second thoughts on intervention

The following essay was written with Drucilla Cornell (Professor of Political Science and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University), and was published in Logos, an excellent on-line journal, in the summer of 2004. It was a follow-up to an earlier essay we had published in the same journal, “For a New Multilateralism,” which has been reprinted in The Logos Reader, edited by Stephen Eric Bronner and Michael J. Thompson (Kentucky, 2006); and Planetary Politics, (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), also edited by Bronner. Together we also wrote "Rethinking Democratic Theory: the American Case," published in the winter 2005 issue of the Journal of Social Philosophy: a grim, even mordant, verdict on the American political system today, but god, perhaps not mordant enough (despite current euphoria over Election 2006). I was going to ask her permission to rewrite this essay slightly to make it more timely, but on re-reading it seemed to need hardly any change at all other than cutting and a bit of rewording. I have just added a postscript of my own.

SECOND THOUGHTS ON INTERVENTION

Why second thoughts? First thoughts about the war in Iraq tended to be more or less the same, and became conventional in intellectual circles. Intervention is “humanitarian,” or it’s more destructive than it’s worth. It prevents the depredations of “rogue states,” or it’s simply a cover for American imperialism. It would be acceptable if truly multi-lateral, but the same actions are unacceptable if unilateral (read, “American”). To foreswear it entirely would be “neo-isolationist;” to endorse it in principle is to try to become a “world policeman.” And so on.

We argued strongly against unilateral action and we still hold to that position. But given the grotesqueness of recent events, we want to stress our own need for second thoughts. Yes, as we wrote before, moral principles are important, when they are being systematically undermined by the so-called realists who argue that principles are simply out of date in the war on terror. But on the ground, where people live and die, what matters is not only the ostensible content of those principles, but also who puts them into action. It is only once we understand the full moral and legal significance of who puts principles into action that we can get beyond some of the seemingly insoluble dilemmas of the positions that we described above.

The dilemmas are insoluble in the sense that a position’s opposite is always equally true, and so we flail futilely around us, trying to persuade each other with concessions that are rhetorically meaningless and empirically empty. How can you measure one destruction against another? how can you honestly say that the U.S. is not an imperial power? how can you honestly say that American policy has never been based on anything but nakedly imperial self-interest? how can you oppose the spread of a democracy you argue for so ardently at home? how can you be so naive as to believe that democracy can be imposed on others by force? how can you be so elitist as to doubt that others want democracy as much as you do? Hypocrite lecteur! Mon semblable! Mon Frere!

In this array of not-quite-principles that demand their own refutation as soon as they are stated, there is no firm ground to stand on except historical outcomes that always arrive too late to be of any use. As Machiavelli wrote, history will be the judge (“look to the end”)--but that’s for the authors of history books. If the Thomas Friedmans and Michael Ignatieffs and Bill Kellers of the world have changed their view of the War on Iraq, it’s because the only excuse for the War as they imagined it was a particular kind of victory, and that War has already been lost. And if somehow it were to seem as though it might be “won,” they would change their minds again. But all the while the real “war,” the war of invasion and conquest against a non-belligerent Iraq, began and goes on as though they had never written or existed--if they never had, nothing would have been changed.

How do we explain this total disconnection between the educated intelligence and the obvious reality that it was failing to observe? We believe the explanation is that many of us, for or against, were asking only part of the right question. We needed to focus more on who was implementing the principle as part of a matter of principle itself. We need to remember that in international affairs, it is the nature and quality of the regime that distinguishes “right” from “wrong.” And the nature or quality of a regime have nothing to do with its stated purposes; with its intentions. It’s misleading, or even false, to say that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” The road to hell is paved with stated intentions of any kind, and we set foot on it when we take them seriously; when we start believing what people say instead of paying attention to what they do.

So intellectuals such as Christopher Hitchens and Paul Berman and Jean Bethke Elshtain (and Tony Blair) parroted phrases about “democracy” and “ending tyranny” and “Saddam the torturer” on behalf of a regime that was and is visibly not pro- but anti-democratic; that had not and has not the faintest interest in preserving anyone’s liberties; and that has lied about every one of its actions, domestic and foreign, as a matter of course. No one in their right mind would trust this regime to “bring democracy” to Florida, let alone Iraq; or to have humanitarian values deeper than those of the average jackal; or to have any interest in replacing destructive violence anywhere with non-violent stability.

On the plain record, the bedrock goals of the regime and its various factions were and are to install and perpetuate plutocratic, one-party rule long enough to enrich its friends and punish its enemies; to secure a cordon sanitaire around Iran, in order to prop up a faltering oil-based economy and maintain the nationalist delusions of empire that could sustain one-party rule; to make the mid-East safe for Israeli dominance; to cement its alliance with a neo-totalitarian Christian fundamentalism. To forget all this while talking about “America” and “its” goals, as though a “nation” were some imaginary ideal, were anything more than the real people who manage to commit real atrocities in its name, is a verbal swindle. It’s the same swindle that the Commander-In-Chief of Abu Ghraib’s MP’s attempted to foist on the world by saying that “they” didn’t represent the real “us,” as though a real “we” are out there somewhere else, unnoticed by the rest of the world, creating a peaceful “democracy.”

In short, the intellectuals, journalists, and prime ministers who promoted the policies of this regime deserve the epithet that Joseph Stalin bestowed on Western fellow-travelers who thought Communism was about a new world of human equality and pretended the gulag didn’t exist: “useful idiots.”

This corrective emphasis on the nature of the regime that sets out to engage in “humanitarian interventions,” or to “promote democracy,” casts a different light on the conventional argument about the role of the UN in this kind of venture. Anti-war but pro-UN commentators such as ourselves have sometimes seemed uneasily to advocate a double standard (destructive violence is somehow more acceptable if the Security Council approves it), or a single standard that is bound to produce disastrous inaction, as in Rwanda-Burundi. Against this position the unilateralists point to the UN’s incapacities: its institutionalized inertia; its numerical domination by nations that are not interested in the strengthening of what “we” consider democracy; its tendency toward the usual corruptions of a sclerotic bureaucracy, as supposedly evidenced in the oil-for-food scandal (hardly a blip on the corruption radar compared to even the minor accomplishments of the Bush II Administration).

But the pro-UN argument is correct, for these are precisely the difficulties that make the United Nations a more appropriate “world policeman” than the United States. As regimes go, the UN is so minimalist it barely qualifies. Its dangers are entirely of a negative kind--that it won’t do anything. It’s no danger to world peace or regional stability; it won’t attempt to take over anybody or anything; it has no black helicopters at all. It ought to be strengthened, but at ten times its current possibilities for armed intervention it would hardly be competing with France, or Germany, let alone the United States.

Not what the U.S. should do in the world, then, but what it ought to do on behalf of or in concert with the United Nations, and how such cooperative action could be arranged, is the question that all of us who believe that humanitarian intervention may on occasions be necessary ought to discuss. But it follows from what I have said about the importance of regime, that this discussion cannot begin to take place in a serious way until and unless regime change has taken place in the United States. If a pro-democratic rather than anti-democratic regime were in power here, we could attempt to link its political direction with arguments about the usefulness of the UN, limits on the US’s imperial sway and economic power, and so on. But if George W. Bush is elected in 2004, there is not a single imaginable foreign regime, anywhere, of any kind whatsoever, that will be better off for being the object of America’s supposedly humanitarian intentions. And as for spreading democracy, it’s the oligarchical, wealth-dominated, United States that is in serious need of an “intervention.”

Postscript–January 2007

And so he was; and so there isn’t. And so we do, still. Will there ever be a U.S. regime that could make a part of the world better via U.S. intervention? The Clinton Administration arguably improved the condition of Haiti in the short term–but not for long. There were too many competing motives at work, too little long-run interest; and once Clinton and his associates were replaced by a regime for whom people of color simply do not exist except as objects of one kind or another of sex policy, that was the end of “humanitarian intervention.” And after Bush? In a way, personnel doesn’t matter. The only way out of imperialism-as-intervention is for the American people to end militarized imperialism, with its immense associated costs to the nation’s material, social, and moral fabric, as well as its reputation with the rest of humanity.

How that might happen in such a violence-prone, historically divided, racially conscious society I have no idea. It may be possible, however, at least to define “humanitarian intervention” in a meaningful way. And one thing is clear: if the UN is too weak to be a successful humanitarian actor, than the goal of the world’s greatest power should be not to desert it but to strengthen it!
All that will be the subject of a future posting here.