Righteous clamor
Samantha Powers and Morton Abramowitz, of the Century Foundation, seem to have a confidence in "righteous clamor" that I lack.
A Broken System
From their column:
"The international system is broken, at least when it comes to Africa. The Darfur death toll may as yet pale when compared with Rwanda's, but if 800,000 Darfurians were to be murdered next week, neither the states individually nor the Security Council as a whole would be prepared to muster a speedy and robust response. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a crisis in Africa -- no matter how heavy the prospective death toll -- that would generate the consensus needed not merely to feed civilians but to save them.
There is a moral and political void in the world when it comes to coping with catastrophes in Africa -- a void that will not be filled by reforming the Security Council. The problem is the states that make up the council. Darfur shows that dedicated advocacy can move democracies to denounce atrocities and provide generous humanitarian help. What the earnest advocacy rarely does is propel the powerful to stop the killing. For that to happen, righteous clamor must reach a high enough pitch that politicians in democratic states are persuaded to do a difficult thing: take domestic political risks in pursuit of polices that do not serve their immediate interests, that can be financially costly and that provide no clear - cut exit strategies."
Part of this problem is political will. But, largely, this is a problem of an American government and American people that have now been burned by humanitarian adventures in foreign lands and a world community more gun-shy for the whole experience. The whole adventure, as illustrated by the coordination of the U.N. intervention in Lebanon, was already going to be a logistical nightmare. When people have to put the lives of their countrymen and women on the line, they need some assurances that it's not a suicide mission, that others are going to shoulder the burden with them, and that the people being saved are going to be somewhat grateful and support their efforts rather than the protracted mess we face in Iraq, today.
The truth is that folks of the West always want their cake and eat it too. Iraq is a terrible war for oil, liberals argue, but trust us when we say that intervening in Sudan is all about the people.
Yeah, cynicism kind of cuts both ways. You spend 5 years tearing down the motivations of people intervening in Iraq, kind of puts you in a tough spot when you're looking for support on Sudan.
I guess that's what really fucks us up in the West.
We spend so much time taking for granted each other and our mutual efforts necessary to tackle important problems like Iraq and Sudan, that when we fuck it all up with all of our bullshitting and pressuring and manipulating and otherwise fucking each other over, we look up from all of that dust and say stupidly to ourselves:
"Why doesn't anyone want to help me?"
Maybe it's because we're such fuckin' assholes, you think?
Yeah, I think.
And being assholes is not something that righteous clamor is going to get us over.
Getting honest with ourselves is the only real option.
Either that or get used to genocide, assholes. In fact, look forward to one once you pull our troops out of Iraq, righteous clamoring ones.
Your choice.
Oh the nobility of it all. It just about breaks my heart.
2 comments:
Sure, you're right.
However, there is an appreciable difference between the call for action in Darfur and the sales pitch for Iraq.
I know that there were plenty of people who really believed that liberation/regime change were adequate justification for the invasion in Iraq, but they weren't pitched that way.
Iraq was sold as a necessary action in the war on terror. Whether that assessment was known bullshit or actual error is secondary to the fact it was sold as a necessity to protect the USA.
The Darfur argument is rooted and offered in terms of humanitarianism.
Sure, the left's hatred of the Iraq war undermines its ability to get action in Darfur. Agreed.
But I don't think it's really fair to equivocate the competing advocacies. One seems a little more honest than the other to me.
I also think it's worth mentioning that we might be able to get something done in Sudan if we weren't embroiled in a really fucking nasty situation in Iraq.
I don't want to play "which tyranny is worse", but you know what I mean.
Yours truly,
John Brown of KS
Yeah, I agree, John.
At least people talking about invading in Sudan have been honest about their motivations. And, I agree that they are, likely, for good faith reasons. Though I tend to believe that the Administration, down deep, was committed to its best reasons for invading Iraq - removing Saddam Hussein - up front, even as I was not just pissed off about the lying, which I had come to expect from public officials when dealing with a public that they had resigned themselves to being too stupid to know the difference between a good rationale and a bad rationale. I also was pissed off that a substantial element of the international/foreign policy community in America had warned them about problems with this invasion and they just shrugged them off like no whoop.
Now, as I see all of the competing issues of paternalism, elitism, self-centeredness, etc. from elements on both the left and the right and how they view one another in light of them, I understand, better, why they communicate so poorly and why they've come to blow off one another and much of the rest of the world that doesn't agree with them or understand their concerns.
And much of it is because of the very kind of "righteous clamor" that Samantha is talking about in this piece. It's this constant haranguing one another in light of honest engagement/discussion/debate that just wears on the various parties in political circles and eventually leaves them tuning out such folks completely.
And a substantial proportion of the public just tunes them both out completely.
And they never seem to get the message. And that just breaks down communication even further.
And, at some point, you want to just scream at them, "Why don't you try acting like a fuckin' grown up and talking to me rather than treating me like a fuckin' child because I don't agree with you or I don't understand your position."
I just end up feeling that with everyone, these days, since I am often but not necessarily intentionally contrarian and certainly independent and just trying to add something that might get us past all of the obvious dysfunction of tactics.
I actually care quite a bit about Darfur. I cared a lot about Iraq before it. I just share the public's weariness with having people harangue me or drag me into such efforts without talking with me honestly about them and engaging my concerns and listening to me when I share them. I'm tired of the arrogant politics of liberal/conservative Father Knows Best. Especially when I follow as closely as I do, when I have studied such politics so, generally, thoroughly, and when nothing but my unemcumbered submission will ever satisfy these assholes who are always on my back to support their cause.
It's just not what I bargained for when I got into politics.
I just wanted to help people. I imagine a lot of people come to it with far less than all of that.
I actually do want to do something about Darfur. And I think both the Bush Administration and liberal activists have kind of fucked things for us on this issue, right now, until people get over feeling war-weary and willing to help out on something where lives are at risk and where there is a realistic need, especially on the back end, to have cooperation from participants.
I just don't see a realistic opening on this, right now, until we cut through some of the political bullshit and people are up for it (and we can secure partners and share the security risks and develop a workable intervention plan, etc. etc.).
I'm up for trying whenever we can build the political will on this. But inspiring people to volunteer for such an effort and building a workable coalition will need to happen learning from the mistakes of this war in Iraq, not repeating them. And as long as liberals are convinced that the only problem with the war in Iraq was that a conservative did it and not them and that it wasn't multilateral enough, we're going to have the same old bullshit politics on this that makes things more vulnerable on the ground.
Someone needs to do something, preferably with a credible, relatively independent Sudanese lead, I think, and with a multilateral force that takes its cues from trustworthy Sudanese leadership that might be able to transition into at least a group of folks who could be responsible for democratic elections so that the Sudanese people can determine their own fate and to provide necessary force levels and supports to bring some security to the area.
Whatever we do, though, it needs to be argued in public, dissents need to be listened to and taken seriously, it needs to be something Americans and French and British or whatever populations are on board with, generally, and preferably has U.N. Security Council and General Assembly backing and respects the self-determination claims of the Sudanese people (that is what fucks up these well-intentioned Good Samaritan efforts every time, Vietnam and Iraq included, I think).
We can do that. But I do think that reducing and ending the bullshit politics of periodic self-righteous ascendancy (liberals win and should win because liberals are right all the time and conservatives can fuck off if they don't appreciate our final and better understanding of everything and vice versa; I'm picking on liberals because they've been more guilty of it, here lately) would go a long way to just have more substantive discussions like "Now, how do we get this done?" instead of "Now is this a liberal cause or a conservative cause and how do I position around it as a function of that allignment?"
It's all kind of fuckin' stupid when you step back from it all and if you give a shit about such causes. But we get so wrapped up in the "righteous clamoring" all the time, I think, that we lose track of the fact that a lot of people think we just look like assholes when we do it.
As someone who has spent much of his life being one such asshole:).
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