and The Party Formerly Known As SCIRI (I cannot prove this, but my sense is that much of the violence attributed to Muqtada Sadr’s Mehdi Army is actually committed by Al Hakim’s militia).
The U.S. has also recruited, funded, and trained former members of Saddam’s Mukhabarat to form “special forces” brigades.
…that the Saudi royals summoned Cheney all the way across the ocean for a 45 minute audience, to warn him that we MUST remain to protect the Sunni minority.
“we MUST remain to protect the Sunni minority.“
Which you have never done and are not doing now.
Of course, you are not protecting ANY Iraqis, and are killing a hell of a lot more Iraqis, including children, than any American realizes.
“To whom were we planning to give them?“
According to the reports I have seen, they were intended for the Iraqi “security forces” – more realistically known as the Iraqi proxy occupation forces. That makes sense, since that is the weapon the U.S. typically supplies its proxy forces everywhere, and it is the weapon they have been supplying to their proxy occupation forces in Iraq as well.
Of more interest might be from whom were we planning to buy the ammunition for the AK-47s we were distributing. Or, were we we just expecting the folks receiving the freebie AKs to just pick up some of that loose ammo floating around Iraq left over after Saddam Hussien’s magazines were looted by one and all. The Ak-47 takes a different round than the American M15/M4 (or any of the other NATO assault rifles for that matter), so the ammo supply becomes a major issue. Someone was going to have to supply them. Any takers on some no-bid/cost-plus contract from a crony weapons dealer sourcing from a Chinese supplier? That would be the quintessential contract though. So typical.
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Small arms shipped from Bosnia to Iraq ‘go missing’ as Pentagon uses dealers
The Pentagon has secretly shipped tens of thousands of small arms from Bosnia to Iraq in the past two years, using a web of private companies, at least one of which is a noted arms smuggler blacklisted by Washington and the UN.
According to a report by Amnesty International [pdf], which investigated the sales, the US government arranged for the delivery of at least 200,000 Kalashnikov [Amnesty report 350K] machine guns from Bosnia to Iraq in 2004-05. But though the weaponry was said to be for arming the fledgling Iraqi military, there is no evidence of the guns reaching their recipient.
European administrators in Bosnia, as well as NGOs working to oversee the stockpiling and destruction of weapons from the Bosnian war of the 1990s, are furious that the Pentagon’s covert arms-to-Iraq programme has undermined the disarmament project.
“It’s difficult to persuade people to destroy weapons when they’re all holding back and waiting for Uncle Sam to arrive with a fistful of dollars,” said Adrian Wilkinson, a former British officer overseeing a UN disarmament programme in former Yugoslavia.
The international administration running Bosnia repeatedly sought to impose an arms export moratorium, but under US pressure it was suspended several times to enable the arms shipments to go ahead.
…
The Moldovan air firm which flew the cargo out of a US air base at Tuzla, north-east Bosnia, was flying without a licence. The firm, Aerocom, named in a 2003 UN investigation of the diamonds-for-guns trade in Liberia and Sierra Leone, is now defunct, but its assets and aircraft are registered with another Moldovan firm, Jet Line International.
Some of the firms used in the Pentagon sponsored deals were also engaged in illegal arms shipments from Serbia and Bosnia to Liberia and to Saddam Hussein four years ago.
Move along folks, nothing to see here, business as usual – Oui
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."C’mon Boo, humility?? From Kagan ??? How can you doubt the wisdom or honest intentions of the “serious” and “credible” experts like Kagan? I mean, they got it all right from the beginning, ya’ know! Their track record is indisputable!
Watch what you say, dude. Cause if a guy isn’t careful about what he says, Kagan and his crowd will get mad and take away your secret decoder ring and drum you out of the club. Hell, they might even require you to attend Appeasers Anonymous.
So Kagan tells everyone to get in line and put on a happy face. He shouts, “ALL ABOARD!! The war train is now leaving the station and there’s tickets enough for everybody!!!! WHEEEEEEEEEE!!!!
well, Mike, there’s a pattern of articles coming out from neo-cons and even hawkish liberals, that are taking a long-view of the debacle and that are concerned with preventing any fundamental reassessment of our forward basing strategy and our basic role as the world’s policemen. And Kagan is only one of these people.
I, too, have detected a noticeable shift of late in how the larger, macro view of the Iraq/perpetual war idea is being framed by Kagan and his ilk. And, as usual, the mainstream media is helping accelerate the subconscious acceptance of this false frame as fact within the minds of the American public.
Granted, a lot of us log on every day, discuss at length and compulsively read about this subject and it is no surprise that many are aware of what is being done. We have those such as Glenn Greenwald, who, among others, does a superb job of exposing their insanity. But what truly amazes me is that the mainstream media, who claimed to have now taken this “won’t get fooled again” attitude after kissing the asses of the neocons in their enabling run-up to the Iraq War, are again so willing to be used as stooges by the likes of Kagan, Podhoretz, Kristol and their liberal-hawk enablers whose biggest wet dream in the world is eternal war in the Middle East.
I don’t think it is just hyperbole to say the groundwork is being laid right now for the realization of the neocons fantasy-of-a-lifetime and somehow, for some unfathomable reason, those with the power to begin debunking and exposing this madness to the public as a whole are sitting idly by and not doing jack. They act like it’s just a big game of Risk, or something. Nobody seems to take it seriously except the “crazy, hippie liberal bloggers”. And who wants to listen to them? They’re not “serious”, you know.
And those “crazy hippies” have only been right about, ohhhhh,………….almost everything.
Neo-Con or not: the return on investment delivered by the US armed forces has been appalling. It really doesn’t matter where one stands ideologically: “playing war” is out from now on. It doesn’t work. Period. Real war as opposed to play war is a low-value activity executed by expendable masses of human canon fodder: As a triumphant consumer society the US simply lacks that cheap manpower.
Cheney and Rummy thought they could substitute belligerent bombast and high-tech gadgetry for a full societal mobilization that THEY THEMSELVES didn’t consider feasible. This has been tried now and it has failed.
The rest is window-dressing.
How about the Middle East in general?
Booman, did you take in the Middle East forum with Cole and Mearshirmer, and if so what was your impression?
If not, why not? Still afraid to take on the Israel-Palestine conflict?
Do you know where one can get a video of the forum?
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Mon Jul 24th, 2006 at 11:11:30 AM PST
I don’t mind being criticized for intemperate language. Many members here took me to task. But being called:
● Video clips – Yearly Kos Convention
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Okay, now I know a lot. Booman got AIPACed. It takes a lot of balls to stick with a human rights agenda.
It’s principles Booman, ethnicity doesn’t make a damned difference. Get with the program. It’s called social-liberalism. And if Johnson could learn them, anyone can.
“One possible consequence of the disaster in Iraq is an America that is much less willing to intervene militarily in other areas of the world.“
One can only hope that this is indeed one of the consequences. It was, from the beginning, the best – indeed, the ONLY good thing – that anyone could hope would come from such an act of pure aggression.
I am not hopeful, though.