Letters to the Editor
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Has no right to.
The U.S. should not -- and has no right to -- invade, bomb and occupy other nations that haven't attacked or even threatened to attack us.
GG, can you expand on this? It's a pretty absolutist statement, and taken literally I can't agree with it. Are all UN Peacekeeping missions out, for instance? Would it really have been wrong to send a unilateral peacekeeping force to Rwanda?
Maybe if it were qualified - "the US should not -- and has no right to -- unilaterally invade, bomb...". But even then it's more complicated, in my opinion, than you're suggesting.
Thanks for your great work.
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jason_
I'm aware of and have written about this controversy before, but I didn't realize there were any credible claims that the number was less than 100,000 at this point, which is why I wrote it as I did. I'll go look at the latest flair-up. I don't consider the difference significant to the point except that it is important to be as accurate as possible about these things.
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rebmarks
I think there's a difference in kind between UN-authorized military actions and U.S. ones undertaken without U.N. authorization. The former also may not be wise, but at least they comport to our treaty commitments (which happens also to be binding law in the U.S.) and are marginally less likely to go wildly off-course in terms of proclaimed intent.
Bosnia is a different story, because it was undertaken without UN authorization and without the most remote link to self-defense. I don't claim an expertise in the debate back then, but from everything I have read, I think there are many reasons to be dubious about both the justifications and intent, independent of the fact that it was done outside the U.N.
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@rebmarks The Slippery Slope of the Global Policeman
What about Bosnia you ask? Good question.
What about Somalia?
What about Colombia?
What about the 'commie dictatorship' in Valenzuela?
What about Zimbabwe?
Darfur?
What is the argument for or against "intervening" in those places?
It's not your business.
The rest of the world is not your problem. If you want to send wheat. Go ahead. We can do without the bombs.
The world might not mind "America as cop" so much, if there interventions were not, shall we say, so self-interested.
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Hitchens
Reading the Hitchens one was just painful.
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@ fly man
"...and March 2003 happens to mark the only time that we ever decided to intervene, after a protracted and open public debate, on the right side and for the right reasons. This must, and still does, count for something."
You're kidding right? Open and fair debate - that's hilarious, I must have missed it, was it on FOX?
There is good reason to believe that Bush had decided to attack Iraq, prior to 911.
And what do you mean the "only time we ever decided to intervene"?
http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz/interventions.html
America has killed millions and millions of people, and this is just since WWII.
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La Bamba!
What about the 'commie dictatorship' in Valenzuela? -- Bill Owen
:-) Best one of the day. A fifties flashback, sorry.
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Amazing!!
The dog ate my homework! Again!
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Go Giants!!!
@ Paul Dirks:
So what has changed? Why does every moral calculation one could bring to bear on the subject suddeny become irrelevant when the actor in question is the US military?
Sorry, I can't hear you over the chanting -- "U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" Which is exactly the same chant, on every level except geographical coverage, as the one we hear in my neck of the woods several times every summer: "Beat L.A.! Beat L.A! Beat L.A.!"
It's exactly what Adam Smith said in Glenn's quote. When your ass and your kids' asses are safe, war is damned entertaining. It appeals to the tribal instinct. And it provides an outlet -- though a tragically destructive one, unlike baseball -- for all that repressed shadow stuff we don't want to admit feeling.
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Hume's Ghost
I especially like Hitchen's conclusion:
"The role of Baathist Iraq in forwarding and aiding the merchants of suicide terror actually proves to be deeper and worse, on the latest professional estimate, than most people had ever believed or than the Bush administration had ever suggested."
And that estimate is? God, he lies like a hog in goose-shit.
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Timothy Noah
I agree with Atrios and others here that say that Noah's response was the best of the bunch.
Wouldn't you benefit more from considering the views of people who were right? Five years after this terrible war began, it remains true that respectable mainstream discussion about its lessons is nearly exclusively confined to people who supported the war, even though that same mainstream acknowledges, for the most part, that the war was a mistake. That's true of Slate's symposium, and it was true of a similar symposium that appeared March 16 on the New York Times' op-ed pages. The people who opposed U.S. entry into the Iraq war, it would appear, are insufficiently "serious" to explain why they were right.
This statement indicates that Noah's response represents a marked distinction from the others. It contains an important question that we all have been asking. And one that many of the media never seem to quite get to.
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600,000 dead
From what I can tell, the Lancet study is controversial because its us in Iraq. When the authors employed the same methodology in other conflicts there was not this sort of clamor over it.
http://www.medialens.org/downloads/pdfs/les_roberts_germany_briefing.pdf
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¡El Toro!
A fifties flashback, sorry.
I was thinking of the Dodgers pitcher from the 80s...
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Depressing
I posted about this at Slate under the main article heading...it's sad that none of these people seems to even consider the underlying assumptions that rationalize American intervention whenever, wherever we see fit. Pretty amazing...
Thanks Glenn, your analysis is right on...
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I've heard worse
I don't know if he still trots this one out since I try to make sure I never hear his views on Iraq since they're so damn frustrating, but Hitchens used to justify the chaos we unleashed in Iraq by saying it was good practice for the army to learn how to fight insurgents.