Stop The Promotions
Posted on March 25th, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
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James makes an important point:
So I suppose I’m less concerned about Obama’s support for that mess of a war than the dignity-promotion principle — which, in a judgment I share with Daniel, remains a cipher at best.
Certainly, the idea that it is the U.S. government’s job to promote “dignity,” which is potentially even more nebulous and manipulable a concept than democracy, can lead to an endless number of pledges of support and funding. It represents not so much a recognition that democracy promotion is inherently flawed, destabilising and counterproductive as it does a belief that Mr. Bush and company have been too limited in their willingness to intervene in other countries at every level. Team Obama’s problem with the “freedom agenda” is that it has been too superficial, and they intend to go much deeper, which in turn implies that they apparently intend to get us stuck much deeper in the conflicts and problems of all those countries to which we are supposedly “inextricably” tied. Forget nation-building or building institutions, which are hard enough in the best of times–Team Obama calls for dignity-building, which is almost infinitely more open-ended and aimless. To repudiate the policies of hubris, they offer hubris cubed.
I would add that in the specific case of Lebanon the “human shields” aspect of the conflict has been disputed by Amnesty and others, but even if it were true that would not explain why so much of Beirut was reduced to rubble or why Lebanon’s infrastructure was systematically destroyed (or why civilians fleeing the south were repeatedly targeted by the IAF). It is not simply that the war killed many civilians and displaced a vast number, but that the campaign was conducted almost from the first day with a reckless disregard for the civilian population of Lebanon.
Filed under: foreign policy, politics
Here’s my reply. Democracy promotion has some pretty solid metrics.
1) Is the country you invaded now a legitimate, recognized democracy?
2) If yes, was the first elected government the political wing of a well known terrorist organization ?
If you get a yes, then a no, you’ve succeeded. Otherwise you’re kind of screwed.
Dignity promotion is, as you suggested, much more nebulous. At the same time, it could be orders of magnitude more effective BECAUSE there is no grand success of failure.
Just as the sovereignty of America lies not in its plains and mountains, nor in its government or monuments, but in its citizens; so too do the source of our foreign policy woes lie not in foreign governments but in foreign populations. Too often we have been careless, condescending, brutally violent or greedily negligent when dealing with brown people. The promotion of human dignity can be focused in small, measurable, and targeted ways improve our foreign relations by bettering the lives of our fellow men and women around the world while avoiding the ire (justified or not) of governments and other actors.
The nice thing about promoting human dignity is that you can start very small, and experiment, and find what works. For example, if America invades your country, destroys your government, kills your friends and relatives, erases your economy and then tells you “Smile, you’re in a democracy now!” you are, in my opinion, more likely to join a terrorist or violent sectarian group than a man who is given an opportunity to learn how to read and write, or who sees water and electricity improving his community.
We can act in small ways, without solving the worlds problems in one fell swoop as Governor Bush tried and failed to do. Over time, our soft power and political leverage will skyrocket, and we won’t have to fight impossible wars on the cheap to achieve that.
I agree with a fair amount of that, and I definitely agree that democracy promotion, especially as it has been carried out over the last few years, contributes directly to tremendous hostility against the U.S. It is undeniable that the regions where we mainly engage in commerce and development lending are the regions that view us very positively, while the regions we treat like colonies and bombing ranges despise us. You’ll get no argument from me that we should move away from the latter. I have my reservations about development aid, mainly on account of its limited effectiveness and its potential for leading to corruption.
“Too often we have been careless, condescending, brutally violent or greedily negligent when dealing with brown people.”
I wouldn’t limit it to “brown people”–our government has treated every kind of people in that fashion at one time or another in the last 60 years.
My concern about this “dignity promotion” business is that it doesn’t seem to mesh at all with Obama’s own support for what was done in Lebanon and taken together with his other statements about the vast extent of our security interests I see a recipe for innumerable open-ended commitments that we can neither afford nor need.
Certainly. “Moderation in all things” is a prudent catechism for a reason, and it’s possible an Obama administration would overreach. Then again, Senator Obama has displayed a distinctly unpolitician-like proclivity for admitting and correcting mistakes. Hopefully this new ideology of “dignity promotion” will be tempered with a conservative, accountable approach. If it’s not, well, that’s what the minority party and the fourth estate are for.
Thanks for responding; I came here via andrew sullivan, but I think I’ll stick around for a while and see what else you have to say.