perfidy

Was arguing with Mike Burton the other day. Mike is uncomfortable with the U.S. exercising its military might in the Middle East. He was basically making the argument, "What right do we have to interfere?" Fair enough. So I asked Mike, a huge Spiderman fan, "What about, 'With great power comes great responsibility'"?” 

We have a moral obligation to use our power for good. We must think very carefully, to determine what course of action will bring about the most good. During the Cold War, we allied ourselves with some repugnant dictators, but with the larger purpose of fighting a greater evil, communism. Now, that reason no longer exists - we need no longer coddle jackbooted thugs in third world capitals. When we look at Saddam Hussein, we can see that he is clearly, solidly in the repugnant dictator category. He oppresses the Iraqi people. Rape, torture, arbitrary executions, economic privation and near total lack of freedom is the daily lot of the Iraqi citizen. 

Also, he gives support to terrorists of all stripes as a matter of state policy. He has invaded his neighbors. He has developed chemical and biological weapons, and used them. He has attempted to develop nuclear weapons, with the help of the French. There is a strong likelihood that Saddam would either provide such weapons to terrorists, or adopt terrorist methodology himself to deliver those weapons to American targets. These are all reasons that pretty much everyone agrees the world would be a better place if Saddam predeceased us. (The French have been very careful not to talk about Iraq - their opposition is based on America, not Iraq.) 

On the other side of the moral calculus, we must take into consideration the consequences of using military force. This, I think, is where John has the most problems. Mike seems to have more problems with justifications for war, even admitting that Saddam is the star of his own personal villainous Jackasserama. There are two groups of sane arguments against a U.S. invasion. One focuses on the practical aspects:

1) Civilian casualties 

2) Diplomatic blowback / Increase anti-Americanism worldwide 

3) Destabilize the Middle East / Make things worse

The other is more theoretical.

1) Just war theory / Applying the Golden Rule to International relations 

2) Moral Equivalence Arguments 

3) Great Power politics

In the first category, we have some potentially serious - less than optimal - outcomes. Are we justified in invading when things might end up worse? Are we justified in invading - even if we succeed in all our goals - if thirty thousand Iraqis die? These are the core questions. 

First, based on my study of the U.S. military, I can virtually guarantee that the now imminent conflict with Iraq will be swift and relatively bloodless. There will be no Stalingrads. (Ve vill not have much fun in Stalingrad, no.) The U.S. armed forces are in the early stages of a revolution in military affairs that is equal in importance to the adoption of gunpowder. No other nation has begun this process. The result is that our military has an unparalleled comparative lethality and effectiveness. 

The war will be over in two or three weeks, and civilian casualties will be low - probably less than 2000, though we will hear complaints from the left that casualties are in the tens or even hundreds of thousands. The Iraqi army will for the most part simply surrender. Those elements of the Army that do resist will be swiftly annihilated. The Iraqi army is to the U.S. military what the Zulus were to the British army. And yes, I know about Isandhlwhana - which was the result of stupendous idiocy on the part of the British commander - who did absolutely everything wrong. More important, as an example, was Rourke's Drift, where 100 British soldiers held off 5000 Zulus for almost a day, killing half of them in the process. Technology and discipline allowed the British to defeat vastly numerically superior forces. The same will happen in Iraq. (and the Iraqi army isn't as big as it once was) 

So, that objection is out of the way. The other two are closely related, and harder to figure. However, given that the calculated risk in terms of battlefield and civilian casualties is so low, that gives us wriggle room in our calculations for the other factors. 

Here are some points to consider. The French have always been pains in the ass. Their behavior over the last several months should come as no particular surprise, though we should wonder what they hope to gain from it. Nearly every European nation except France, Germany and Belgium officially supports us. Around the world, the reaction is mixed, but hardly uniformly against us. China and Russia are opposed, but China is still officially a communist nation for Christ's sake, and Russia has legitimate sphere of influence style arguments against American involvement, as well as lucrative trade deals and mountains of uncollected debt with the current regime. 

All of these nations are acting in what they perceive to be their own national interest. They are accorded no opprobrium for doing so. Only the United States is targeted with this criticism. The French, for example, have been fighting for months in the Ivory Coast without UN sanction. The African terrorists didn't destroy the Eiffel tower and kill 3000 French citizens, either. 

I don't think the world will hate us any more (or any less) after we induce Saddam to shuffle off this mortal coil. Most people will breathe a quiet sigh of relief that someone did the job. And though they wish the cowboy Americans weren't so damnably powerful, they certainly weren't going to do the job themselves. 

In the next couple years, I think that the real diplomatic blowback will be on the French and the Germans. They have pissed us off. They will be locked out of the settlement in post war Iraq. France's arrogant attempts to usurp leadership of the still nascent European superstate have alarmed much of southern and eastern Europe. I don't think that they'll be able to quietly slip through the pro-French EU constitution. And they won't get any help from us. France's position in the world has already been weakened, and will be weakened further once we successfully and very quickly put an end to Saddam's regime. 

As for destabilizing the Middle East, that's not a bug, that's a feature. We will be installed directly in the geopolitical heart of the Middle East. We'll have bases that no one will be able to dictate the use of but us. U.S. Army, Air Force and Marine units will be bordering Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia; the three largest surviving Islamic terrorist supporting nations. We will be able to put the arm on them, but good. 

And remember, similar fears were voiced about the first Gulf War. The eruption of the "Arab street" after our stunning victory was rather… anticlimactic. I think the same will be true here. And as for making things worse in Iraq, I don't see how they could be significantly worse. If we succeed in establishing a new polity that is as prosperous and free as say, South Korea in 1970, we will have achieved a great victory. If we do better - and we have in the past - then that's just gravy. A prosperous and free Iraq would virtually win the war on terrorism all by itself.

Well, Steve, rather shockingly I find myself agreeing with you on almost all counts, and here I was all ready to grab you by the belt and pull you back from the frogbashing precipice over which have leapt so many of our best and brightest. I only hope they don't think that after all this, they stand a chance of getting in on the ground floor of any reconstruction, nation-building, Marshall Plan, or accolades that would ensue in the event of a successful overthrow of Saddam. They can go pound salt.

I only have this to say in defense of the duplicitous pointy-mustache farmers: any nation that can invent bearnaise sauce can't be all bad. Mmmmmm........creamy.......

As Al Bundy said, it is good to hate the French. Cheese eating surrender monkeys. We can all have fun mocking the French. Every Bastille Day, I have a mournful drink in honor of all those who went to the guillotine to ensure French Liberty. 

France presents a problem for the United States. Despite being our nominal ally, they have obstructed us at every turn for at least the last six months. We should not be terribly surprised; the French live for being obstructionist. A classic example was France’s departure from NATO at the height of the cold war, only to return after the Soviet Union was safely on the dustbin of history. 

But the problem is not entirely with France. We were the ones who went to the UN, allowing them to entangle us in endless UN shenanigans. In the short term, though, these maneuverings will amount to little; we will eventually tell the UN to piss up a rope and invade Iraq. Saddam will get his long deserved appointment with justice, and the Iraqi people will dance in the streets of Baghdad once we liberate it. With a little luck and some hard work, the United States, Britain and Australia will create a halfway decent nation there with rule of law, a fair amount of freedom and a marked absence of oppression, murder, torture and rape. I think that we can reasonably expect that in ten years, Iraq will be on par politically and economically with 60s/70s South Korea, with the hope that in the not too distant future, it might follow the same path and become a real democracy. 

However, it is painfully clear that whatever France's reasons for their stubborn resistance, it has nothing to do with Iraq. The possibility of a free, prosperous and Saddam free Iraq does not move the French. The fact that they have effectively allied with a malignant thug, effects them not at all. Protestations that "War is Failure" from Chirac (however ironically appropriate coming from a French leader) are obviously disingenuous because at this very moment, French forces are fighting a bloody war in the Ivory Coast in West Africa, without UN sanction. 

It seems that there are several interlocking motives for recent French obnoxiousness. One, reaching for power in the EU. Two, fear and loathing at how strong the American hegemonic hyper-puissance has become. Three, internal French domestic issues. And finally, naked self interest. 

First the naked self interest. France's willingness to undermine UN sanctions that France itself had voted for goes back to the end of the first Cold War. France was the primary buyer of Iraqi oil in the oil for food program, France made millions selling arms to Iraq, and was shipping spare parts as recently as a couple weeks ago. France stands to make more billions if oil deals currently in place were ever acted on and sanctions lifted. 

As for the EU, France's desire to be the leader of a European superstate has long been commented on. For reasons unknown to mortal man, the Germans have gone along with this, loyally licking France's boots ever since the EU came into being. France's real opinions on the position of other nations in the nascent European federal state were on display when, after several East European leaders signed a statement in support of the U.S., President Chirac said that they had all "Missed a good opportunity to keep quiet." This is of course stupendously arrogant. Imagine the international reaction to an American President saying exactly the same thing, and adding that it "was not well brought up behavior." 

France, despite copious evidence that it is a partially industrialized, barely second-tier world power with almost no ability to project military power beyond its own borders and scarcely more power within its borders, still thinks that this is the Napoleonic age and that the world should tremble before France, and accede to her merest whim. France envisions its future as a counterweight to American power - more on that in a minute. France has been the driving force behind the evolution of the European Common Market of the 60s into the European Union of today. At every stage, the French have pushed to have ever more power over European citizens concentrated in a group of unelected bureaucrats in Brussels. 

It is worth noting that whenever one of these proposals has come to a vote, in any nation, it has failed. The entire EU project is undemocratic, imposed by fiat from above. France feels that it will benefit from this situation, that the power of all the other nations in Europe can be harnessed to the pursuit of French aims. And since the Americans had conveniently neutered the Germans, the only thing in the way was the British. France has used the recent international hooforah as a pretext to try to strengthen its position winthin the EU. This may have backfired, as the southern and eastern tiers of Europe are less and less willing to follow the French lead. And the British, well, they have never liked following the French. Which leaves the French in charge of a coalition consisting of themselves, Germany and Belgium. The "Unilateral" U.S. has the support of six times as many European nations as France. 

Along with the French desire to control the EU, the French also oppose the U.S. on more general terms. As the sole remaining superpower, the U.S. at this moment is in a position of absolutely unparalleled strength in relation to the rest of the world - more so even than in the immediate aftermath of WWII. Without sounding too jingoistic, we could defeat all of the navies of the world faster than they could assemble. We, and we alone, can project overwhelming military power anywhere on the globe. And we can do this without breaking the bank - we are spending half (as a percentage of GDP) on defense as we were during the worst years of the Cold War. The American economy, despite a recent mild downturn, is still outperforming every other economy. Japan and Europe are in the doldrums, and have been for over a decade. American innovation, dynamism and cultural ubiquity scare the French. 

When I was in college for the second time, a foreign exchange student from France was a friend of mine. He had asked me to take him into town so that he could purchase a car. He had expressed a clear need for a large, American car with a V8 engine. While we were waiting for the appointed time, he began complaining about "American Cultural Hegemony." This was too much for me, as I was sitting there watching someone smoking Marlboros, wearing Levis, listening to rock music, and about to go buy a big American V8 car. "Dude, no one held a gun to your head! You bought in of your own free will!" But he was exercised over Euro Disney and McDonalds in the City of Lights. People buy it because they like it. 

We offend them. Just by existing. By being so simplisme yet so perversely successful and powerful. France is attempting to build a coalition to form a counterweight to American power. Germany, China and Russia have signed on, along with every tinpot dictator or islamofascist theocracy who fears that they're next on our list. But how far will this get them? Three vetoes on the on the UN security council and not a lot more. It will be decades before Russia is a functioning nation again, they are nothing even close to a world power. They have moved into the third world. China is struggling to leave the third world, but with half a billion desperately poor, barely literate peasants moving into the cities at an ever growing rate, it may be likelier that China collapses than it becomes a true world power. And Germany is subject to the same stultifying effects of EU overregulation as France. This is not a coalition of weasels, it's an ad hoc alliance of failed states masquerading as world powers. 

Finally, you have internal French domestic politics. The large suburbs of unassimilated and radicalized Islamic youth circling every French city must weigh heavily on the French subconscious, though I think they prefer not to think about openly. Not upsetting this large minority must be a factor in French decision making. Also, like Schroeder, Chirac has parlayed populist anti-Americanism into electoral success. 

It has annoyed me that the media has continually harped on the fact that America's unilateralism has damaged our relations with our allies. But the fact is, the consequences of French intransigence and pride will hit them a lot harder when they realize that they've pissed off not merely an American administration, but a large fraction of the American people. My step grandfather fought in WWII and he still hasn't forgiven the Japanese. The American public is often forgetful, but by no means always. They have damaged their relations with us.

The PM of Serbia has been assassinated in Belgrade. Let's hope this time is different from the last time, mmkay?