Dear Max:

Thanks for your "pith-y" riposte. I'll set out my beef in greater detail in a moment.

But first I want to clarify one point from yesterday's exchange. I never meant to imply that the 180 landings abroad by the U.S. Marines between 1800 and 1934 offered no positive lessons about the conduct of small wars. Far from it. By collecting the best exploits from some of the most significant small wars between two covers, you've done a real public and strategic service. (My favorite dog soldier in your book: Smedley Butler, not only because he kicked ass on several continents, but because his latter-day conversion to pacifism and capitalist conspiracy-mongering is something out of a John Dos Passos novel.) For one thing, the small-scale, rough-and-ready deployments you depict are a nice rebuke to the laughable techno-excesses of the U.S. military today—like the 6,200 troops, 26,000 tons of equipment, and 14 heavy tanks you describe the Army sending over to Albania to guard its precious Apache helicopters (maybe those forces were intended to stop Wesley Clark from actually trying to use the helicopters). And yes, perhaps your heroes are smiling at the special-forces teams in Afghanistan. Somehow, though, I don't think you have to worry about the "publicity-averse" Pentagon not producing small-war heroes for our time. You're confusing their aversion to the press with their aversion to publicity. Or weren't they screening Blackhawk Down in New York? Coming to your theater soon: Brad Pitt on a mule near Kandahar, with Julia Roberts ditzily pining in Peshawar, and Gene Hackman back in Washington doing everything he can to make sure his boys come home alive.

Now that I'm done writing flap copy for your paperback edition, let's get down to business. What matters is not just whether the United States should intervene but under what auspices it should intervene. While I'm relieved that you think we need "some kind of international sanction for long-term occupations," in my view international sanction (and the United Nations is really the only game in town) should be more than an after-the-fact fig leaf for Uncle Sam's, er, big stick. Since it's easy to get bogged down in parsing legal definitions of intervention and the U.N. charter, here's a concrete example. I think that for the United States to intervene again in Iraq, we need a Security Council resolution that authorizes us to do so, just as we needed it the first time there and in places like Bosnia.

If we don't get that sanction, any intervention is bound to be much less successful in both the short and long run. First, the use of force will command far less international and domestic support (scads of polls show that the U.S. public prefers any use of force to be in concert with the United Nations instead of on our own). Second, there will be less international political and economic backing for any subsequent state-building effort. And third, we run the risk of having any intervention seen solely as the prosecution of national interest rather than the defense of universal values. It's easy to dismiss that last concern as mushy-minded. But ironically enough, your book in defense of U.S. intervention provides ample proof of the corrosive cost of U.S. double standards and arbitrary behavior toward its neighbors, both in terms of failed occupations and lost goodwill.

Obviously, we live in an imperfect world—one where, for example, a totalitarian state has a veto on the Security Council. There will be times when so-called coalitions of the willing are both necessary and inevitable, whether NATO in Kosovo or Nigeria in Sierra Leone. But those arrangements should be the exception rather than the rule, because their use ultimately undermines the authority of the U.N. Security Council.

You asked me what moral I draw from our less successful interventions. I agree with you that many were done with the best of intentions. But they were products of their times, and the times have changed, for the better. (For one thing, the "help out our little brown brothers" riff has thankfully been consigned to the history books.) My message is not that the United States shouldn't engage in military interventions. It's that we should almost always work through the United Nations. Yeah, I know U.N. peacekeeping has a sometimes sorry history. But anyone who has read Samantha Power's story about Rwanda's genocide knows that the most glaring failures of the U.N. peacekeeping mission there were at least partly our fault. (By the way, it's not clear to me from either your book or your first posting what a U.S. imperialist would do about Rwanda. My verdict: If we had backed the U.N. force, we could have stopped the massacres.) Why shouldn't the United States help the United Nations create an effective rapid-reaction force to prevent future Rwandas from happening? And this might gladden your free-market heart: Why couldn't mercenaries—excuse me, private military companies—play a peacekeeping role under U.N. auspices in hell holes that nobody wants to touch?  Think of this as the ultimate Nixon-went-to-China: George W. Bush, whose dad made excellent use of the United Nations, redeems all his unilateral sins by transforming the United Nations into a truly effective globo-cop.

Cheers,
James