This is a thought experiment. If you can’t speculate on hypotheticals, don’t play.
The US military announces tomorrow that they have developed a magic weapon that can make everyone within its range fall asleep for 48 hours. They immediately announce their intent to use it to embark on a policy of regime change in the world’s oppressed countries.
The first up is Burma. Ruled by a government every bit as shitty as Saddam’s, exporting drugs, with a democratically-elected Nobel Laureate waiting to take over. The US wants to use the magic gun to oust SLORC without a shot fired, without any casualties, without infrastructure damage, and without any major vested interest that might be an ulterior motive.
The UN refuses repeated appeals to get involved; it insists that only it can authorize force, and they refuse to threaten the Burmese junta. It will be the US/UK/Oz alliance again, or no one.
In this case, I probably wouldn’t object to the proposed action but I don’t know if I would support it… I suppose I’d be a bit worried as to the ramifications of allowing only the U.S. to choose which countries need a regime change… as well as what kind of regime to replace it with.
I’d welcome it. I could really use 48 hours of sleep.
On a more serious note, the electronic killing bomb has been in the works for awhile now. That would be interesting.
If it were the French military who developed it first, would the US mind them “sorting a country out”? Howbout if they chose to chose to carry sleeping settlers out of the West Bank and lay them comfortably on a Mediterranean beach, for example?
I’m all for human rights abuse prevention, but doing so direct invasive intervention is extremely dangerous in terms of regional stability and long term consequences and should be undertaken with extreme care and diplomatic delicacy.
OK, a hypothetical question about your hypothetical weapon:
Rather than looking at things on a case-by-case basis, has the US or the UN, either one, suggested developing some framework of standards to provide guidance on what countries the ‘sleep bomb’ should be used on?
If the UN hasn’t, then they should. If the UN has specifically declined to provide that sort of guidance to the US, then I’d be in favor of the US acting alone. But the first step for the US is to declare what their standards are for regime change, rather than asking for a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on whatever country happens to pop into Wolfowitz’ mind next, like we did this time.
To be blunt, I think there are good reasons for the long-standing international consensus against violating another nation’s sovereignty. I think there are exceptions to that rule, but I think “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind”, as TJ put it, requires us to spell out the circumstances that we believe justify such intervention.
If we’re going to say the old rules are insufficient - and IMHO they are - then IMHO we ought to say what rules we’re going to replace them with. This applies whether or not any lives are lost in such interventions.