Libya too?!

I was scrolling to the bottom of the page just now, when it occurred to me that this belief deserved even more slamming.

At the precise same time as the Libya intervention, France engaged in armed intervention on behalf of the Muslim Ouattara against the Christian Gbagbo in the Côte d’Ivoire. The US has troops all over, including in the middle of that often-violent standoff between the Koreas and in various stuff in Latin America on and off for the last century. The UK has had troops in Sierra Leone in the last decade. France sent troops to Christian Rwanda (albeit too late and in the wrong role). And, of course, there was that “different phenomenon” in the Balkans, where “Christendom” intervened mostly on behalf of Muslims against ethnic cleansing by other Christians. A much more convincing pattern is that intervention depends on perceived stake in the country* and ease of engagement. There is simply no empirical backing for your claims.

To John Mace, I think the West actually has been surprised at how poorly the Libyan rebels have fared. They clearly have manpower, just not the quality manpower. ISTM that France et al. originally were assuming air strikes would eliminate Qaddafi’s advantage and make it so clear that he would fall in the end that his supporters would abandon him and the regime would collapse in on itself. Since that hasn’t happened, they keep raising the stakes to make it clear the winner will definitely be the rebels, no matter what happens.

To RedFury, the continued siege on Misurata acts as a sufficient justification for continued attacks on the government. It may or may not be what was intended, but really all NATO needs is permissibility, not a mandate. The current troops by any straight reading are not an “occupation” force, so that clause is no barrier either.

All that said, it would be damned nice of the Qaddafi regime to topple, already!

EATA: I forgot to respond to the later portion of Commissar’s post, but I love how all his examples of Marxist predictions happening… haven’t actually happened.

*Interestingly, the two big stakes seem to be geography and colonial history/cultural links. Most of these countries are of so little material interest to the world at large that you really can’t justify intervention on material grounds. If you use these factors, you can explain Australia in Timor-Leste, France in Rwanda (ish) and Côte D’Ivoire, the US in Latin America, NATO in the Balkans,…

Well they’re puppets of the government of Christendom.

The Libyan people don’t really want free and fair elections; they were manipulated by the west into peacefully protesting.
Then Ghadaffi was manipulated by the west into shooting these peaceful protesters, thus triggering the crusade that we’d planned all along.

To me, it looks like the *rebels *are rebelling, but the people of Libya? Not so much.

Who are the rebels? Are we at all sure they are “the people?” Or, are they simply “anyone but Qaddafi?”

I need to go ahead and put “The world is not black and white” in my signature, as I am tired of having to point this out in seemingly every second post on these boards…

Look: the fact that Western nations love to go to war for reason X does not logically mean that they do not also love to go to war for reason Y. Would you argue that the historical Crusades were not a Christian campaign against Muslims because said Christians also spent a lot of time fighting each other? The world is not that simple.

As for your examples, those fall into other (non-Crusading) categories of Western warmongering. Among these is a colonial mindset that often sees ex-colonial masters being unable to leave their ex-subjects in peace. France in particular seems to suffer from an abject inability to let its empire go. The whole Yugoslavian debacle, meanwhile, falls into the category of Western states wishing to dominate all lands and peoples in their general vicinity (ditto for the American Empire and Latin America).

To summarize: Western Christian nations often go to war in order to re-subjugate their ex-colonies. They also often go to war to impose their own views on their neighbors. Finally, they often go to war as part of their centuries-old crusade against Islam.

I hope this clarifies global politics for you.

When we see the same phenomena repeated without regard to whether the target of intervention is Muslim or not, it is empirically unsound to conclude that being Muslim makes a difference. You have not offered a single shred of evidence for your position, and I have offered damning counter-evidence: namely, multiple cases in which the West has intervened on the behalf of Muslims, both against other Muslims and against Christians. Furthermore, in case you haven’t noticed, most of the Muslim nations in which intervention has taken place are either former colonies, in close proximity to European nations, or both. You haven’t made a deductive argument, either — you seem to be happy to make assertions without any backing whatsoever.

It’s nice that you can “clarify global politics” by hammering the entire world into an inaccurate ideology, but accuracy comes before clarity.

Finally, the intervention that we are discussing rarely qualifies as “warmongering”, in that in every case I mentioned, there was already a war when the West intervened. It is frankly pathetic that this needs to be pointed out to you, since you were posting on this very message board when the Libyan revolution and the Ivoirian crisis began. Your distortion of the recent past does not make your arguments any less shaky.

Yes, by definition.

From the reports I’ve seen there is broad support everywhere but ghadaffi’s heartland. And certainly the scale and distribution of the rebellion is pretty amazing for just one faction or political party.
And let’s not forget this is one uprising among many in the region. Are they all just niche groups?


Commissar,
just out of interest, can you answer two questions about a hypothetical? Let’s say that there was a humanitarian crisis happening somewhere in the world: many thousands of innocent civilians being murdered, raped etc.
The first question is: If there are countries that can intervene, militarily, should they do so?
The second question is: If a Western country were to intervene in this way, is it possible that they may do so purely out of humanitarian concern? IOW, is there always an underlying, “evil”, reason for any military intervention by the West?

On the contrary, I presented you with a coherent theory of Western aggression that aptly explains why Western nations choose to go to war in various scenarios. Yes, there are three such scenarios. Yes, I realize that you would prefer to have a one-size-fits all answer that explains all Western warmongering in one fell swoop. Unfortunately, the world is not that black and white.

Now, do you have an actual counter-argument to my theory other than the fact that you wish it were simpler?

That’s absurd. It is not warmongering to attack a nation as long as it is in the midst of a civil war? How do you justify such a distinction? As far as I can see, it is no more acceptable to launch an unprovoked attack against a war-torn nation than it is against one at peace with itself.

My position is that, in order to maintain global peace and human freedom, national sovereignty must be entirely absolute. I believe that this is the only way for us to progress as a species, for all other approaches result in imperialism and homogenization. I am perfectly willing to accept many millions of deaths as long as sovereign borders are not violated.

Thus, my answer to your first question is no.

My answer to your second question is that, yes, I believe that a Western nation can indeed choose to intervene for what it considers to be decent reasons, rather than self-interested ones. However, in light of my answer to the first question, I maintain that even a purely kindhearted intervention in a foreign nation is never justifiable, under any circumstances.

Reread my objection: it is not that your theory lacks parsimony, but that it has no empirical support. If you think there are different causes for the same phenomenon, you need to show some evidence of that. In other words, you need to show that a country’s status as Muslim has an impact on whether the West “warmongers” there. Since you have not done so (and indeed, there is no difference to be shown), your argument fails.

Words have meanings. “Warmongering” specifically means supporting war; the word “monger” means “to sell or peddle”. But when there is a war already, as is the case of every example we have discussed, the presence of another country in the conflict does not necessarily support war. In the case of the Côte d’Ivoire, for example, it almost certainly sped up the cessation of hostilities. When there are mass atrocities being committed, as clearly was the case in the Balkans, for example, intervention will usually decrease numbers of deaths. (In fact, that’s a very large part of why the public supports intervention and at least a substantial part of why governments are willing to mobilize in places where they have really minimal material interests.) Had you used a term like “violate sovereignty”, your post wouldn’t be so ridiculous.

Sovereignty over the bodies of “many millions” of people is a pretty incoherent value — though it’s an argument that gets played out every day all around the world. R2P is still a very new doctrine, though Aquinas (among others) expressed some of its core ideas. What really amuses me, though, is that you’re a communist who thinks sovereignty is absolute. Whodathunkit?

Offered without comment.

Obviously, sans telepathy, I will not be able to definitively prove to you what a given Western leader was thinking when he ordered an act of aggression against a foreign nation. What I can do, and what I have done, is offer you a theory that seems to explain why Western nations go to war. My proof? You already cited it. French adventures in Africa = category one (picking on ex-colonies). NATO in Yugoslavia = category two (picking on the neighbors). Christendom in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya = category three (picking on the the Muslims).

That is my theory, and the facts seem to support it. Now, do you have something that you believe falsifies this theory? If so, I would love to hear it.

Words do indeed have meanings, and you are in no position to reject these meanings on political or philosophical grounds. You posted the definitions; as you can see, none of them include a requirement that warmongerers only seek war against peaceful nations. There is nothing to support your absurd position that it is not warmongering to urge an attack on a strife-torn state.

Why does this surprise you? I would argue that this is the position held by many (if not most) present Communist thinkers. The Communist world has embraced peace and self-determination; it is the West that is unable to let go of its blood-lust and dreams of empire. As you may or may not have noticed, it is the glorious People’s Republic and Russia that tend to come down on the side of sovereignty in the Security Council. The sovereignty-violating warmongering tends to come from the three capitalist democracies that round out the organization.

You’re upset at that poster for usurping your prerogative? (Note: straight man has not done what you’ve accused him of doing.)

BBC is reporting the US will now use armed drones against the Libyan forces. Good-oh!

No, I have something that does falsify your theory: namely, that Western powers have intervened on behalf of Muslims as often as against Muslims (some interventions have been both). They have even intervened on behalf of Muslims against Christians*. Are you suggesting that Western nations are engaging in two precisely opposite foreign policies at once? Worse still, the vast bulk of its subsets could just as easily be put in the other two sections: Libya, Somalia, and Iraq (I)** were all once European colonies. Hence, your third category is completely ridiculous and pointless.

You also have the problem that the motivations you’ve posited for all three categories, in and of themselves, make no sense. They are, in essence, “because the West is evil” [not a real quote]. You need to do better than that. Marxist thought applied to IR (and everything else, really) generally ties actions to exploitation; you have entirely failed to do so. Exploitation isn’t a great explanation***, but at least it’s better than pure ideology. Try again.

Your defence of the term “warmongering” had been responded to before you posted it, and merits no further response.
*Actually, I can only think of one case of a Western power intervening on behalf of Christian rebels against a Muslim government (you can figure it out yourself). I can think of intervention going the other way in two places (Côte D’Ivoire and in the Balkans).

**Iraq II and Afghanistan weren’t interventions at all, but it’s amusing to see you trying to link them to Libya. France stayed out of both of them, remember? Canada and Italy stayed out of Iraq. The Arab League hasn’t been involved in either. The list goes on…

***Somalia, for example, really isn’t worth exploiting. Europe got all of Libya’s oil and most of its investment money under Qaddafi anyway. There is obviously an interest having peaceful and non-repressive neighbours, but that’s less “exploitation” and more “mutual interest”.

I assume that you refer to the puppets that Christendom leaves in its wake following a successful invasion of a Muslim nation. If so, welcome to neo-colonialism. Traitors are a dime a dozen, and it tends to be cheaper and easier to have them pretend to run the nation rather than admit to outright colonialism. This does not falsify the theory that Christian Western nations seek to invade Muslim states; it simply means that the world is not sufficiently black and white for your liking.

Were all three US colonies? No, they were not. Hence, that category is not sufficient to explain US warmongering against these three Muslim states. The “eternal Crusaders” category, meanwhile, explains it quite well.

I’m not sure how you reached that particular conclusion. Nothing I have said can be read to imply that the West is “evil,” as I reject all such meaningless Judeo-Christian terminology. The West is not evil; it is simply the product of its own cultural and historical identity. Part of that identity is an all-consuming hate of Islam. You see this in French attempts to quash Muslim identities. You see this in the rabid Islamo-phobia of the average US citizen (and many posters on this board, incidentally). And you see it in a constant willingness to attack Muslim nations at the drop of the hat.

It is important that we understand this phenomenon, for there can be no change without understanding. Simply saying that one party is “good” and the other “evil” adds nothing to the discourse. You have fundamentally misunderstood my theory if you believe that it ultimately comes down to such juvenile and archaic concepts.

The very use of the term “puppets” implies that the West does not hate them, even though they are Muslims. They just hate the other Muslims (who, as you apparently haven’t noticed, tend to be more secular than the ones on whose behalf the West has intervened.) You’re still talking in circles. Your explanation is still nonsensical, and still runs against empirical evidence.

Meanwhile, trying to defend this “crusader” nonsense has brought you back to neocolonialism. (It’s like you’ve conceded the point! This could be a breakthrough!) But when you talk about neocolonialism, you just make it some weaksauce normative imperative that Westerners have to run things (you still haven’t bothered to try to talk about exploitation —just as well, since it wouldn’t work anyway). But I think that’s funny. There aren’t a ton of people here who would disagree that these interventions have a lot to do with Westerners imposing certain values on regimes that have rejected them — it’s just that most of us think that not murdering protestors in the streets is a pretty good thing to value. (Wow, a lot of double negatives there… I should go to bed…)

Sidenote: your use of nonneutral terms like “warmongering” and “traitors” (and yes, they have amoral definitions — but you clearly aren’t interested in those) merits the summary of “evil”. If you want to reject moralism, then don’t be moralistic! It’s not hard, really.

TL;DR: you’re making a moral objection and pretending that it’s an observation of how the world works. I think that’s lame.

So “in order to maintain global peace…I am perfectly willing to accept many millions of deaths”? And note that the deaths we’re talking about aren’t the tyrants but specifically innocent civilians.

But thank you for responding to my hypothetical. I was just interested to know where you were coming from.

It’s not really a theory though, it’s just a bunch of ad-hoc rationalizations to fit an existing ideology.

Commissar: “It’s because you hate muslims”
Everyone else: “Well, what about the times we’ve aided muslims?”
Commissar: “In those cases it was because they were ex-colonies they wanted to re-conquer”
Everyone else: “What about situations like Kosovo?”
Commissar: “Well that was just picking on their neighbours”

This is not a theory, and you haven’t offered any facts to support your accusations.

Out of curiosity, who would they be? Who are the most prominent and influential “present Communist thinkers”?

And where would we find such a thing as a “Communist world”? It’s down to pretty much North Korea, last I looked. Even China - er, excuse me, “the glorious People’s Republic” as you call it, is totally given over to entrepreneurial capitalism now. Maybe you hadn’t noticed.
OK, anyway, you like self-determination. Great, so do most of us. Now, isn’t that exactly what we see in Libya today? An attempt by its people to throw off a dictator and implement the government desired by its people? Or is “self determination” in your parlance make a nation synonymous with whoever the current oppressive warlord is there?

As usual, readers should note that this is not Commissar’s actual position, at all. His actual position(s) on sovereignty vary depending on whether or not he’s offering up an apologia for tyrants and thugs who are anti-western. When discussing the Chinese, for example, his position morphs into:

As for why, all of a sudden, Commissar has developed an abiding respect for sovereignty and a dislike of (even alleged) aggressive, imperialistic warfare, and why he keeps alleging that the mostly-western audience of this board are a pack of “Crusader” states, despite the obviously erroneous nature of such a slur? I’ll leave that as an exercise for those reading along.