Seize the Day

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Sat Feb 15 23:51:32 PST 2003


On Sat, 15 Feb 2003, Dennis Perrin wrote:


> I mean, no war on Iraq? Okay. But what instead?

How about a world in which the US leads rather than shows contempt for the rest of the world? I'm all for a new world order in which dictators could be removed and replaced by democracies. But that could only happen, even in theory, if their removal was legitimate, if it represented the majority of world opinion, if the process was institionalized. You would need a world political body that was felt to be truly representative and effective.

It would take a while to build. But such a thing is possible. The US has so much might, that if it led the drive towards rule by international law, it is really within humankind's grasp to do something that has for millenia seemed liked a dream: to outlaw war. And more, to outlaw dictatorship.

But what we are doing now is exactly the path to the opposite. This is the US using that power to destroy every shred of international joint rule by consensus. This is the US using its enormous power to set up a shoddy 19th century imperium. The old rules of sovereignty have their bad points. But a world of no rules is worse.

And rather than a pacified world, it will produce a more fragmented world of more war and terrorism. And rather than democracies, it will produce the same abortions we've been producing for the last century. This isn't the first people we've said we were going to liberate from tyranny. And in every other case, unless it was country that had already been industrialized and democratized before we got there, we simply produced another tyranny. And without changing the rules of the game, that's all we're going to get out of this. And following the National Security Directive laid out in the fall is in fact going to change those rules for the worse. It's going to destory the stability and calculabilty and security they provided without replacing it with a new principle. Just our rogue will.

Weber once famously defined rule as "a monopoly over the legitimate use of force." The legitimate part is all-important. Without it, you don't have a shepard's crook. You just have a stick you keeping jabbing into a hornet's nest.

Michael



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