Month: February 2007

by Charles

A little over a year ago I wrote about Hugo Chavez’s grasping quest for power in Venezuela and I thought it would be helpful to recap some of his "accomplishments" in the past twelve months.  I refer to him as a communist because, according to the Economist, he refers to himself as one.  As for him being a dictator, well, dictator is as does.  The mindset is there.  Considering the policies he is pursuing, it looks clear to me that there are strong similarities in the actions of Chavez and Mugabe and Castro.  The primary difference is that Venezuela is fortunate enough to be sitting on huge oil reserves, thus softening the damaging impacts felt from his bad decisions.  Mugabe and Castro don’t have that geological luxury, and their tenures have been much longer, so there’s been more time to see how their decisions have unfolded.  But before opining further, some examples of Chavez’s moves.

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by hilzoy

Peter Beinart has a piece in TNR about why he supported the war:

“For myself, perhaps the most honest reply is this: because Kanan Makiya did. 

When I first saw Makiya–the Iraqi exile who has devoted his life to chronicling Saddam Hussein’s crimes–I recognized the type: gentle, disheveled, distracted, obsessed. He reminded me of the South African exiles who occasionally wandered through my house as a kid. Once, many years ago, I asked one of them how the United States could aid the anti-apartheid struggle. Congress could impose sanctions, he responded. Sure, sure, I said impatiently. But what else? Well, he replied with a chuckle, if the United States were a different country, it would help the African National Congress liberate South Africa by force.”

He also writes about why he got it wrong:

“I was willing to gamble, too–partly, I suppose, because, in the era of the all-volunteer military, I wasn’t gambling with my own life. And partly because I didn’t think I was gambling many of my countrymen’s. I had come of age in that surreal period between Panama and Afghanistan, when the United States won wars easily and those wars benefited the people on whose soil they were fought. It’s a truism that American intellectuals have long been seduced by revolution. In the 1930s, some grew intoxicated with the revolutionary potential of the Soviet Union. In the 1960s, some felt the same way about Cuba. In the 1990s, I grew intoxicated with the revolutionary potential of the United States. 

Some non-Americans did, too. “All the Iraqi democratic voices that still exist, all the leaders and potential leaders who still survive,” wrote Salman Rushdie in November 2002, “are asking, even pleading for the proposed regime change. Will the American and European left make the mistake of being so eager to oppose Bush that they end up seeming to back Saddam Hussein?” 

I couldn’t answer that then. It seemed irrefutable. But there was an answer, and it was the one I heard from that South African many years ago. It begins with a painful realization about the United States: We can’t be the country those Iraqis wanted us to be. We lack the wisdom and the virtue to remake the world through preventive war. That’s why a liberal international order, like a liberal domestic one, restrains the use of force–because it assumes that no nation is governed by angels, including our own. And it’s why liberals must be anti-utopian, because the United States cannot be a benign power and a messianic one at the same time. That’s not to say the United States can never intervene to stop aggression or genocide. It’s not even to say that we can’t, in favorable circumstances and with enormous effort, help build democracy once we’re there. But it does mean that, when our fellow democracies largely oppose a war–as they did in Vietnam and Iraq–because they think we’re deluding ourselves about either our capacities or our motives, they’re probably right. Being a liberal, as opposed to a neoconservative, means recognizing that the United States has no monopoly on insight or righteousness. Some Iraqis might have been desperate enough to trust the United States with unconstrained power. But we shouldn’t have trusted ourselves.”

I admire Peter Beinart’s willingness to think about what he got wrong, and why. But while I think that he’s right to say that we can’t be the country the Iraqis and South Africans wanted us to be — a country wise enough to liberate other countries by force — there’s another mistake lurking in the train of thought he describes. Namely:

It’s not just that we aren’t the country Beinart wanted to think we were; it’s that war is not the instrument he thought it was.

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by hilzoy

From the International Herald Tribune:

“It sounds like some incredibly dark Grimm Brothers fairy tale. Each night before the sun sets, thousands of children march in grim procession along dusty roads that take them from their rural villages to larger towns. The children are afraid to sleep in their beds, terrified that they will be abducted by a madman who will force them into a marauding guerrilla army that hunts down their friends, families, and loved ones.

The fleeing children sleep in churches, empty schools, makeshift shelters, and alleyways. And every morning at sunrise, the children walk home, free for another day.”

These are the ‘Night Commuters’ of northern Uganda:

(photo copyright Bruno Stevens.)

For years, they have walked from their homes to the nearest large town each night to avoid being kidnapped by Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army, which uses children as soldiers, servants, and sex slaves. Normally, there are 30-40,000 night commuters; more when times are bad.

Times have not been so bad recently, but they are about to get worse.

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