A fascinating exchange has gone on between two of my favorite bloggers, Caleb McDaniel and Paul Musgrave, about how the two sides tend to look at American foreign policy in a far too simplistic manner. Caleb began by responding to a recent column by David Brooks crowing that the recent movement to get the Syrians out of Lebanon was a direct result of Bush's policy in Iraq. Paul then wrote this reply to Caleb, which is not so much a rebuttal as an extension of the same sort of reasoning. He agrees with Caleb that Brooks' American triumphalism is far too simplistic, but he points out that there is an equal tendency on the other side to engage in the same sort of simplistic reasoning in regarding anything and everything about American foreign policy as evil and malicious. He says:
Is the situation as simple as Brooks claims? No. It is not American power that produced the desire for Lebanese, or Egyptian, or Ukrainian, or Georgian, democracy. Nor has American power yet been able to deliver on its promise to the Iraqis, nor even, in full, to the Afghanis. But if America is to be castigated--and rightly so--for its history of providing support to thoroughly nasty despots and undermining (or worse) governments with plausible claims to at least some legitimacy, then we should also be careful to weigh in these balances Washington's moves to redress these grievances and clean up its mess.Such moral accounting would tax the cleverest CPA. And, faced by these confusing topics, people are apt to revert to their prior beliefs about the aims and moral worth of the United States, picking out only those facts that support those ex ante beliefs. So it is that jingoists like Brooks see America as a white-clad avenging angel of Freedom delivering liberty in neatly-wrapped parcels to otherwise passive and indistinct foreign peoples. But we should not accept by default that because Brooks is wrong the opposite extreme is right.
Just as there are some, primarily on the right, who fervently believe that America has produced every good and decent thing on the face of the earth and that America is truly the hero on the white horse spreading freedom around the globe, there are also many on the left who cannot view any American policy in any foreign context as anything but evil. One of the common arguments heard against the policy in Iraq goes something like this:
The war in Iraq is a cynical grab for money. The government is doing little more than looting and exploiting the Iraqi people for their oil. After all, Bush is an oil man himself and Cheney's former company, which is still paying him, stands to make billions from the war. They are using the American military as little more than a private army to advance the financial interests of themselves and their friends. If they really cared at all about oppression and human rights, they would be intervening in the Sudan to stop the horrible genocide going on there. But there's no oil there, which just proves their cynical motives.
Now suppose for a moment that tomorrow the Bush administration made a dramatic shift in its foreign policy. Suppose the President even admitted publicly that he has been previously motivated by the financial interests of America and that from now on he is going to use American military might only to help the oppressed people of the world. Suppose he then announces that he is going to ask the UN to intervene in the Sudan to stop the brutal genocide that has already killed millions, and if the UN doesn't do it, we'll go in ourselves to put a stop to the inhumanity there one way or another. Do you think for a moment that the Chomsky crowd would react to the new policy - the very same policy they say we should be following - with anything other than more accusations of the real financial interests behind the new policy?
Both the David Brooks' of the world and the Noam Chomskys of the world can think only in the clearest black and white. The US is either the unquestioned savior of the world or the purest force for evil ever known, and the facts will not get in the way of either conclusion for either side. Whatever happens will be filtered automatically through the prism of their prior held beliefs. For the Brooks crowd, if tomorrow Bush announced that we were invading Canada to stop the dreaded march of mad cow disease, they would dutifully parrot the party line and wax eloquent about the freedom we would at last be bringing to our northern neighbors.
For the Chomsky crowd, it's damned if you do and damned if you don't. If we don't do anything to stop an inhumane situation somewhere in the world, be it the Chinese occupation of Tibet or the genocide in the Sudan, we are being complicit in the destruction of human rights. But if we did do anything to intervene in those situations, they would immediately accuse the government of being self-serving and find some ulterior motive to point to as the "real" reason for the policy. Somewhere between those two extremes there must be room for an informed, adult, balanced conversation about the complexities and difficulties of building a coherent foreign policy that is consistent both with our stated principles and our more practical interests. And in that conversation, I am eager to hear what smart and reasonable people like Caleb and Paul have to say.
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Thanks for the link and the kind words. Bloggers like Paul and yourself prove, I think, that we can have these kinds of "adult, balanced conversations" ... even in the blogosphere!
I disagree with only one point of your analysis: I don't think the far left has ever considered just what they would say if Bush changed foreign policies and started protecting Sudan instead. They don't have to: The far left has deliberately chosen a foreign policy goal that doesn't really exist for us right now--precisely so they can continue to complain about our not attaining it with a minimum of risk or intellectual legwork.
Or, more charitably, we might say that they are only pointing out the high opportunity cost of the Iraq War, which has meant that we must give up any chance at helping in the (admittedly unforseen) crisis there. But there's a fine line between the two.
Hi Ed:
I mostly agree with you in this post, specially for the need on the left to look more the complexities in witch American foreign policy is developed. Although, I think there are a couple of problems with your reasoning (and I will say this in my member quality of "the Chomsky crowd"). One is the hypothetical you use to show how the Chomsky crowd is always willing to criticize American foreign policy no matter what they do. Do you really think that it is even possible that the Bush administration will intervene a country with no oil, only on humanitarian basis? Of course it is logically possible, but in real terms is almost unthinkable. In other words, I am willing to bet that Bush will NEVER intervene in Sudan, to follow your example., cause he and the thugs in his administration has shown they only care about money and power.
Now, there is a second consideration. You complain that "bad if we do, bad if we don't". But then, what do you mean by doing and not doing? In this context I suspect it refers only to military intervention. And I think military intervention is not the only thing you can do for solving a conflict. You have diplomacy, economic pressure, or even "not doing" (what if the US stopped supporting despots all around the world, EVEN if it hurts its own economic-political or military interests?). That doesn't mean that I oppose military intervention as a matter of principle (unlike most leftists, I supported US intervention in the Balkans last decade, although I opposed the way it was carried on).
I disagree on several points. First, and most important, what possible grounds would the "Chomsky crowd" have for believing Bush, given his record? Second, this - "For the Chomsky crowd, it's damned if you do and damned if you don't. If we don't do anything to stop an inhumane situation somewhere in the world, be it the Chinese occupation of Tibet or the genocide in the Sudan, we are being complicit in the destruction of human rights. But if we did do anything to intervene in those situations, they would immediately accuse the government of being self-serving and find some ulterior motive to point to as the "real" reason for the policy." - is grossly unfair. The "Chomsky crowd" in which I cautiously include myself (in that I think a lot of his criticisms are valid, although not all - I don't think the Iraq war was all about oil, but then again nor does Chomsky) aren't the ones constructing a simple invade/don't invade dichotomy. The Chomsky crowd are saying, for example, don't provide active support to dictatorships with appaling human rights/military expansionism records. I can't see why that's even controversial given the number of times such "realism" has backfired on us, not least with Iraq. In cases of immediate extreme and incontrovertible humanitarian crisis, like Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Sudan, etc then yes intervention is justified, and probably a moral duty. But there was no immediate extreme humanitarian crisis in Iraq, not since the draining of the Southern marshes ten years ago, which once again was partly the result of US "realism". It's apples and oranges.
Keep in mind that I'm not saying that Chomsky's critique is entirely wrong in all circumstances. In fact, I think it's eerily accurate in many cases. My point was a hypothetical, and I know it's unprovable and therefore speculation, that the far left would find some way of turning any possible American foreign policy into a negative thing. You can see it in things as innocuous as Bush's pledge to give billions in aid to Africa to help stop AIDS. Some of that came in for legitimate criticism, in that it funded the ridiculous "abstinence only" nonsense. But even aside from that, I still read numerous people shooting that down because it was really only to help American drug companies from whom the drugs would be purchased. I just don't think it matters what the US government does at this point, there is a sizable group who will always find a way to turn it into a negative. No matter what we do will involve someone buying or selling something at some point and they will build that up into the "real" reason for the policy because they refuse to believe that our government can do anything at all that isn't motivated by evil. And again, that doesn't mean that our government hasn't often been absolutely worthy of that critique in the past; it certainly has. And I am the first one to say that we need to stop supporting dictators around the world for short term benefit. It backfires on us every time.
Sure, I can understand where you're coming from, and I agree there is a degree of knee-jerk anti-US-foreign-policy thought on the left, but at the same time it seems you are coming quite close to that Powerline post about "What depths will those crazy Democrats sink to next". ie Even though the "Chomsky crowd"'s position on Iraq and Sudan is justified, if some incredibly unlikely hypothetical occurred, in which case pretty much the entire world would have to radically rethink its assumptions about Bush and American foreign policy, you fear that the Chomsky crowd wouldn't. Is that really fair?
Chomsky himself, and most of his supporters (I hate that term, but I'll leave it be for the moment), don't argue that everything the US does is evil. They argue that everything the US does is driven by self interest, while at the same time the US pretends to be acting out of benign humanitarianism. They further argue that this causes a lot of harm around the world, which could be alleviated if a) Americans stopped studiously ignoring the hypocrisy, and b) Americans stopped their government behaving hypocritically.
Jason, I don't think there's anything inherently odious about naming foreign policy goals that are not achievable right now. When will they be achievable if we don't imagine them now? I definitely want to save a seat for the "complainers" at the table where most policy decisions are made. I just don't want them to be the only ones in attendance.
And, in keeping with the general thread in this post and Paul's, I'm sure you'd agree that your critique of the far left really has more to do with their being "far" than "left." After all, the neoconservative vision of a world in which the United States is the only and unapproachable military superpower, but also in which every country is a democracy that loves the United States, is not a foreign policy goal that exists right now either.
I agree that, to chagrin of proud liberals such as myself, there is indeed a segment of "America-haters" within the reactionary left. Honestly, it seems to be composed principally of college students who read a few Chomsky essays and suddenly think they have the ueber-answer to all the world's ills: "America-Diddit". In other words, it's a sign of intellectual immaturity, a small mind that only thinks in black-and-white. To be fair, however, the mirror image of this simplistic worldview seems to be far, far, far more prominent on the right. I see a strong, reflexive, nationalistic streak that runs through moderate conservatives and even apolitical folks every day. Nothing unusual about it. It's human to want to believe the best about the particular nation-state where we were born. But among conservatives who are more political in their outlook, this blossoms all too readily into willful blindness to the facts, and a with-us-or-against-us moral compass. If nothing else, it's *easy* to be jingoistic. Most anti-American leftists are the product of a derailed educational development.
I think a mature leftist thinker in America--including Chomsky--would say that any perception that America is subjected to special criticism is beacause 1) America is their home, and they want it to be the best nation it can be; 2) America is arguably the most militarily and economically powerful political entity in the history of the world. The former point is simply the criticism facet of mature patriotism. The latter point is an ethical consideration. Does great power imply that you can and should do anything you want to do? Or, to quote from Spider-Man, does great power come with great responsibility?
Personally, my worldview probably cleaves closer to leftist populists such as Howard Zinn. I tend to be simply cynical about power. It will always be abused by those who possess it, and any proclamations of virtue or altruism by the powerful should be assumed by default to be lies. This is true whether one is talking about George W. Bush, Saddam Hussein, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, Emperor Qin, or Julius Ceaser. Viewed through this lens, all of America's foreign policy decisions are decisions motivated by power, and any other result is, at best, a happy accident.
Love your posts. Too often blog stuff devolves to crap. Reasoned people can disagree or not.
I recently came across this anti-war piece that claims to be a Centrist attack. You shoulkd read it and possibly opine. It makes points on the war that I've not seen elsewhere. Keep up the good work.
http://cosmoetica.com/B194-DES136.htm
Iraq, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, And The Couch Potato's Burden:
A Muscular Centrist Attack On The Pro-War Position