In a discussion with a friend on Facebook, I started thinking about why I disagree with interventionism. This basically encapsulates my views.
There have been slaughters of humanity since humans arrived on the scene. I have a very negative view of human nature, rather Augustinian in view, in which humans are not good at heart or wanting the best for all by nature, but will do amazingly brutal things to each other in the "State of Nature" as Locke put it, unless restrained by the forces of society. I'd imagine the first early man to start cave painting the antelopes he saw running around was killed by the first art critic with an antelope bone to the back of the head when the critic didn't like the painting, and so it went. Here in the West, where 4000 years of slow process into the question of human rights and civil society has made it possible to have advanced culture and relative peace, we've still had our bouts of utter destruction of life and property. And that's "advanced" by the standard of much of the world where life is cheap and shooting your neighbor in an argument about a property line or a chicken is a noble act. I hate to seem like someone who doesn't care, I don't like seeing humans brutal to humans, but simply put there is nothing we can do about it. Humans had been amazing evil to each other before the USA came on the scene, and if humanity is lucky enough to make it 10,000 years from now and the USA is long gone, humans will still be brutal to each other. The Brits tried to police the world in the 19th to 20th Centuries, and look where they are now -- they have created a huge surveillance state where saying the wrong thing is "crimethink" and they posture over the useless Falkland Islands with 4th rate Argentina. Yes, some military actions are absolutely necessary -- the original action in Afghanistan after 9/11 was. But what we needed to do rather than nation build was find OBL, kill OBL and his associates, stay just long enough to let the Afghanis decide what madman they wanted running their "nation" (scare quotes intentional) and then leave them to their own devices.
So I disagree politely with those who think that intervention is a necessity: *interventions* are never necessary. Some *military actions* are, but internventionism is simply moral do-goodism that saps our resources and is at best a band aid on the gaping wound of dark human nature. Look at Iraq -- we were still occupying the country, and the Shia who had been empowered by our glorious "intervention" there started funding death squads to go about the country shooting people for listening to music, teaching subjects that were considered "unIslamic" in universities, and those just having some fun and trying to enjoy their lives. By at least come accounts, the political situation is as bad now as it was under Saddam Hussein, but certainly Iraq has not become -- nor ever will become -- a liberal (small "L"), Jeffersonian republic where human rights are respected and the dignity of the person is considered paramount in legislation and law enforcement.
It's a brutal world out there, and the USA will go bankrupt trying to crusade to make it better. Better we stay in our own backyard and deal with our issues than make the world "safe." Here are some wise words from a long dead US President, John Quincy Adams, about America's role in the world:
"Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.... She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit...."
-- John Quincy Adams, 1821
No comments:
Post a Comment