posted
Posted this in a thread that I thought it was relevant to, but totally wasn't at all. Really need to start reading posts in their entirety rather than just skimming. Reposting it here. I've been pondering the US' role in the rest of the world when it came to stopping genocide and other related things. There's a lot of background info that was sort of present in the original thread than I don't have time to retype and clarify for this thread, so this may come out of left field for now. I'll clarify some things if they need clarifying later.
(And to clarify, I really like the word clarify)
I actually DO think it's reasonable to consider ourselves obligated to intervene, in some fashion. But that attempting to do so and then commit to creating a viable, self sustained political infrastructure is just not feasible. I also think that jumping in to punish people for things they did 10 years ago (a la Iraq) is not helpful. Lots of countries have done terrible things in the past, recent and distant. Including us.
But what would be the ramifications of a policy like this?: (Also, how do you properly end a sentence that is both a question and has the directive nature that a colon provides?)
Whenever a situation has escalated/degenerated to widescale genocide and/or other war crimes, to the extent that it's not physically possible to make the situation WORSE, the US comes in, kills the leaders of the side responsible and anyone who gets in the way, then gets out. As fast as possible. So the point is not to go around building nations, but to say, simply "Do not commit genocide, or we will come in and wreck you." The idea being that after a few instances of this, random warlords throughout the world will get the message and, at the very least, tone down the scale of their atrocities.
I'm specifying genocide because its something that I think we can universally agree is bad and can never be justified. There's a wide range of actions that could merit intervention, but deciding what/whether to do anything about each one could get complicated. It'd leave plenty of war torn areas with atrocities being committed just short of that, but eliminating one thing effectively seems better to me than doing a confused, ineffective job at eliminating a host of related issues.
I am not REMOTELY certain I support this idea. I'm just pondering the implications of it.
Posts: 4136 | Registered: Aug 2008
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You are setting up a basic black and white policy: If you commit Genocide--we will kill the leader of the country or organization responsible.
Determining responsibility could be an issue.
But let us go on. You argue that we will not do nation building. We will topple the government of whoever is committing the crime, but we won't stop the chaos that will result in loss of that country's government?
The problem is that Genocide is not a rational crime. It is a crime of irrationality--the total removal of some evil group, religion, race, party. Those who commit the crime are willing to sacrifice their own lives to do so.
Sure, some are politically motivate. Kill off the Kurds to remain in power thought Sadaam. But if we don't replace the fallen government, then perhaps those who hold true power will select a sacrificial pawn to be removed. Kill all X who vote against party Y. Offer Joe Y to the angry Americans. Then the rest of party Y has clear control of the country.
Posts: 1941 | Registered: Feb 2003
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posted
Its one thing to re-structure (Japan, S. Korea) but in those situations we stopped interacting as military and govt. and grew a relationship of nations and co-dependant economies. Iraq will require a long-term marshall prescence to defend against any power vacuum that results from our diminished control.
In the long term, it seems like the U.S. will colonize multiple parts of the middle-east or watch it all go back to men like Saddam and thusly undo everything that so many lives have been lost doing.
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quote:But let us go on. You argue that we will not do nation building. We will topple the government of whoever is committing the crime, but we won't stop the chaos that will result in loss of that country's government?
First, let me say again that this is simply a possibility I'm mulling over, not something I'm advocating. But a main thing I specified is that we'd only get involved in cases where the situation is ALREADY chaos, or enough people are dying that chaos wouldn't be any worse.
I don't think it ends up working largely because of the "determining responsibility" issue. Most obvious example being the Middle East: on both sides you can find people whose stated goal IS to eradicate the other, some of whom are willing to sacrifice themselves. But determining exactly who is responsible isn't necessarily feasible. Then again, the actual death toll numbers aren't nearly as big as the sense you'd get from the media, so the whole situation isn't necessarily relevant.
I am wondering what percentage of genocides are driven by people genuinely willing to sacrifice themselves. Because that's the real issue: Sure, governments may be willing to offer Joe Y as sacrificial lamb, but how many Joe Ys are going to be willing to be maneuvered into that position after a few other examples?
[ December 21, 2010, 12:38 PM: Message edited by: Raymond Arnold ]
Posts: 4136 | Registered: Aug 2008
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posted
I do not see anything that makes genocide neccesarily irrational. There are many rational reasons to want to eliminate an entire groups of people, we ( a majority of the Western world and to go on a limb I would even say a majority of the world period) just consider it to be neccesarily immoral.
The problem with helping countries or regions that suffer from totalitarian regimes, or even theoretically a genocidal democracy, is that the costs are simply too high to make it feasible. Simply "bombing them into the stone age" sets the stage for a failed state ala Somalia etc. Attempting to "nation build" ends in costly ventures such as Iraq and Afghanistan that simply do not pay off when conducted unilaterally,or at the very least mostly funded by a single payer. Given that at the moment there is really only a single nation capable of expeditionary military action, the USA, there is a rather small chance of the burdensome cost of nation building changing anytime soon.
Also I would not call the United State's "nation building" process to be colonzation in any sense of the term beyond potentially the use of the nation as a logistics hub ( friendly naval or air force base). The United States generally does not even get a better bargaining position in business deals within the nations that it works in. Iraq is a wonderful example of this as I do believe almost none, if any, of the oil contracts went to an American firm. What benefits the United States, read some wonderful literature such as the Atlanic Charter from WWII, is the opening of markets no matter who happens to dominate the market.
That and many genocides are conducted by peoples willing to sacrifice themselves. I hate to use this example, but Germany is always a wonderful one in this regard. I would say even the Turks in their mass killing of Armenians (they fought more than enough wars in the regions) and even the Serbs to a point. They did take quite a few beatings before they stopped trying to wipe out non-Slavs etc. I could go back further into history, but I don't know how much that would interest anyone.
Posts: 1753 | Registered: May 2001
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quote:Originally posted by Black Fox: I do not see anything that makes genocide neccesarily irrational.
The fact that genocide is, in its typical form, based on fatally flawed concepts of race and a conception of the human species as stratified among different races with different worth, or different levels of "human-ness," and that it is done to "purge" or to "purify" a region of one racial group seen as being insidiously degenerate and a drag on the gene pool, then yes, genocide is necessarily based on an irrational concept.
quote: There are many rational reasons to want to eliminate an entire group of people.
Perhaps. But genocide particularly is the attempt to eliminate people according to a hierarchy of race which does not *actually* exist. Meaning it is an attempt to accomplish a goal which can never be defined- because there remains as as much genetic variation within the specified "master" group as between the groups warring.
There may be politically rational reasons for wanting to destroy groups of people- but genocide is not a rational act, no matter the motivation, because it is based in an irrational premise.
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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posted
genocide could be perfectly 'rational' in many cases. it was often 'rational' in the past; it was better to purge lands of people rather than try to contain them and assimilate them, when the vaguaries of empire meant that subjugated populations would strike back the instant there was a waning of hegemony. It was the de-facto standard before the achaemenid dynasty did that whole satrapies thing.
i've listened to some people argue that if the international community was a bit different, it would be effectively rational to cleanse areas of the world like afghanistan and replace them with white colonists rather than try to liberate them, since it's a 'near impossible task to reform people who grew up there' — at the very least model the wars of expansion after how the israelis are pursuing ethnic cleansing in what they at least consider to be their rational self-interest.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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posted
Sure, in the sense that genocide entails mass murder, and mass murder can be considered rational.
Ethnic cleansing for political reasons can be rational, as you say. It's just not rational in the most basic sense of "ethnic cleansing," as it was conceptualized, by, say, the Nazis.
Sort of like the war on terror- it is irrational to fight a war which has no obtainable objective (the elimination of a political strategy), but not irrational to actually fight terrorists.
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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posted
You realize that there are many notions of race that have nothing to do with some kind of biological component. In that sense race does exist, as much as any other concept of identity does. If I get a bunch of people in a room to say and believe that they are X and for the most part other peoples do as well. Well.. they certainly seem to be X. You can say its silly to think that they believe they are X, but I don't think we can strip that from them. Now, how deep that identity goes, is it simply subjective or is there some objective basis, is something else.
You also just said it was rational so I will basically take that as it is.
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