The Problem of Intervention

...Technical Problems...

...Similarly, the United States Security Council would dispatch its infection fighters to a troubled spot anywhere on earth at the command of the Military Staff Committee...

...We are citizens of the most powerful country on earth, though we constitute, in its political life, a pitifully small presence...

...Given the weakness of the European Parliament, EC decision making appears remote to many Europeans, several times removed, in the hands of the European Commission and Eurocrats...

...The third possibility: the democratic left could urge Washington, in this fluid historical moment, to press for effective mechanisms of international collective security, particularly WINTER • 1993 • 23 under UN auspices...

...In the Gulf, this was reinforced by Bush's coddling of Baghdad between 1988 and 1990...

...If needed, member states were to provide "armed forces, assistance and facilities," according to the UN Charter...

...How one defines, delimits, and acts on "American interests" is, of course, inseparable from one's values...

...A nationalist politician, Rashid Ali, has seized power...

...An apt analogy is the human body's ability to rush the blood's white corpuscles to combat an infection in any part of the body...

...After a dozen years of voodoo economics, Americans are hurting...

...A host of technical problems, often not separable from politics, comes with empowering something like the MSC...

...The Bourgeois State Fallacy...

...George Bush sought to make it a campaign issue by talking about Clinton's draft record, yet Americans pronounced such matters irrelevant to their concerns—economic concerns, which are not so different from those that once sustained the pre-Vietnam Democratic party...

...He flees, as does the Mufti, eventually to Berlin...

...who first coddled Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega and then invaded Panama to capture him...

...When Moscow suggested in 1988 that the MSC be examined anew, the Kremlin also maintained that the Soviet Parliament would have to approve deployment of its troops to enforce Security Council resolutions...

...Would intelligence be the sole responsibility of countries who have, say, spy satellites...

...The United States wanted it to have a substantial force at its disposal and the USSR something small...

...support from Washington for the Spanish republic would have been welcome...

...This should be a matter of discomfort, even to Americans who supported the war, for several reasons...

...Consequently, it has three options...

...We still hear that the war was fought with "one hand tied behind our backs...

...If one assumes that proletarian revolution is not on the global agenda—an intelligent assumption—then there are corollaries...

...The latter insisted that any act abroad by a "bourgeois state," especially the United States in the twentieth century, was imperialist and malevolent by definition, just as such a state could not be transformed and deployed for any truly beneficial domestic purposes...

...This nexus of values and interests is what should determine whether an America foreign policy decision is right or wrong, not the fact that it is American...

...The Isolationist Fallacy...

...We would inevitably be resented...

...military is designated for MSC use...

...Still, the more it does belong to them, the more they, as a whole, must be seen as possessing real interests internationally, which a government must represent...

...and Bruce Russett and James S. Sutterlin's, "The UN in a New World Order," Foreign Affairs, Spring 1991...

...Let us hope that Clinton's election puts all this to rest...

...One is that the task of a democratic left is to fashion a reformist politics aimed at recasting the country by expanding social and economic democracy, diminishing racial and gender inequality, and reducing (preferably eliminating) the power of wealth and class...

...This approach can't quite escape the cold war...

...To avoid their misapplication, the democratic left needs to rid itself of three fallacies to which it is sometimes prone: The Motive Fallacy...

...Such circumstances demand not postures but credible ideas...

...Historically, the left has inclined sharply against American intervention abroad...

...Can one reasonably expect, within the context of the MSC, that the United States would chance revealing sources and means of intelligence to a Russian military commander, or a Russian to an American, even if Russo-American ties were good...

...How will Americans feel about life-anddeath decisions concerning American troops being made, if only in part, by authoritarian regimes accountable to nobody...

...Today's partial accord cannot be presumed eternal...

...Either way, something vital is ignored: this is not the nineteenth century...

...Democratic Problems...

...Moreover, the world may be militarily unipolar today, but it is economically both multipolar and increasingly linked...

...Either way, Bush's motives, let alone his braggadocio about the "Vietnam Syndrome," provide no answers to these questions...

...Yes, even if you will be at odds with that prime minister at the war's end...

...Regional collective security arrangements, although attractive in principle, have given little reason for optimism in practice...

...Would that necessitate command of the operation by one of those countries...

...Of course Saddam is a miscreant, they allowed, but the U.S...

...Once there were great hopes that the EC might provide an important model, yielding an effective collective security system for Europe...

...Political Problems...

...What was common to Bush and anti-interventionists was this: they confronted the Gulf with extraneous factors on their minds...

...This was not an issue in Desert Storm, where the mandate, to expel Saddam from Kuwait and not to occupy Iraq was followed, but it was when the 38th parallel was crossed during the Korean War...

...Saddam sought to do just this...

...The results...

...More to come: Saddam Hussein is sure to test the new American president soon...

...Plenty of them have been our allies...

...He extols Arabism, denounces imperialism, and is cheered by the exiled Palestinian leader Amin el-Husseini, the Mufti (roughly, Moslem primate) of Jerusalem...

...For a generation of Americans—my own—this calamitous intervention by Washington was a defining experience, bearing no resemblance to the anti-Nazi struggle...

...3 Considerable preparation and coordination would be necessary...

...The two have previously sought Axis patronage, and will surely do so again...

...What of intelligence sharing...

...What of a fascist coup in Moscow or a nuclear Teheran...

...Who will pay for it...

...Engagement, Not Isolationism As we enter 1993, the United States faces no serious military threats...

...Although we should undoubtedly be supportive of democratic regimes and movements around the world, we need to be wary of an old—sometimes idealistic, too often shrill and haughty—American tendency to tell other people that we must be their example...

...In Korea, troops were under a "unified command" headed by Douglas MacArthur, and in the Gulf the Security Council endorsed the use of "all necessary means" by a U.S.-led coalition to expel Iraq from Kuwait...

...I've tried to suggest some herein, with arguments aimed to encourage debate...

...If the United States is not to be the cop of the world, then a credible alternative must be developed...

...The "if" is all important, for if it could be persuasively demonstrated that the peril was not severe or that it was reversible short of military action, then such action was unwarranted...

...Like others, this dictator is susceptible to international pressures...

...Americans of the democratic left are, at the end of the cold war, in a peculiar position...

...In my discussion of the UN, I am greatly indebted to and have drawn considerably from these articles, although conclusions are my own...

...The world has changed radically...

...Who proves this better than His Majesty's troops, dispatched to dispatch him...

...Fallacies of the Left My point is this: anti-interventionist sentiments have good grounding...

...When Marx, in 22 • DISSENT the middle of the nineteenth century, postulated Britain as the model of capitalist development, he perceived it politically to be a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie: suffrage was restricted to a small portion of the population with means, and the state was its servant...

...Then, the evening news: starvation in Somalia, "ethnic cleansing" in Yugoslavia, the threat of a right-wing and/or neo-Stalinist coup in Moscow...

...Old signposts on new paths can be perilous, even if some terrain remains familiar...

...How, in this new world disorder, are we—the liberals, the democratic left—to think about American interventionism...

...If democracy succeeds in Russia, it will be Russian, not American, democracy...

...If all these complications arise in my mind, and I have no expertise in military matters, there must be scores more...

...A functional MSC is dependent on relations among the permanent members of the Security Council...

...There are, after all, varying forms of intervention...

...You are an activist in the British Labour party, long opposed to your country's imperialism...

...Since the UN's founding, the Security Council has authorized only two military operations, and both used ad hoc arrangements because institutionalized ones were absent...

...In both the MSC was nonfunctional...

...They demonstrate, however, that "collective security" is no easy matter...

...Still, the problems should not be underestimated...

...In fact, little can be done about this because representation must be on a state level...

...It seems to me that the answer is a straightforward yes, because one ought to distinguish the overwhelming immediate danger —a pro-Axis regime in the Mideast in the midst of World War II—from distrust of conservative leaders...

...WINTER • 1993 • 25...

...I am, of course, not being subtle: because Americans were lied to by their government, from Vietnam in the 1960s to Central America in the 1980s, part of the left tends, too often, to judge circumstances abroad by the motives of American leaders and not by the circumstances themselves...

...3 UN peacekeeping forces face some similar problems but are a matter distinct from the MSC, for they are not involved in large-scale action against an adversary but are deployed on a small scale by permission of the combatants and may only use weapons in self-defense...

...However, Washington's coalition-building and request for UN sanction, whatever its limits, was a form of collective security, in fact the only feasible one given at the time.' When the UN was founded, a Military Staff Committee (MSC) was established to enforce decisions of the Security Council...

...The increasing integration of the global economy, linked as it is to revolutions in communications and technology, has changed radically how countries and economies interact...

...It can nourish a right-wing approach (for instance, Patrick Buchanan's) as easily as a left-wing one...

...Who will command, and how will fragmented linguistic command on lower levels be made functional...

...and who, "realists" by self-acclamation, coddled Saddam Hussein, helping to set the stage for the Gulf War—after which they announced that the WINTER • 1993 • 21 "Vietnam syndrome" had been put to rest...

...Universal suffrage, he allowed in several writings, would create a very different situation, something ignored by Marxist-Leninists...

...Naive isolationism, no less than aggressive interventionism, occludes what we in the democratic left should champion in the post–cold war world: collective security...

...Let's imagine that an army division within the U.S...

...Second, when collective action is dominated by one power, the action can be identified by its foes with the ambitions of that power rather than with the sanction of the international community...

...Nobody can plausibly claim embargo alone was a feasible policy...

...First, one wouldn't want this arrangement to be the sole possibility on a regular basis, unless one craves for U.S...

...it is another to advocate an impossible, indeed perilous, disengagement from the world...

...But such sentiments can be well or badly applied...

...The Bush administration, between 1988-90, and the anti-interventionist left in 1990-91 labored under parallel misconceptions...

...There has been a putsch in Baghdad and, well, you don't know what to make of it...

...When Bush crowed that Desert Storm ended the "Vietnam Syndrome" and part of the left condoned a Vietnam analogy, both repeated cold war logic even though the cold war was over...

...It is 1941...

...Someone who spoke of the "threat" from Grenada may have some difficulty in being persuasive about real perils...

...I've just argued against the first—isolationism...

...Presumably, the troops would be composed of units earmarked for MSC use by the armed forces of several states...

...But if a scurrilous character helps fashion a tinderbox, does one refuse him water to put out the fire...

...The bad faith seemed endless...

...Dangers abound...

...Sure, he's a foul fellow, they conceded, but we're used to manipulating these types...

...Still, for democrats, there's a problem at least as potent as that of a superpower playing world cop...

...Admittedly, it is a distant prospect...

...Isolationism is simply untenable...

...2 Benjamin Rivlin, The Rediscovery of the UN Military Staff Committee (New York: Occasional Paper of the Ralph Bunche Institute on the UN of the City University of New York, May 1991), p. 3. Also, see Rivlin's "Regional Arrangements and the UN and the UN System for Collective Security and Conflict Resolution," International Relations, August 1992...

...This, however, must be done with sobriety, because collective security is a complicated matter...

...The EC's response to Yugoslavia will disabuse confidence on this score for a long time...

...And in Republican campaign bluster this past fall a foe of the war (Clinton) who avoided serving in it was excoriated while a proponent (Quayle) who dodged combat, allowing others to fight for his "principles," was a patriot...

...And today, after two years of embargo punctuated by a devastating war, he still reigns...

...Dictatorships are represented in the Security Council and in the General Assembly...

...They have a strategic assumption...

...A proper response—by the left or anyone else—to the invasion of Kuwait ought to have rested on two questions: (1) What danger, short and long term, was posed by Iraq...

...Isolationism today is born of previous misadventures abroad, reinforced by the end of the cold war...

...Political abuse has discredited the UN often enough in the past, and one wouldn't want to add a military dimension...

...During the Gulf crisis some critics presented collective security as the opposite of American maneuvers...

...The more success in doing so, the more "America" belongs to the American people as a whole...

...Making the MSC, or something like it, functional ought, at least, to be explored...

...It is one thing to be leery of American interventionism...

...There may be ways of grappling with such difficulties...

...Nowadays the War Powers Act would have to be taken into consideration...

...2 The MSC, on which sit military representatives of the permanent members of the Security Council, never became operational because of the cold war...

...For Rashid Ali, an enemy of his enemies is a friend...

...trucks with such stinkers regularly...

...So, what to do...

...How many more bombs could have been dropped had that hand been "free...

...The idea seemed so simple," one scholar remarks...

...How we conceive social democratic values in global as well as domestic affairs must be a function of the world we engage, not just the world in which those values were first formulated...

...Also, current permanent membership—and thus MSC representation —doesn't include several major world actors, such as Germany and Japan...

...Consider the logistics were the Security Council to authorize a large-scale action, but without one power dominating...

...I borrow this term from recent criticisms of the European Community (EC...

...When American legislators, scrutinizing the UN Charter in 1945, discussed use of U.S...

...Finally, when one power dominates a collective security action, there is a danger that it will, for its own reasons, disregard the parameters set by the Security Council...

...The result was no force at all, although the MSC still convenes monthly...

...But if one rejects this fundamentalist notion, then there is an "America" that is not simply a function of capitalist interests, powerful though they be...

...American might was essential to Hitler's defeat, and few today would find this objectionable, though a tiny segment of the left mechanically reapplied analyses of World War I to 1939, disastrously concluding that again only capitalist aggrandizement was at stake...

...If the "Bourgeois State Fallacy" lends itself to a denial of American interests per se, isolationism does the opposite, imagining that the United States can somehow detach itself from the world...

...Third, when one power dominates a justifiable action and its leader is George Bush (for example), that leader's previous behavior may cloud the issues at stake...

...troops to be the world's police...

...But at least European parliamentarians are elected...

...Bush's posture encouraged Saddam's aggression in the first place...

...Still, one frets a little that the new president, having been attacked on his draft record, might incline to "prove" himself...

...When a country is in a militarily secure position at a fluid historical moment it has a choice: it can seek shortsighted, short-term advantages or it can conceive the combination of historical fluidity and national security as a unique constellation enabling it to fashion long-range advantages for itself and the rest of the world...

...and (2) If great menace was at hand, what justifiable means could arrest it...

...This America, unavoidably, must have interests in a world of states...

...Bush and company imagined that Saddam Hussein could be "brought around...

...troops by the UN, they apparently assumed a treaty would have to be passed by the Senate...

...If force was the sole alternative in the Gulf, then given the strategic and institutional prerequisites for such a large-scale operation, the multinational (though American dominated) coalition fashioned by Washington, or something like it, was the only practical option...

...To do otherwise would be to succumb to "the motive fallacy" —allowing mistrust, however justified, of a political leader's motives to cloud your comprehension of an actual situation...

...What of different levels of technology among the armed forces of contributing states...

...Excluding China, for 24 • DISSENT example, from international security decisions would be dangerously foolhardy...

...The second, also illconceived, is to envisage the world as "unipolar" and conclude that the United States should take complete charge of global order and proselytize American democracy...

...No serious observer can argue that Iraq's invasion of Kuwait could have been handled effectively by the Arab League or the Gulf Cooperation Council...

...American leftists fought Franco...

...Sending food to Somalia, advocating a radical change in the International Monetary Fund's (IMF's) worldview or espousing Michael Harrington's idea of an Economic Security Council at the UN would be opposed by few...

...Echoes of such thinking extended beyond Leninist ranks...

...In Vietnam 58,000 American lives and countless Vietnamese were sacrificed in an undeclared war driven by simplistic cold war logic and fostered by repeated deceptions by successive administrations, Democratic and Republican...

...Anyway, after his war with Iran, he owes us and is susceptible to our entreaties...

...Unipolarism is a prescription for making Americans the cops of the post–cold war world, a responsibility we shouldn't shoulder, save in very exceptional circumstances, and cannot afford...

...the left must reinvent itself if the values dear to it—egalitarianism, human rights, social and economic justice, self-determination—are to have efficacy...

...This came from people who warned of the "threat" from Grenada...

...Vietnam, however, allowed no such assertion...

...Likewise, anti-interventionists (or some of them) thought Saddam could be brought around by embargo...

...Will economic disarray in Europe or economic chaos in Russia leave Americans unaffected...

...Yes, just as the war effort as a whole should have been supported...

...Yet this, like most generalizations, requires caveats...

...For most of the left, as for most Americans, this country's role in World War II was unambiguously justified...

...Bless the use of British troops—ordered by conservative Prime Minister Winston Churchill—to crush a third-world regime asserting independence...

...There is a "democracy deficit" at the UN...