"Realist" v "Idealist" ...

[saavedra77]

“I’m not a pacifist... I believe in the use of force. But there has to be a good reason for using force. And you have to know when to stop using force.”

“There may have come a time when we would have needed to take Saddam out ... But he wasn’t really a threat. His Army was weak, and the country hadn’t recovered from sanctions.”

“You encourage democracy over time, with assistance, and aid, the traditional way. Not how the neocons do it.”

-Brent Scowcroft, former National-Security Adviser to President George H.W. Bush, in an interveiw in last week's New Yorker magazine, regarding the differences between the 1991 and 2004 U.S. wars with Iraq.

The article also contains an interesting summary of the state of debate between so-called foreign policy "realists" like Scowcroft and neoconservative "tough idealists" like Robert Kagan, William Kristol, and Paul Wolfowitz.

Personally, I wouldn't endorse either the "realist" attitude that stability is everything or the neoconservative view that the U.S. can democratize the Middle East by force.  But I think the article brings to mind some interesting questions: Do human beings everywhere innately desire self-government, as Robert Kagan and William Kristol seem to argue?  (Scowcroft thinks not.)  And what has self-government meant, or what would it mean, to people as diverse as Bosnians, Kosovars, Hong Kong Chinese, Iranians, Iraqis, Lebanese, mainland Chinese, North Koreans, South Africans, Syrians, Taiwanese, etc?  And, finally, how can people outside of a given society most effectively support those inside who do desire some kind of self-government--stay out of it ('cuz you'll only provoke some kind of xenophobic reaction ... or something ...), provide an "example" of self-government at work in your own country, speak out (stigmatizing tyrants/praising the opposition), islolate/sanction abusive regimes, materially aid reformers or underground movements or rebels (otherwise known as subversion and espionage ...), or ... just "Cry 'havoc' and unleash the dogs of war!" whenever you see a dictator you have a reasonable chance of overthrowing?  (OK, it's not Sun Tzu, but I'm trying to convey a spectrum of opinions similar to what I'd see on my flist, here ...) 

I have to say I'm a mite disturbed that many of those quoted in the New Yorker story seem to have a "one-strategy-fits-all" attitude about this (which doesn't seem particularly credible, given how complicated the world actually is)--but perhaps I'm taking everyone's broad, sweeping statements out of context ...

Comments

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

I don't know about the "overall" effects of these schools-of-thought, but I do know the specifics of this Iraq example.

For months we heard about how the sanctions were ineffective.

Then we invade and find quite the opposite being true.

Watch now as Iraq, in the long run, becomes even more alienated from the rest of the Arab world.

[greyaenigma.livejournal.com]

The tricking thing about the sanctions is that while they were crippling the country, it doesn't seem like they were hurting Sadam directly. As in so many cases, punishing a country to get at the dictator isn't very efficient. That being said, it still might have worked if given more time... at least it might have worked better than alienating the entire world and infuriating the Muslim world by plunging in without just cause.

[saavedra77.livejournal.com]

I don't think that the sanctions hurt Saddam personally, if you put it that way, but I think that there's evidence that they crippled him militarily. On the other hand, the corruption of the oil-for-food program both undermined the purpose of the sanctions and, apparently, deprived Iraqis of the food and other necessities that oil-for-food was supposed to guarantee.

I hesitate to comment on this, because a lot of what I've heard about both the sanctions regime and oil-for-food has seemed politically slanted. Saddam spread the idea that sanctions were killing the Iraqi people, even as he facilitated this by diverting oil-for-food ...

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

That's the thing; sanctions aren't meant to change dictator's minds... they're dictators, they aren't going to change their minds. In a country with 26 million people, I find it very hard to believe that they couldn't have started their own revolution with 75 percent of Saddam's armies forced into it, or only in it to survive. The Kurds don't want to liberate the Muslims, the Shia don't want to liberate the Sunni, and the Sufi just want everyone under lockdown. Since they couldn't pull together, and since this inherent factionalism would rule the day after any popular revolution, they should've remained under the heel of Saddam, where they were all kept in check until they could put aside their differences and ideologies.

[greyaenigma.livejournal.com]

Hell, people in this country barely seem interested in self-governance. If more of them cared, they'd be voting. If they cared even more, they'd be thikning for themselves before voting.

[ryuusama.livejournal.com]

Oh, Americans do want self-governance. They just don't want to to exert the effort required to actually govern themselves. Also, if they do govern themselves, that means the have to take responsibility when things go wrong, and it's just so much more convenient to "play the blame game," isn't it?