Reid, I'm going to "break character" for a sec. I was enjoying our debate before, and I wish I hadn't shut it down. I’ve thrown some insults your way recently, but this has never been personal for me, and I haven’t taken any of your insults personally. As far as I'm concerned, we're engaged in argument as sport. So, without further ado, I’m going to respond to your last lengthy post, and you can choose whether or not you want to respond to it…
1. In addition to citing sources that don't support your claims, there's another problem with your arguments. Because your insults have no basis in fact at all, they also have no teeth, and they’re *really* easy to dismiss. Here's an example.
Leaving aside times when your arguments are implicitly moral (and those are the important ones, but I’ll get into that at the very end), there are several examples when you explicitly demand that morality be brought into the discussion. The last turn in the discussion was initiated by you demanding that I make a moral argument.
And then, afterwards, you try to shame me for being immoral:
And, of course, immediately after the first quotation in this post, you say:
You deny you're engaged in "moral thinking", but yet you admit you provide "moral criticisms". There's no meaningful distinction conveyed by these terms; you're simply contradicting yourself. So the accusation that it's "only in my head" doesn't stick at all. It’s incredibly easy to dismiss. If you want your insults to be effective, try making arguments that have some basis in reality.
2. Here's another example where your insults are completely meaningless because you show a complete disregard for facts:
There's so much that's wrong about this.
First, the idea that I’m the only person who cared about this would be unconvincing to anyone who has even the slightest awareness of basic facts about the issue. Discussion about the red line continued to be hugely relevant even several weeks ago, when Trump fired cruise missiles into Syria. It was crucial, Trump believed, to distinguish himself from his predecessor, and demonstrate that, unlike Obama, he was willing to stand by his word and use force. Furthermore, criticism of Obama for not enforcing the redline was a frequent talking point made by Republicans while he was still president.
Second, enforcing the red line wasn’t a “hardline” position. Even some senior officials within the Obama administration wished that Obama had enforced it. John Kerry,
for example, thought failing to enforce it was a real problem. Many liberals criticized Obama for failing to do anything to stop or slow the suffering in Syria, and saw it as a deep moral failing that he did nothing. But if Obama had intervened in 2013, his response would have been much more limited, and would have had less of an impact than what many liberal interventions have hoped for. It likely would have been a much smaller attack that fell far short of regime change, that it would have been comparable to Trump’s cruise missile strike several weeks ago.
Third, it's hilarious that you'd accuse me of being uninformed about this, when, again, your source contradicts rather than confirms your claims. (It's especially funny in light of your complete failure to show that I cite sources that don't confirm my claims.) It's true that Obama was speaking off the cuff when he made his remarks, but it’s completely false that he “minimized” them afterwards. It ultimately didn’t matter that they were improvised. After Obama made his statement, the administration leaned into it. I’m citing
your source:
And the article goes on and on about how the administration continued to own Obama's red line, and how they accepted it as binding. So: read your sources before you cite them?
Fourth, your remark about going toe-to-toe with a nuclear power is factually incorrect. In 2012 and 2013, Russia had not yet entered the Syrian Civil War, so, at the time, there was not a real possibility of escalation between two nuclear powers if the US went after Assad in the same way that there is today. In fact, some who criticize Obama on his Syria policy blame him for enabling Russia to regain a “foothold in the Middle East”. It’s a frequently stated conservative talking point. Here’s just
one example:
So that’s that. I should add: none of what I’ve said about Obama has anything to do with differences of opinion between us. It has only to do clarifying basic facts that are indisputable, but which you, nonetheless, seem eager to deny. Do you see why I got pissy when you didn’t cite your sources yet? Okay, next point.
3. Your citation of the 9/11 Commission Report is completely dishonest. If you quoted the next line of the text, it would undermine your basic claim about what the passage you cited report means. In full, it says:
"
That does not mean U.S. choices have been wrong." There's no disavowal here of American foreign policy. There's no concession that America's actions in the Middle East weren't justified, or that they were bad. The commission is merely calling for a PR program (or something like it) to fix the US' image in the Middle East. This isn't a moral confession of wrong doing or a repudiation of the fundamental soundness of US foreign policy.
But, larger picture, the mere fact that US foreign policy has undesirable and unintended consequences doesn't mean that its foreign policy is wrong or misguided. (There are, of course, other measures according to which such judgments can be made.) Nobody would deny the principle of
blowback. Unintended consequences are a feature of foreign policy decisions that decision makers have to live with. They aren’t necessarily the product of negligence or excessive force or some other impropriety, nor that a decision was a bad or unjust (although, of course, they can be). In some cases, decisions may have undesirable consequences, but sometimes such choices are made because there’s no acceptable alternative to doing nothing.
4. And now we’re approaching the crux of the difference between our views. One of your key contentions in your last post to me was this:
When I said you should think in less moralistic terms, I was challenging an assumption that is implicit in many of your statements about US foreign policy, such as this one. The “assumption” is compatible with, although not necessarily implied by, the previous quotation. I expect you’ll deny you subscribe to it yourself, but I invite you to distinguish your view from it. Aside from the post above, which you evidently intended to apply both to Afghanistan and to Russia, the closest you get to explicitly stating it was when you said this in an even earlier post:
When I responded to this, I said it was “reflective of a imperialistic, racist, condescending attitude that’s prevalent on the left”. And I stand by that. It seems to share a lot in common with an argument that’s prominent amongst the anti-war left, and it goes something like this: American intervention is the single greatest cause of instability in the Middle East (and, even, in the world). As long as the US has a military presence there, the chaos will continue. However, since we are the greatest cause of instability, if we leave, it will stop. Therefore, we should leave.
Those who make this argument also claim that despite what our media’s reports to the contrary, the US is the dominant aggressor in the world order; what appears to us like hostile, unprovoked attacks from foreign powers, are actually defensive responses to our provocations. (This sounds a lot like your argument about revenge, quoted above.)
It’s fundamentally a moral analysis. It explains why the world is so hostile to us by blaming us for our own actions, and it offers a prescription for what to do about it (namely, withdraw). And in doing so, it grossly exaggerates just how influential American power is, by narcissistically assuming that, when bad things happen in the world, it’s likely because of us.
Now I’m not denying that US foreign policy can be exceptionally aggressive, or that what appears to us to be unprovoked aggression from our enemies can at times in fact be defense. I’m merely challenging the monocausal explanation for why the world is such a hostile place which can be inferred from this view. My disclaimer above about compatibility rather than implication applies, but nonetheless you
seem to buy into it, both in the two quotations cited above, but also here, when you say:
The implication here is that if the US leaves the Middle East, or if it changes its policies, terrorism will stop. That argument is, for starters, factually incorrect; i.e., it can be disproven by empirical evidence. To take one really famous example, ISIS was able to conquer areas in western Iraq so quickly in June 2014 in part because Obama honored Iraqi PM al-Maliki’s request to evacuate US troops in 2011. If the US troops were there, they likely would have prevented ISIS’ rapid expansion into Iraq.
It is also incorrect because it fails to take into account that most of the victims of terrorism are not Americans — or even westerners. The vast majority of Islamist terrorist attacks are committed by Muslims against other Muslims in Muslim majority countries. If Salafi-jihadist terrorists are killing other Muslims, their motivations cannot be reduced simply to revenge against Americans because of our foreign policy.
Which gets me back to another point I made earlier (although it is a secondary point): the idea that the anti-war position that I described above is actually condescending, even as it purports to be progressive. Despite American atrocities and American meddling in the Middle East, it’s fundamentally wrong, and even insulting to those who live there, to suggest that those living in the region merely react to outside sources such as the US, which alone have agency.
What it completely fails to appreciate is the extent to which
authenticity is a key driving force in the Middle East. The pursuit of authenticity shapes the ambitions, actions and goals of many who live in the region. There are economic, social and political conditions that are responsible for why life is so difficult in the Middle East. But, for many, the destitution is accompanied by a profound sense of humiliation, that has as much to do with history and culture as with material welfare. For many, Islam and regional history and culture provide the conceptual frameworks through which they understand and make sense of their hardships, and they also provide the solutions.
I think it's difficult for Americans to take seriously the idea that belonging to a once great civilization that now lies in ruin can be a motivating political force, that some are even willing to die for. I think there are several reasons.
First of all, because we take for granted what being citizens of the world’s super power does for our personal self-confidence and self-image. I expect that even Americans who criticize America and don’t particularly identify with it are nonetheless bolstered by being a citizen of the country. Furthermore, globalization and urban cosmopolitanism in the United States has given many city dwellers an impression that just because local and national bonds don't matter to them, that they no longer matter to anyone in the world anymore. But they do -- in some cases, immensely.
But, secondly, because our worldview is fundamentally materialist, our vision of the good life has mostly to do with securing economic prosperity, and we generally eschew highly ideological visions of what we should pursue in life (this is sometimes describe as the "American aversion to -isms"). Thus, most analyses of Islamic terrorism in the West assume that the primary motivations for terrorism are socio-economic, and a response to material destitution, rather than ideological or religious ones. My point is that, for many in the Middle East, that destitution is inflected with cultural and religious significance in terms of how it is understood. For example, the view of ISIS is that the material poverty and the political powerlessness is a divine punishment for spiritual and religious decadence, so the solution to the material hardship is to establish a caliphate where a purer and more authentic form of Islam can be practiced. The material and the spiritual concerns go hand and hand.
Muslims and others living in the Middle East want to construct their own societies on their own terms, by drawing from their own local historical, cultural and religious resources. But there is widespread disagreement between them over the type of society is the best, what is the most authentic way to conceive of the relation between Islam and the nation-state, and the boundaries that should exist between states given the diverse demographic composition of the region. Just to talk about one particularly high profile example: Al-Qaida may have justified 9/11 with anti-imperialist, anti-US, anti-Israel arguments, and I suspect that they truly hated the US and Israel. But at the same time, the organizations ultimate goal has been to establish a caliphate, just as ISIS has. In fact, one of key disagreements between ISIS and al-Qaida was that al-Qaida believed ISIS was mistaken in trying to create a caliphate too soon, when it could easily just be destroyed by the US, and so damage al-Qaida’s reputation in the eyes of non-militant, non-radicalized Muslims. Al-Qaida wanted to wait until the conditions for a caliphate were more favorable. One feature of that was to try to push the US out of the Middle East, and to halt its support for regimes in the region that made it impossible for al-Qaida to establish its caliphate. Alternatively, ISIS was able to capitalize on the weakening of the autocratic Arab regimes during the Arab Spring.
The US has interests in the Middle East, and as such a large military power, it also plays a role there, and pretty big one at that. But it’s only one force among many, and the US’ ability to influence the region is weakening, in part, as authoritarian governments, with whom it’s easier for the US to collaborate, strain and are torn apart, and substate actors with transnational ambitions take their place, and as regional superpowers meddle in the affairs of other countries in order to advance their own agendas.
5. You make a similar argument about Russia as you make about the Middle East. When you said that America acting out of self-interest causes other countries to seek revenge, you were talking about Russia. I’ll quote you again in full this time:
Again, if I can attribute to you any kind of logical consistency at all, your argument here is that Russia's humiliation during the 90s can be understood as a response to the US' aggressive foreign policy pertaining to Russia, specifically, something having to do with foreign investment.
Although the Russians’ sense of humiliation was not completely indifferent to the US (big picture, one of the problems was the perception that Russia was not an equal to the US, as the USSR had been -- it was no longer a bipolar world, but a unipolar one), I highly doubt it had much to do with foreign investment. The Russian economy was in a miserable decline through much of 90s, largely because it was reeling as it shifted from a planned economy to a free-market economy. I highly doubt that it was a very appealing opportunity for those who wanted to park there money somewhere. I bet Russia would’ve been happy to take money from private American financiers. Still: cite an example, and show me I’m wrong.
And you mention Putin’s own soreness about that period. But if there’s something related to US foreign policy that Putin is particularly sore about from the 90s and 2000s, it’s the extension of NATO membership to former Soviet-bloc states, including those that border Russia, and the Color Revolutions. Foreign investment in the 90s wasn’t particularly humiliating to Russia, especially not to Putin — if anything, he’s gained personally from it and it’s made him incredibly wealth. In fact, when Putin reached out to Bush during both presidents’ first terms, he was hoping he’d be able to convince Bush to help Russia receive foreign private investment from the US to bolster the Russian economy. But eventually it didn’t matter because global oil prices shot up, and Russia was able to grow its economy thanks to its large oil reserves.
But the big point I’m making is that the Russian sense of humiliation, and it’s aggression, is not simply caused by the US. It has in large part to do with how Russians perceive themselves and the unique destiny of Russia within the global community. Russia imagines itself to be a distinct civilization, *in* both the East and the West, but not really *of* either. In much of the 19th century (and now in the 21st century after Communism), it saw its form of Christianity and its culture as one which provides a powerful alternative to the decadence of the West. The sense of humiliation has more to do with the belief that Russia’s economic conditions and its stature as a player in the global arena and the respect it receives, don’t match its self-image as a dominant, influential society.
6. Which, brings us to my conclusion. At the end of your last post to me, you said this:
That is
one of my points. Still, you may claim to agree with me about my conclusion (as you do in that quotation), but your actual arguments about the Middle East indicate that you've understood it through a fundamentally moralistic paradigm, and the same goes for Russia. Going back to the very beginning of this post, I said your arguments are implicitly moral. In what I’ve written about your views on Russia and the Middle East in this post, my underlying contention has been that because you see things through a specific moralistic framework, your interpretations about them is completely skewed and one-sided. You can say you agree with my principle that "thinking in moral term is poor to understand why a country acts", but clearly you don't actually believe it, because the idea isn't reflected in your actual arguments about US foreign policy and international relations.
There. Done.
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