Dear James,
I know the Slate editors want this dialogue to turn into a “small war,” but I can’t help expressing my gratitude once again for your kind words about my book. I’m particularly glad you’re as fascinated by Smedley Butler as I am. He was my favorite character in the book—the “Fighting Quaker” who spent most of his life in nonstop combat and then, upon his retirement from the Marine Corps as a major general, turned into a pacifist. It’s truly a shame that his exploits have become so obscure today; the only small-war soldiers we remember are those who got killed in a memorable way (e.g., Custer).
You’re right that the Pentagon, even if it tries to limit reporters’ access to the battlefield, is happy to cooperate with “reality” TV series and Hollywood extravaganzas. Yet it’s odd that, even after a decade of nonstop small wars, I still can’t name a single American hero of those conflicts. Can you? The Pentagon needs to do more—as Gulf War vet John Hillen argued last year in the Wall Street Journal—to publicize the adventures of today’s Audie Murphys and Sgt. Yorks.
As I suspected from the first posting, you don’t object to American troops taking part in “pacification” missions; you just don’t want these undertakings to be unilateral. “[W]e should almost always work through the United Nations,” you write. My reaction upon hearing anyone tout “U.N. peacekeeping” is similar to Gandhi’s reaction upon being asked what he thought of “Western civilization”: “It would be a good idea.” Alas, I have as little confidence in the United Nations as Gandhi had in Western civilization.
I should make clear at the outset that I’m not a member of the Black Helicopter brigade; I don’t think the United Nations is a world government that is going to contaminate our precious bodily fluids. The problem is the opposite: The United Nations is ineffectual and, I suspect, always will be. There was a brief flurry of hope that, after the end of the Cold War, the United Nations could turn into an effective international police force, but those hopes died in the early 1990s, sometime around the crises in Somalia and Rwanda. (To answer your question: I think that the United States probably should have intervened in Rwanda for moral reasons, just as the royal navy stamped out the slave trade in the 19th century.) I agree with you that it’s not fair to pin the blame for those failures entirely on the United Nations; the United States shares a large degree of culpability. But that’s precisely the point: The United Nations is incapable of doing anything serious without American leadership.
The question then becomes: Why should we limit our freedom of action by waiting for a U.N. resolution? I agree that it’s nice to have, but it’s hardly essential. We acted in Kosovo and Bosnia and Afghanistan without benefit of U.N. sanction, and those interventions were not hampered at all by the lack of action in Turtle Bay.
Coalitions are often important, but they also come with a downside: Getting a bunch of independent states to act together is like herding cats. Even the Anglo-American alliance in World War II had some tensions; the strains were considerably greater on NATO during its action in Kosovo. And that’s among an alliance of Western democracies; the U.N. membership extends to every two-bit dictatorship on the planet. The U.N. bureaucracy is capable—just barely—of organizing conferences on human rights; it’s a stretch to think that it could do something effective to protect those rights.
I shudder to think what would happen if the United Nations actually did have an independent armed force at its disposal. It would more likely use that force against Israel than Iraq. Just this week the U.N. General Assembly voted 74-4—the only no votes coming from the United States, Israel, the Marshall Islands, and Micronesia—to condemn “grave breaches of international humanitarian law” by the Jewish state. I’m still waiting for the U.N. resolution condemning Palestinian suicide bombings.
Luckily, there’s little chance that the United Nations could have an effective, independent military force any time in the foreseeable future. Just think about the organizational problems. I could envision countries like Bangladesh and Ukraine contributing low-quality infantry; but where would the air support, transportation, logistics, intelligence, etc., come from? There’s only one nation that is capable of projecting force around the planet—the United States. So it would be up to the United States to do the heavy lifting (literally). Yet before the force could be deployed, we’d have to canvas the support of Security Council members like China and Syria. Not a welcome prospect.
Please don’t take this as an argument for a “cowboy” foreign policy. I think it’s important to act with allies, and with U.N. sanction if possible. And if we have allies who can do the job without much American assistance—as the Australians did in East Timor and the British did in Sierra Leone—that’s terrific. I just think we should be more concerned about whether our foreign policy is effective than whether it’s “multilateral.” In the case of Iraq, I’d say we should try to get U.N. support but, if we can’t, that shouldn’t stop us from knocking off Saddam before he nukes Tel Aviv (or Manhattan)
We don’t need a U.N. military. We already have a globo-cop. It’s called the U.S. armed forces.
Imperialistically yours,
MB
