----- Original Message ----- From: "Yoshie Furuhashi" <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
> >> Higher estimates of famine deaths in North Korea mention that 2
> >> million or more people died (Cf.
> >> <http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/asiapcf/9808/19/nkorea.famine/>), a
great
> >> boon if the US were planning for a military aggression for "regime
> >> change." And yet the US is far more gun-ho about "regime change"
in
> >> Iraq than in North Korea -- despite the remaining Cold War
rhetoric.
> >
> >==================
> >
> >So what?
>
> Then, why mention "Saddam and his gang of thugs" killing lots of
> people? Hearing such a remark, one would be led to think that
> relative death tolls mattered.
=========================
Oh no, don't change the subject. The issue of body counts and a utilitarian calculus as a *primary* mode of justifying intervention into intra-state terrorism and stopping unjustified aggression against a sovereign nation, however feudal it's mode of political organization, is comparing apples and oranges. The capacity of NK to threaten to exercise its capability to use nuclear weapons in order to thwart any potential hegemon from interfering in preventing intervention in its internal affairs is a completely different issue from the manner in which the history of Iraqi aggression against Kuwait occurred.
Now, to repeat my question; do you think that the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was justifiable? If justification is a non-issue to you, then you undercut your desire to assert that the US was unjustified in acting to throw Iraq out of Kuwait.
If on the other hand you assert that Iraq was justified in invading Kuwait, you need to *give reasons* [Habermas fans feel free to chime in here :-) ] why Iraq's reasons are more justifiable than the US' reasons for asserting -and backing with military force- that such an act was not justifiable given that, despite US hypocrisy on the issue of national sovereignty, Iraq violated a norm of international law, which holds irrespective of whether the US abides by it or not. If you're going to be a Realist/Hobbesian about IR, then you have to come to terms with *amoralism* and the consequences of a potentially reductive, interest-theoretic economism; in which case justification is beside the point and, to borrow a phrase from Alexander Wendt, anarchy is what States make of it.
> >If you want to go the international law route and say human
> >rights trump national sovereignty, to be consistent, scores of
countries
> >would need to undergo regime change and since there's no terrestrial
> >Leviathan that does not live in a glass house capable of throwing
stones
> >at this point in history, what, in the absence of using even more
> >violence is the solution to unwinding the standoff with NK and all
the
> >forms of tyranny on the planet today?
>
> I'll leave it up to Koreans, North and South, to decide the Korean
question.
====================
That's fine with me, but, interest-theoretically, given what I've written above, what happens if they form an alliance and decide in 2012 to turn their collective know-how on China or Indonesia in an adversarial manner? I pose the question not for the sake of encouraging cynicism, but only to set a space for having the courage to deal with worst-case-scenario thinking, along the manner in which we're accustomed to thinking the worst about US interests and the potentially nefarious implications......
> I'm simply saying that the US attacks only nations that do not have
> any military capacity to pose threat. If Iraq actually had nukes,
> ICBMs, etc., the US wouldn't be so aggressive toward it. I'm not
> sure what your disagreement is.
=============================
Duh. This is a staple of military strategy; don't attack a potential enemy if your models cannot reduce the risk/uncertainty of defeat to a desired minimum.
>
> At 5:43 PM -0800 1/8/03, Ian Murray wrote:
> > > If you asked Arab citizens and non-citizen residents in the
Middle
> >> East, you would notice that they were even less threatened by
Iraq's
> >> annexation of Kuwait than Arab autocrats were.
> >
> >========================
> >
> >Give me a plane ticket and a supply of fresh water and I'll take the
> >damn poll myself. What sample size will convince that it's not as
> >simple as you propose?
>
> ***** The Arab masses, throughout the region, will, for long, see
> US involvement in the Gulf as a war waged against Iraq in order to
> maintain the Arab clientele of Washington in power, on the one hand,
> and to protect Israel and maintain its strategic edge in the region,
> on the other. The Arab masses will not easily forgive the for
> adopting a double standard: one, for Iraq and Arabs and Moslems, in
> which immediate implementation of UN Security Council resolutions is
> pursued through garnering international support to wage a merciless
> war on an Arab country. The second standard is that with which Israel
> is favored. Israel has not implemented even one of the numerous UN
> Security Council resolutions on the Palestinian problem. It continues
> to occupy Arab land without the US raising serious objections against
> it. In fact, the US has been rewarding Israel, over the years, with
> substantial economic and military aid amounting to billions of
> dollars.
>
<http://www.passia.org/publications/annual_seminar_reports/pagwa1991/six
th.html>
> ***** That sounds about right to me. The only Arabs who really
> wanted war against Iraq were the elite in Kuwait. If you have
> evidence to the contrary, I'd like to see it.
==============================
Again, that unnecessarily changes the whole point/context of the discussion, which was whether or not Iraq was justified in attacking and annexing Kuwait. The contradictions of the popular sentiments given above do nothing to address the substantive issue regarding what, if anything, justifies the violation of the territorial integrity of a politically recognized society. To the extent we may be headed into an historical epoch whereby *states* are rendered increasingly malleable institutional *formations* that aren't quite anarchies, then we need a new vocabulary of justification for legitimizing our desire to significantly attenuate the notion that some, with financial backing from wealthy patrons, can arm themselves to engage in deterritorializing and reterritorializing political boundaries. If justification is a red herring, then you've undercut your ability to condemn any political agency from asserting its capacity to control territory in its interest, whether that territory is defined as geographical-ecological, computational-financial or religio-ethnic.
>
> At 5:43 PM -0800 1/8/03, Ian Murray wrote:
> > > We are not talking about any state. We are talking about the
USA.
> >
> >====================
> >
> >Ah, American exceptionalism in reverse!
>
> As far as military power and imperialist ambition are concerned, yes,
> the US is exceptional. Who can deny that?
=============================
You missed my point, which was to show that you were attempting to hold the US to a higher normative standard of justification regarding the intervention in the affairs of another country than, say, you hold Iraq's justification or lack thereof, in the invasion of Kuwait. If sovereignty is organized hypocrisy, then you've got a mighty wild horse to ride..............
> If left entirely to citizens and non-citizen residents in the Arab
> world without the US strong-arming, there would not have been a Gulf
> War. Arab governments have been much more pro-US than Arab masses
> have been. Why shouldn't citizens and non-citizen residents in the
> Arab world decide, rather than the US government?
> --
> Yoshie
>
=========================
Ah, let's rewind history to the 15th century to deal with the cumulative causation that has led to the current impasse. Again, was Iraq justified or not in invading Kuwait or does justification deconstruct in your approach to international relations?
Ian