open Democracy News Analysis - The future of US foreign policy: a reply, Michael Lind - Comments

jdubow on "The future of US foreign policy: a reply"

jdubow — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 02:31:41 +0000

Michael Lind commits a crime against intelligence by stating "The only methods permissible in war are those detailed by international laws, such as the Geneva conventions". The Geneva conventions aren't international law. There is no one to enforce them and no society which includes them in its constitution. In fact the Geneva Conventions were developed so that war between countries accepting them could be more humane and have less cost in terms of money and legitimacy. They weren't, as is often said, a suicide pact by the signatories.

Most liberals assert that the Geneva Conventions apply to states they disapprove of while politically correct organizations (the Palestinians, the Iraqi terrorist and military groups, Hamas etc) don't have to follow them and can be as barbaric as they like. This is so illogical as to be beyond credibly dumb. Nowhere in the Geneva Conventions does it say that signatories have to follow the conventions and non-signatories don't. If the signatories are in combat with non signatories then all bets are off. There are advantages to maintaining discipline in your troops, so wholesale carnage shouldn't happen, but coercive interrogation of professional terrorists disguised as civilians or using civilians as human shields and planning the slaughter of innocents makes as much sense as the child that killed his parents claiming an exemption from prosecution because he is now an orphan. Making claims that are equivalent to "show me the person and I'll show youthe law" take the claimant out of the realm of serious commentators and into the realm of high school social groups.

charries on "The future of US foreign policy: a reply"

charries — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 21:10:03 +0000

Michael Lind appears genuinely to be unable to understand, firstly, that the history of the United States during the C19th and particularly during the years of the "Progressive" era was a history of Imperialism. The United States has been an empire since its foundation. No the Europe of 1815-1914 was not a century of peace but neither was the century during which the United staes pushed others aside and occupied territories from the Alleghenies to the Pacific, pushing Canadiand north, Mexicans south and numerous aboriginal nations all over the place. To call Roosevelt and Wilson progressives is perfectly reasonable but they were also racists, expansionists and imperialists, or are we to understand their actions in latin america and Asia to be morally superior to the policies of the European powers? And if so why? It seems that the last bulwark of American Exceptionalism is to be found among liberals who cannot loose hold of the nursery story that Wilson was an internationalist in love with democracy (he might have started in Georgia) and the equality of small nations (excepting Mexico) and the nursery storyteller's progeny, tales of derring do, in the cause of freedom and justice, with the USSR playing the bogeyman.

The United states has been ruled by governments which have pursued what they have defined as the "national" interest. That this has not been the interest of the common people of the US goes without saying, that GW Bush does not work in behalf of the average American is equally clear. The same is true of governments generally... but that is another and much more complex story.

The future of US foreign policy: a reply, Michael Lind

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Michael Lind's advocacy of a concert-of-power solution to the United States predicament in Iraq provoked a range of criticisms on openDemocracy. Here, he replies to his critics. Read the rest of this post...