I Need An Intervention, Right Now!

By Cernig

Ross Douthat picked up on something Matt Yglesias wrote today and I ended up reading some of the best sense I've seen in a blog post in ages - liberal interventionists are basically impatient.

It's all very well to say that the United States should be trying to build a world order in which great powers like Russia and China are willing to sign on whatever sort of Burmese intervention might theoretically be sanctioned under the "Responsibility to Protect" umbrella, but even if you're optimistic that such a world order is attainable - which Matt is, and I'm not - it's still far enough off that we can expect many more Burma-style (or Darfur-style, or Kosovo-style, or Rwanda-style) quandaries in the meantime. And answering the "what is to be done?" question that invariably accompanies these crises by saying that "American officials ...should keep pushing the international community to move to a world where something like the Responsibility to Protect has some force in the real world" amounts to answering it by saying "in the short term, nothing."

Now, that may be the right answer, but it's an answer that's more likely to appeal to realists and non-interventionists of the left and right than to the liberal internationalists to whom Matt's addressing himself. Basically, it amounts to telling people who are ideologically invested in the idea of interventions to halt wars, genocides, famines and so forth that they need to accept today's famine, and tomorrow's genocide, and the day after that's bloody civil war ... and someday, if the U.S. plays its cards right and invests heavily enough in a multilateral framework for international relations, the other great powers will come around to "rules of the road" under which it's plausible to imagine the UN conducting humanitarian interventions inside the borders of its more misgoverned member states. And while the Iraq invasion has made this Yglesian, "choose the UN, and patience" approach to world affairs much more appealing to the liberal-internationalist set than it was in, say, 1999 or 2002, as time goes by and more Burmese-style crises pass without an international response, I expect that most liberal hawks will default back toward the more aggressive and UN-skeptical approach to the world's troubles that at present is defended primarily by neoconservatives.

...From JFK down to Bill Clinton and the liberals who agitated for the invasion of Iraq, it's hard to find all that many prominent liberal internationalists (at least within the Democratic Party) who resisted the temptation, when it presented itself, to choose interventionist ends even when the multilateral means that liberal internationalism is theoretically committed to weren't available.

As Douthat writes, that impatience stems from a need to "do something", and when you possess the world's biggest hammer - the US military - everything looks like a nail. But you can only hammer so many nails at one time which means there are always going to be humanitarian crises you cannot intervene in. As some pretty wise folk have pointed out down the ages, the poor will always be with us.

And then there's the blowback problem, as expertly explained in a piece for the Small Wars Journal by by ex-special forces commander, retired General Geoffrey C. Lambert (hat tip - Attackerman):

The dictators we supported grasped our instruction and went into action with total freedom of action, unfettered by moral or legal limitations. As a result, counterinsurgency turned ugly as anti-communist zeal led to the imprisonment, torture or death of innocents among the thousands that perished in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and throughout the region. Sadly, it wasn’t until the Carter Administration and the War in El Salvador that human rights became a cornerstone of U.S. counterinsurgency planning and execution.

Today, we see the Children of the Left, now adults, (whose parents were disenfranchised or worse) finding their voices in Argentina, Chile, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, and elsewhere. As a result, Latin America is increasingly drifting towards building new economic, diplomatic and military relationships, diminishing US influence in the region.

As we continue our struggle against radical Islamic terrorism, expanding the effort to our allies and coalition partners, we need to remember the Children of the Left. Our 20,000+ prisoners in Iraq, the death of innocent civilians, the loss of face of the many men now unemployed in a culture that values the man’s role as bread-winner more that we can understand, and our status as occupiers and Crusaders collectively may result in conditions far worse than the situation in Latin America today.

As we begin our exit from Iraq and begin focusing on building host nation counterinsurgency capability in Iraq and other countries, analysis of long term implications of seeking only short-term gain may provide insight to allow us to match word and deed in the upcoming decades to minimize long-term blowback – blowback from the Children of the Crusade.

Put blowback to unilateral interventions into the equation and you see very quickly how there is a curve of diminishing returns from such military adventures. And no matter how hard we intervene, someone somewhere will still suffer - we can't intervene everywhere and everywhen. So, for liberals motivated by humanitarian good wishes, it makes more sense to wait, to let the wheels of international consensus grind slowly on, to build up a non-military intervention force as an option and only intervene multilaterally with as near to dammit full international support. Otherwise you're just creating new Children of new Crusades who will, by conflict with their "rescuers", create even more humanitarian disasters. At least by doing things the patient way some problems might get solved definitively instead of spawing new ones.