This is a follow up to my previous post about lessons Kevin Drum of WashingtonMonthly thinks we should learn from the Cold War as applied to the War on Terrorism. This is not a stand alone post.
The thrust of Kevin’s “Lessons from the Cold War” seems to be that containment works, so why not apply it to the War on Terrorism. I have already suggested that containment was merely the least bad option in the Cold War and I have also suggested as opposed to the Soviets our current enemies have proven to be much more willing to use whatever force they can get their hands on when attacking us. This makes the long time window needed for a successful containment action less appealing.
But another problem with the idea of containment in this context is that many of the people who support the use of the word ‘containment’ aren’t actually that interested in following through with the actions needed for successful containment. They talk about containment only because they must appear to have an alternative to war. This is why Kerry’s vote against the First Gulf War is so troubling. Saddam’s Iraq invaded Kuwait, and Kerry voted against turning Iraq back. Saddam decided to expand, and Kerry voted against containing him.
But that is the least of containment’s problems. One of the major weapons of containment is found in economic sanctions. But the fact is that economic sanctions are not tremendously effective, and also tend to hurt the lower economic class of civilians more than they hurt tyrants and their friends. Are you willing to potentially harden your heart when the tyrant parades people whom he is intentionally starving for propaganda benefit? Or will you give in and strengthen the tyrant’s position? Or will you pretend that you can separate the two while ignoring the Food-for-Oil scam which took advantage of your sympathy in the very recent past to provide billions of dollars for palaces and bribes?
Containment is about preventing the spread of ideologies to nearby countries. Are you going to be willing to support indigineous resistance movements like the Contras were in Nicaragua? Are you willing to accept that these movements might not be as savory as you might like but grit your teeth and support them because there is no one else?
Are you willing to befriend dictators who are unfriendly to your enemy’s cause but not as moral as you might like?
Since a prolonged ‘cold war’ against Islamism involves terrorists who have proven their interest in destroying such institutions as the 40,000 person occupied World Trade Center towers, a long term containment regime will include much stricter policing of America. Are you willing to soften civil rights protections in order to police America?
Will you support democratic movements in your ‘contained’ countries with weapons? If not, what will you do when the ‘contained’ countries slaughter the members of said movement? Will you treat them like we treat Cuba’s dissidents–as people to be interviewed by Oliver Stone while he suggests that Castro really tries to give them a fair trial?
If your answer to most of these questions is ‘no’, what does a containment policy entail other than telling the not nice people that they aren’t nice and letting them take over any place where they can bully people?
The Soviet Union fell not because of its pathetic economy, but because the Soviet government was not willing to murder millions of people as they had in the past. Do you believe that Islamists are close to that point?
P.S. Isn’t it also interesting that the containment policy now lauded by many on the left may have directly led to many of the conditions in the Middle East that we are now fighting? Is that a problem?
Nice piece of rhetoric.
quick analysis:
# Paragraphs starting with “But”: 2
# Rhetorical questions: 20
# Sentences starting with conjunction: 6 (3 but, 2 or, 1 since)
# Tastefully mixed metaphor: 1
“Savory character… grit your teeth” Yum!
Mac, I was going to post something along the lines of “well, that was just plain messy; I can’t tell what the heck he’s talking about, can you?”
But the analytical approach is so much better.
Don’t forget straw men (I count three) and sweeping generalizations (four).
Doug M.
Funny: I was able to follow Sebastian quite clearly.
Perhaps you’d like to explain what he’s on about in your rather more concise and decidedly more readable style, then?
OK: simply put, in order for containment to work a whole bunch of things must also happen, including quite a few unsavory ones and a couple that could be described as vile. Are people espousing that theory also ready to accept this? And if they aren’t, what’s their alternative plan? And does any of that plan include the phrase ‘And then a miracle happens’?
Or something like that: I have to get going. 🙂
This really needs to be broken out into two questions: 1) is containment a viable option against stateless terrorists? and 2) is containment effective against states with WMD who might provide them to terrorists.
The answer to #1 is an obvious no. But the answer to #2 is more debatable.
Containment is still effective against states themselves. Most of the arguments against containment above directly contradict our approach with North Korea, so I’m not at all certain it’s as simple as it’s being laid out here.
In the Cold War containment worked because the West had a huge cost advantage (nuclear over conventional forces); the Soviet Empire was a drain on Russian resources (capitalism as compared to communism); and that shinning city on the hill was western Europe as compared to eastern Europe (again the capitalism comparison).
Is containment an option, well the first hurdle is, are you willing to drop a thermo nuclear device the next time America (or her allies) is attacked. The cost advantage of nuclear power versus an asymetrical opponent and their state sponsors.
Edward, our problems with North Korea rest solely on its client state relationship with the PRC which complicates our options.
Edward, our problems with North Korea rest solely on its client state relationship with the PRC which complicates our options.
Are you arguing that we may as well not contain NK to the best of our abilities? Or that containment remains an effective tool even if only second best to invasion?
Does Drum talk about using containment in the war against terror or was he saying that it was working against Iraq? It was working against Iraq. I don’t understand it’s formulation in the war against terror organizations – though maybe we can say that the Michigan Militia, KKK, Posse Comitatus, etc. have been contained. Perhaps we can say, too, that we went to war with the Branch Davidians though that seemed to upset some on the right.
On NK neither, if you are to contain North Korea, it requires PRC to be an active player. Or to (or threaten to) change the rules. Containment often requires large expenditures in blood and money, the Korean War as an example.
Are you willing to soften civil rights protections in order to police America?
FBI had everything they needed to stop 911 except the analysis. What good is more information without the proper analysis? Sure, you might be able to track down a group of Texas democrats visiting New Mexico but what other benefits will the softening of civil rights protections bring about?
FBI had everything they needed to stop 911 except the analysis
Really, I won’t even touch “the wall” issue, so what is everything? I’m curious.
Just a note to pedants, on rereading my post I found a total of zero rhetorical questions. If you believe the answers to those questions are obvious, please share the obvious answers because I really don’t know.
Oops I lied, there is one rhetorical question. It begins with “Isn’t it also interesting” and could easily be “It is also interesting”. But all the other ones are serious questions which 12 comments in have received zero replies.
Sebastian, FYI: rhetorical questions are questions where the asker is not interested in getting an answer, but in making a statement. I certainly get the impression from your post that you’re more interested in making your statement than in getting any answers. You should not, therefore, be surprised when no one is interested in playing along with your rhetoric.
By the way, more on the Iraq invasion as an al-Qaeda recruitment tool…
Containment is just one strategy, yes or no to any one question depends on the situation and containment has costs and the avoidance of armed conflict is not necessarily one of them.
Thus your opening premise of containment as alternative strategy to avoid armed conflict was a false premise.
Jesurgislac, you write:
“FYI: rhetorical questions are questions where the asker is not interested in getting an answer, but in making a statement. I certainly get the impression from your post that you’re more interested in making your statement than in getting any answers.”
What is my statement? If it is so obvious that my questions are merely rhetorical surely you can tell me what my statement is.
Timmy, you write:
“Containment is just one strategy, yes or no to any one question depends on the situation and containment has costs and the avoidance of armed conflict is not necessarily one of them.”
Containment seems to be proposed as the major strategy by the Democratic Party (insomuch as it has any strategy whatsoever) for dealing with the war on terror. I can’t talk about everything, but I chose to talk about the most dominant proposed strategy in the Democratic Party. If I had chosen a minor strategy your point would be more helpful. As for the avoidance of armed conflict, it seems to be one of the major points that is being made about containment. (See Kevin’s post which started my discussion. It revolves almost entirely around avoiding armed force and not trying to bring democracy at the point of a gun.) Do you think that containment proponents in general do not see that as one of the biggest selling points? (Once again not a rhetorical question. I am trying to see where you are coming from).
[Note: I wrote this response late last night but forbore from posting to see how things developed. In the cold light of day it’s more polemical than it should be, in response to what I then perceived as the polemicism of the original post; although I’ve softened it somewhat, my apologies for any stridency contained herein.]
I’ve heard this argument made a dozen times before, so let me provide my standard response. While I have no problem acknowledging that realpolitik considerations must trump ideological considerations, this line of reasoning too often justifies capitulations that lead us to support tyrants when we don’t have to. Mossadegh, Saddam, Marcos, Pinochet, Suharto… I refuse to believe that we could not have done better.
[Please note that this is not a partisan attack; we’ve unnecessarily supported real bastards for more than fifty years now from both sides of the aisle.]
It strikes me as similar to abridging free speech (or any other civil liberty, for that matter). Yes, freedom of speech is not absolute and there are times when it is both right and proper to abridge it, but the general policy should be to keep it as free as possible with every restriction explicitly licensed. In the same way, our foreign policy should generally be a moral one, so that moral and ethical dimensions are as prominent as economic or geopolitical ones. No more reflexive “Well, these movements might aren’t as savory as I’d like but there is no one else” without examination; no more cavalier washing of the hands when our “angels with dirty faces” maim, torture or kill. Every single deviation from our moral policy must be explicitly and individually justified or be found wanting and discarded, and we should do our utmost to ensure that no deviations are required.
There are going to be times when we must ally with the lesser evil against the greater as in World War II, but we should regard these as the exception, not the rule. We should set our sights on a foreign policy that treats others as we would be treated, both as nations and individuals, and we should not allow ourselves to be seduced — by money, by power, by ease or, yes, by lives — into accepting anything less. It is the good thing to do; it is the wise thing to do; it is the right thing to do.
With this proviso, then, you and I are in accord. Without it, we will never agree.
What is my statement? If it is so obvious that my questions are merely rhetorical surely you can tell me what my statement is.
“Sometimes you gotta do nasty things in order to stop nastier things from happening.”
[That’s the shorter format, at least.]
The problem I have with most of your questions, Sebastian, is that the only honest answer that any of them can be given is “It depends”. Shorn of context, what other response is there? Might I suggest that, if you’re really interested in answers, you try asking more concrete questions?
“Sometimes you gotta do nasty things in order to stop nastier things from happening.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
As for the avoidance of armed conflict, it seems to be one of the major points that is being made about containment.
This is where I’m coming from, the statement, containment avoids armed conflict, is a flat out lie. The key drivers for any successful containment program are threats ultimately backed up by force or some type of armed conflict.
But maybe what they are proposing is the threat of containment instead of actually being engaged in a program of containment.
“Sometimes you gotta do nasty things in order to stop nastier things from happening.”
That is the statement of my rhetorical questions? Huh?
“Are you going to be willing to support indigineous resistance movements like the Contras were in Nicaragua?”
This translates in your mind to “Sometimes you gotta do nasty things in order to stop nastier things from happening.”? (Note this is closer to a rhetorical question than the previous ones because it denotes shock or surprise).
The idea that sometimes you gotta do nasty things in order to stop nstier things from happening is well understood by most people. If there was going to be a fair summary of the purpose behind my non-rhetorical questions it would be closer to “I worry that you use the word ‘containment’ but aren’t thinking about what containment really entails.”
And that worry is now definitely confirmed as a problem because you have retreated into ‘it depends’ as if it was all a hypothetical. We are talking about the war on terror here. You honestly don’t have any concrete ideas about how containment would work in the war on terror? Wow that reassures me.
That is the statement of my rhetorical questions? Huh?
That was the underlying motif of your questions as witnessed by three or four people, yes. I punched it up a little because I’d spent too much time on my previous post to worry overmuch about trying boil 20 rhetorical flourishes down to a single sentence.
If you’d like to render it as, “I worry that you use the word ‘containment’ but aren’t thinking about what containment really entails” that’s fine — it’s certainly a more obvious translation and, had you posted as such, you’d probably have avoided much of this flak — but it seems to me that not only are you worried, you’re implicitly asserting that a) nasty stuff will need to be done, b) your target audience hasn’t thought this through because c) they’re not as clear-thinking as you, and d) your target audience doesn’t have the balls to actually commit to what’s required of the strategy.
Or, to summarize by trading antagonism for trenchancy, “Sometimes you gotta do nasty things in order to stop nastier things from happening.”
[I’ll note that your persistent questioning of an unidentified audience, where a simple declaration of your worries would suffice, really doesn’t help your case. I’ll also reiterate that I’m not presuming to have innate knowledge of your intent; this is merely how I perceive your questioning.]
And that worry is now definitely confirmed as a problem because you have retreated into ‘it depends’ as if it was all a hypothetical.
No, I responded with “it depends” because it depends on the context. As in, “Shorn of context, what other response is there?”, the next sentence. For example, a question like…
Are you willing to potentially harden your heart when the tyrant parades people whom he is intentionally starving for propaganda benefit?
…can’t honestly be answered by anything comprehensible except “It depends”. Anyone’s going to be “willing to potentially” do almost anything; the question is either rhetorical, polemical or poorly-worded, and I’m not particularly inclined to take a stab at it given the general tone of your interrogatives.
As for your illustrative question, “Are you going to be willing to support indigineous resistance movements like the Contras were in Nicaragua?”, the obvious counter-question is: support them against what? Am I going to support them against Hitler? Sure. Against Mother Theresa? I rather think not. So who are we supporting them against? What are they like? Are we worried about the monstrosity of the regime itself, or its ties to something monstrous? How awful are the resistance relative to the regime? If we replace the regime by the resistance will there be any fundamental difference between the two or will it simply be “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”?
Another obvious counter-question: what are our alternatives? Are there other indigenous resistance movements to work with? What are they like? Can we create another movement? How much control do we have over this resistance? Can we trust them to do what they say? Can we trust them to do what we need? Can we shape them to better ends? Can we eliminate them if they prove intractable? Will this elimination require the support of another morally dubious resistance movement, ad infinitum?
More counter-questions: What kind of diplomatic pressure do we have on the regime in question? What kind of economic pressure? Will our foreign policy be jeopardized by these backdoor shenanigans? What kind of deniability can we maintain? How will our standing in the international community, and therefore our ability to implement other policies, be affected by this support?
In other words, it depends on the context.
Now you may think the answers to all these questions are obvious given the phrasing of the question, but I guarantee you that there are going to be fundamentally contentious issues when discussing exactly what “like the Contras were in Nicaragua” means. [I have a multi-part riff on the creeping use of “necessity” to cover “expediency” in American foreign policy over the past fifty years that I’m just dying to use. It makes this post seem positively Hemingwayan. You have been warned.] Bluntly, it looks like you’re trying to a smuggle in a boatload of unverbalized assumptions which, though they may be common in your usual circle of acquaintances, need explicit declaration if you’re going to be querying those of a different political disposition.
In other words, if you’re really interested in getting specific answers then please ask concrete questions.
NB: Because I assume you’re debating in good faith, I’m not going to venture into the prospect of answering yes to a question like “Are you willing to soften civil rights protections in order to police America?” and then having that misinterpreted as license for any destruction of any civil liberty whatsoever. Because I assume that not all those reading my responses do so in good faith, however, I’m even more chary of such simplistic questions.
You honestly don’t have any concrete ideas about how containment would work in the war on terror? Wow that reassures me.
You honestly never asked if we had any concrete ideas. Amazing how sometimes not asking the question fails to yield the answer.
Addendum: See, this is why I wanted to go with the trenchancy. Damn my inability to shut the hell up!
Did you think my questions might have potentially included resistance against Mother Theresa? Is the context of this discussion really so unclear? (Note to pedants, now I am using rhetorical questions. Are you incapable of understanding the difference. Oh, look a semi-rhetorical question.)
War against Terrorism is the context. It should probably be called the war against Islamist terrorism.
Even more specifically the context is containment as the major counter-narrative to dealing with the War on Terrorism currently being floated around by the Democratic party.
And I’m not buying the pathetic “you never asked” reply. Don’t be so flip.
If I may quote myself from the original post: “If your answer to most of these questions is ‘no’, what does a containment policy entail other than telling the not nice people that they aren’t nice and letting them take over any place where they can bully people? ”
That asks for ideas on containment. The somewhat annoyed tone of that particular question comes to fend off the typical empty appeals to strongly worded UN resolutions ‘condemning’ things.
And if you disagree with the premise that nasty things are typically needed in a containment regime you might offer counterexamples in important countries.
But instead there have been 24 posts of whining about rhetorical questions that weren’t even rhetorical questions. Uncomfortable and pointed questions are not always ‘rhetorical’. But even in arguing this I’m being sucked back into the pedantic gameplaying.
But at least I am better informed than I was before. It is quite apparent that the liberals on this board at least do not take containment seriously. We got wrapped up in rhetorical bullshit because you see containment as a rhetorical bludgeon instead of an important foreign policy idea. Ok. I get it. I’ll move on.
In the interests of comity…
Did you think my questions might have potentially included resistance against Mother Theresa? Is the context of this discussion really so unclear?
No, it was a reductio ad absurdem. I chose Mother Theresa (and Hitler, for that matter) as a convenient delimiter of the spectrum, deliberately chosen to be more extreme than anything in the present context. If you prefer a more realistic version, substitute “Allende” and “Suharto” for the benign and malign ends of the spectrum — both, conveniently, with whom the United States had extensive (and, in Allende’s case, terminal) dealings.
Uncomfortable and pointed questions are not always ‘rhetorical’.
You’ve missed the point. Your questions weren’t uncomfortable or pointed, they were unanswerable as posed in any meaningful sense. They were too broad, too vague, and too devoid of context. [We all got the larger context, Sebastian, it’s the specifics that are lacking. Saying “the war against Islamist terrorism” doesn’t answer any of my counter-questions, for example.] What’s more, they have the appearance of being deliberately unanswerable for rhetorical advantage; that’s part of what I, and I think Jesurgislac, are responding to, as witnessed by my a) through d) above.
I understand that you don’t feel that way but that’s not relevant: you’re trying to get answers from us “liberals on the board”. If we have problems with the way the questions are phrased it’s incumbent on you to try to clarify (more accurately, refine) the questions so that we can actually have a shot at answering them.
[Apologies for speaking for the other “liberals on the board”. Please feel free to disagree.]
We got wrapped up in rhetorical bullshit because you see containment as a rhetorical bludgeon instead of an important foreign policy idea.
Mind-reading. Ten yards. I’m fully prepared to engage in a dialogue about containment; I’m not prepared to do so under the auspices of a post filled with “rhetorical bludgeons”, which — as I’ve said about three times — is the way I perceive your original post.
Now I’m prepared to lay down the bludgeons of the present conversation, return to the beginning and start anew, provided you are willing to do likewise. I’m not willing, however, to bother trying to answer your questions as currently phrased nor in the tone currently used. [I considered doing the typical mutatis mutandis response, but decided that any analogue of your original post would be too damn antagonistic to accomplish anything.] If you’d like to refine your questions — and preferably reduce them in number so they’re more manageable — I’ll be more than happy to provide a constructive response, and I hope others will do likewise. Is that a deal?
Addendum: Since I’ve now apparently laid waste to three threads in short succession, I’m not going to post here for a while. Sebastian, I’ll be back in about a day or so; if you agree to my offer, I’ll lift my self-imposed ban long enough to give your refined questions the attention they deserve.
Sorry about that, folks. Enjoy the debate, should it rekindle.
Now that I’m back from saving Lake Erie from noxious sprawl, I can viciously attack the giant edifice of anthropogenic straw assembled herein.
Notably, Seabass is still missing the overall point of Clark’s article, which is that you cannot just declare “democracy time!” whenever you want — it takes years to prime the pump. So when the good people of Eastern Europe finally decided en masse that what they wanted most of all was “democracy, whiskey, sexy,” they threw off the yoke of their communist oppressors once and for all. And then there is the obvious and oh-so-crucial distinction between Al Qaeda and Saddam.
But let’s start at the beginning, and go back to the long telegram, shall we?
Hmmm. Seems relevant to our current struggle, don’t it?
Here’s the bottom line:
We’re good here, too:
And there we have the origins of containment doctrine. The nut of it is a reaffirmation of the ultimate power of American values; offered a choice between our vision of the world and that of the Soviets, Kennan believed the world would choose the former. Kennan proposed that we align ourselves with the national aspirations of anti-colonial movements in the Third World in order to present that choice most fully.
Now, as it was carried out by, say, the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, policy departed from doctrine at times. This really began with Nitze’ s NSC-68, written in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union’s successful atomic test, and the “loss” of China. So US policy shifted from favoring soft power to advocating peace through military strength. When the brothers Dulles came in, they took their own rhetoric a bit far in Guatemala and Iran, with unfortunate results. While our anti-support for the Greek communists was a Good Thing, I view these later interventions as fundamentally unnecessary, so I would echo Anarch’s plea for context. Churchill connived to make Allan Dulles shit his paints about communists taking over Iran, when really it was all about oil. Perhaps Sebastian has a different view. Regarding Vietnam, rather than recognizing Ho Chi Minh as first and foremost a nationalist and siding with him against the French, we pushed him to the Dark Side.
As to sanctions, I think they are bad policy as a general rule. It depends, however, what your ultimate goal is as well as the nature of the threat. In the case of Cuba, they’re idiotic; we ought to be flooding that country with subversive tourist dollars. In the case of Pakistan, they were a mistake as well, since we lost a handle on what was going on in that country. In North Korea, they’ve been basically useless. In Saddam’s case, however, they more or less worked, and with some tweaks, a crackdown on kickbacks, and some fancy diplomacy with France and Russia, they could have kept Saddam in his box.
One key point I would expect Seabass to make is that while Kennan saw the USSR as deterrable, unwilling to take risks, and likely to back down when challenged, Al Qaeda is none of those things. At the same time, however, a military conflict with Al Qaeda is not the worldwide conflagration inducing event that a tangle with the Red Army in Eastern Europe would have been.
And here we come to the big issue. Al Qaeda is a transnational movement, driven by glorification of 7th century Islam and a hatered of the seductive idolatry of the West. They are highly skilled at propaganda, which in our current media environment has become paramount. They operate in a region of the world that is sensitive to anything that smacks of imperialism, given its history.
As such, we have a conundrum. Occupy a Muslim country, and you hand Al Qaeda a propaganda victory unless you can shrug off the taint of imperialism long enough to build a democracy. The downside of failure is the failed state. The upside is likely to be more murky for a while. So it really hinges on the belief that the US can more or less unilaterally impose a democracy in an Arab country after removing a hostile regime. Is it easier, rather, to work from the outside?
This has been an exercise in disorganized thoughts.
More later.
“in order for containment to work a whole bunch of things must also happen”
Cite, please.
anthropomorphic sprawl, I mean.
Enjoyed reading your posts.
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