LP and CC allude to the case of Haiti, implying that things are worse there now as a result of U.S. intervention than before. LP quotes Chomsky describing an episode in 1994 of vicious attacks on demonstrators by armed gangs while U.S. troops stand by, doing nothing, or even worse, mobilizing to protect some rich folks' neighborhoods from possible attack. Not quite clear in LP's post is the fact that the attackers were holdovers from the Duvalier/Cedras regime -- army, police, paramilitaries -- and the victims were Aristide supporters. The problem here was not peace-keeping, but failure to keep the peace. For lack of U.S. troops, these demonstrators would not have been safer. Obviously there would have been no such demonstration at all.
Assertions here that things are worse now in Haiti than before have been unsupported. It happens that this could be true as far as the economy goes, with no small credit to U.S./IMF machinations, but to charge the remnants of the Aristide movement with the greater responsibility for human rights abuses is pretty low. Much like blaming the victim.
The illogic here is the simultaneous implication that the U.S. intervention did too much and not enough. Too much by moving in the first place, and by asserting malign class interests, and not enough by failing to ensure democracy and human rights. To associate the failures or ill intentions of the intervention with the case for protecting human rights is positively perverse. Any outside intervention is going to have ambiguous effects. The negative quotient will rise insofar as people of good will abstain out of defeatism or knee- jerk anti-imperialism, making common cause with the we-don't-give-a-shit U.S. right wing.
Another bit of silliness is the line that some people presume to be little secretaries of state, calling for humanitarian intervention. This does not deter, apparently, the generation of little secretaries of the treasury, calling for an end of aid to Indonesia.
>From silly we go to idiotic, in the form of accusations
that support for intervention is for some a route to
moral self-esteem. The logical counter-part to this
is that opposition to intervention is a means of
pride in one's transcendance of pedestrian morality
to some higher plane of knowledge, in anticipation
of the revolution some one hundred years or more
in the future.
The baffling critique of moralism is all the less appropriate in this context. In debates over foreign affairs, morality is 80 percent of the issue. No ordinary person's material interest is affected in any obvious way by whether or not somebody intervenes in Kosovo or East Timor. Nor is imperialism harmed by failure to intervene, since as we all know the Indonesian regime is a creature of any such imperialism.
We're now sitting here, before the fact. There has been no NATO/US fait accompli. As we speak, atrocities are being committed by agents of the Indonesian regime, which unlike Milosevic has not been imputed with even one redeeming feature by anyone here, yet. The Chinese "communist" regime, beneficiary of critical support from assorted parties on these lists, utters no word of reproach to Indonesia, for obvious reasons.
There is no reason not to support an armed UN peace-keeping mission. The terms of its engagement would clearly be an object of attention, as the negative example of the IMF's privatization dictates to Haiti points up. The identity of the lead country in such a force, such as OZ, and its own narrow interests, would be of interest in the same context.
The case for East Timor is better than that for Kosova. The independence movement is more democratic, its overlords the Indonesian regime more revolting. The power imbalance is obvious. There is no threat to Indonesia worth honoring implied by East Timor independence, not that Indonesia's national interests deserve any consideration in the first place. There is no issue of western imperial expansion.
If we are to be practical, we would reject tactics of mobilizing around cutting off material and financial aid to Indonesia. If the East Timorese are not worth protecting, why should anybody in the U.S. put himself out to block aid to Indonesia? If such aid were blocked, how effective would we expect that to be relative to the real-time slaughter now in progress?
The logical disconnects are endless. If the Indonesians wore white sheets and hoods and menaced a colony of Trotsky-reading East Timorese in Dallas, the Timorese would be worthy of police protection. But evidently being massacred in a distant place is not the same sort of emergency.
What idealistic young person in her right mind would find common cause with a left that opposes international peace- keeping in principle, regardless of what atrocities are committed against some powerless people?
The inadequacies of all such interventions do not strengthen the case for abstention in the name of anti-imperialism. Quite the contrary, I would say the anti-interventionist left has no future. The right does isolationism much better; they are much more consistent. The pro-interventionist left leaves much to be desired in many fields, but it has the virtue of being FOR something defensible in the present tense, rather than pretending that defeatism and alienation are politics. The mission of the UN is to act in these sorts of situations. Even if it failed every time -- something not demonstrated, IMO -- there would still be a reason to call for such intervention, if only to point the way to a hypothetical, more ethical world order.
End of rant.
mbs
P.S. I haven't called anybody a name, but I'll be happy to respond in kind.