Debate:Why doesn't the US liberate people in oppressive regimes?

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:It is also telling that the WSJ pundit is seemingly unable to imagine any alternatives to military force to batter down those criminals (again: Social control of those unruly plebs - not trying to actually fix any social problems).
 
:It is also telling that the WSJ pundit is seemingly unable to imagine any alternatives to military force to batter down those criminals (again: Social control of those unruly plebs - not trying to actually fix any social problems).
 
:Furthermore, claiming that the U.S. in a time of already tight budgets needs to increase its already astronomic military spending, especially from a paper so dedicated to cutting social expenditure, is simply obscene. The columnist, Bret Stephens, is really a clear-cut example of the kind of creeping militarism in the U.S. described by Chalmers Johnson in his "Blowback trilogy", since Stephens completely fails to acknowledge that there might be alternatives to armed intervention, that there are valid reasons why the U.S. ought to be able to spend less on its military than it did under Reagan (hint: the Cold War is long over), not to mention that Stephens also conveniently forgets Ronnie Raygun's [[SDI|most wasteful, futile and useless money sink]] or the gigantic deficits it contributed to.  
 
:Furthermore, claiming that the U.S. in a time of already tight budgets needs to increase its already astronomic military spending, especially from a paper so dedicated to cutting social expenditure, is simply obscene. The columnist, Bret Stephens, is really a clear-cut example of the kind of creeping militarism in the U.S. described by Chalmers Johnson in his "Blowback trilogy", since Stephens completely fails to acknowledge that there might be alternatives to armed intervention, that there are valid reasons why the U.S. ought to be able to spend less on its military than it did under Reagan (hint: the Cold War is long over), not to mention that Stephens also conveniently forgets Ronnie Raygun's [[SDI|most wasteful, futile and useless money sink]] or the gigantic deficits it contributed to.  
:WSJ's/Stephens' claim that the U.S. Army is returning ''"to its pre-World War II size"'' is pure and simple B.S. The suggested personnel cutbacks would reduce the Army to "only" ca. 450,000 men, while a quick web search put [http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/summary.cfm?q=358 the size of the U.S. Army in 1939 at 200,000 with an additional 200,000 in the National Guard]. If you look at [http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/02/24/281955972/pentagon-budget-cutting-plans-sure-to-draw-flak the long-term graph of the size of the U.S. Army since 1940 provided by NPR], not only are the cutbacks minimal as a proportion of the U.S. Army's size since the end of the Cold War, but the reduced army will not be much smaller than at the ebb between the end of WWII and the Korean War, and clearly far above the size of the Army in 1940. Stephens also seems oblivious to the fact that while the Cold War at least theoretically justified a huge U.S. Army to deter a Soviet invasion of Europe followed by a "red nuclear fait accompli", it is both dubious in theory and in practice whether a huge U.S. Army would even serve his purpose of a "broken windows" strategy. For instance, all of the "nice" cases of either real of hypothetical scenarios Stephens mentions of ''"'''preventing''' tragedy"'' involves nice "cheap" (at least in terms of U.S. lives and treasure) air strikes, making his whining about a minor reduction in the manpower of the U.S. Army utterly irrelevant.
+
:WSJ's/Stephens' claim that the U.S. Army is returning ''"to its pre-World War II size"'' is pure and simple B.S. The suggested personnel cutbacks would reduce the Army to "only" ca. 450,000 men on the active rosters (i.e. only including National Guards and reservists actually recalled for active service), while a quick web search put [http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/summary.cfm?q=358 the size of the U.S. Army in 1939 at 200,000 with an additional 200,000 in the National Guard]. If you look at [http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/02/24/281955972/pentagon-budget-cutting-plans-sure-to-draw-flak the long-term graph of the size of the U.S. Army since 1940 provided by NPR], not only are the cutbacks minimal as a proportion of the U.S. Army's size since the end of the Cold War, but the reduced army will not be much smaller than at the ebb between the end of WWII and the Korean War, and clearly far above the size of the Army in 1940. Stephens also seems oblivious to the fact that while the Cold War at least theoretically justified a huge U.S. Army to deter a Soviet invasion of Europe followed by a "red nuclear fait accompli", it is both dubious in theory and in practice whether a huge U.S. Army would even serve his purpose of a "broken windows" strategy. For instance, all of the "nice" cases of either real of hypothetical scenarios Stephens mentions of ''"'''preventing''' tragedy"'' involves nice "cheap" (at least in terms of U.S. lives and treasure) air strikes, making his whining about a minor reduction in the manpower of the U.S. Army utterly irrelevant.
 
:In short, Stephens strikes me as something of a scaremongering militarist who is repackaging the Bush doctrine in more currently palatable window dressing (to mix metaphors). Even worse, Stephens repeats Bush claims that we live in "Hitler'esque times" to make his outrageous demands for '''more''' U.S. military spending in a time of tightened U.S. budgets seem like a necessary, even moral, priority. Bascially, political punditry at its glib worst. [[User:ScepticWombat|ScepticWombat]] ([[User talk:ScepticWombat|talk]]) 00:37, 17 December 2014 (UTC)
 
:In short, Stephens strikes me as something of a scaremongering militarist who is repackaging the Bush doctrine in more currently palatable window dressing (to mix metaphors). Even worse, Stephens repeats Bush claims that we live in "Hitler'esque times" to make his outrageous demands for '''more''' U.S. military spending in a time of tightened U.S. budgets seem like a necessary, even moral, priority. Bascially, political punditry at its glib worst. [[User:ScepticWombat|ScepticWombat]] ([[User talk:ScepticWombat|talk]]) 00:37, 17 December 2014 (UTC)
 
::Stephens would also do well to remember the consequences of earlier eras in which something very like his "broken windows" approach was the U.S. foreign policy of choice, namely the aforementioned Banana Wars (which at best kept in power U.S. friendly elites and today would almost certainly lead to an even more pronounced anti-Americanism) and how the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, which was presented exactly as the sort of paternal liberalist intervention that Bret Stephens seems to be advocating, shaded into Philippine-American War.
 
::Stephens would also do well to remember the consequences of earlier eras in which something very like his "broken windows" approach was the U.S. foreign policy of choice, namely the aforementioned Banana Wars (which at best kept in power U.S. friendly elites and today would almost certainly lead to an even more pronounced anti-Americanism) and how the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, which was presented exactly as the sort of paternal liberalist intervention that Bret Stephens seems to be advocating, shaded into Philippine-American War.

Revision as of 02:01, 17 December 2014

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Contents

Proposition

In North Korea, 3.5 million people died because of the policies of a crazy government. LGBT people are facing inhuman tratment in a number of countries such as Iran, Saudi Arabia etc. Women's oppression is an integral part of some governments like Saudi Arabia. Shah's Iran was a beautiful country which was ravaged by a fanatic government.

Sovereignty comes with responsiblity. A state which does not protect the rights of its citizens loses its sovereignty. Why doesn't the US act to overthrow these oppressive regimes? Promotion of human rights is an integral part of US foreign policy. --LobPo (talk) 13:51, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

The US has no claim of sovereignty over North Korea, Saudi Arabia or Iran, & also has human rights problems of its own to sort out. WeaseloidWeaselly.jpgMethinks it is a Weasel 14:06, 15 December 2014 (UTC)
1. The US has no legal mandate or right to do such things.
2. When Bush in fact tried to do something like this the present outcome is arguably worse that the initial problem.
3. The US political system is hardly a shining model for the rest of the world. It would be a good idea if it removed political corruption and prevented white policemen killing black citizens before it tries to start fixing the rest of the world.--Weirdstuff (talk) 14:15, 15 December 2014 (UTC)
Let's turn it around and suppose that, say, Lichtenstein invaded the US over their appalling human rights record with regard to their prison systems.... Doxys Midnight Runner (talk) 14:41, 15 December 2014 (UTC)
The human rights violations that takes place in a liberal country like the US are miniscule compared to those take place in a Stalinist regime like DPRK or religious regime Saudi Arabia. --LobPo (talk) 14:44, 15 December 2014 (UTC)
And who made you moral arbitrator of the world? Doxys Midnight Runner (talk) 14:49, 15 December 2014 (UTC)
Then who will protect those people languishing in North Korean labor camps for no fault of their own? Or people being hanged publicly for blasphemy? Stoned to death for adultery? When massive amount of human rights violations take place in an illiberal country, a liberal country has moral responsibility to act. In fact, liberalism is the dominant ideology of 21st century. --LobPo (talk) 14:50, 15 December 2014 (UTC)
It is moral to invade North Korea due to labor camps that will kill thousands, and maybe tens of thousands, of military and civilians (like Iraq) as well as likely causing a nuclear strike on nearby nations not even involved in the conflict? I am all for helping people out, but you need to think through your ideals. Also, what happens if the US does harm to civil rights at home or in their occupied country like blackwater in Iraq were allowed to do? EmeraldCityWanderer (talk) 15:16, 15 December 2014 (UTC)
You need to remember the vast number of American deaths which LobPo's cunning scheme would inflict as well.--Weirdstuff (talk) 15:18, 15 December 2014 (UTC)
I always thought they would be hawks like LobPo who would be willing to fight for a conflict they want to instigate. Their lives would be happily laid down in the defense of fellow human beings and not be chickenhawks wanting others to do the same :-p EmeraldCityWanderer (talk) 15:25, 15 December 2014 (UTC)
For an ideological viewpoint, a good argument is liberal internationalism. --LobPo (talk) 14:55, 15 December 2014 (UTC)
Our of curiosity - how would you finance this mad scheme?--Weirdstuff (talk) 15:00, 15 December 2014 (UTC)
Well, in theory, we should liberate people and promote rational/liberal values in oppressed nations. If we could snap our collective fingers and free the world, then we would be obligated to do so. The arguments from postmodernism (stuff about sovereignty and "self-determination") are pretty silly. But it never seems to work out the way we say we planned it (though it may well have worked out the way Dick Cheney planned it). We always seem to screw it up. In Iraq, we set out to remove a brutal, torturing, murdering dictator and ended up with our mercenaries shooting civilians in squares, Abu Ghraib, burned libraries, Daesh, and torturers all of our own. And don't forget the dead Americans. I had ancestors who were Mr. Boot's "self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets", and I sure as hell wouldn't trade places with them. So it fall to us to promote democracy and human rights in less six-shooter-y ways (which we, admittedly, aren't doing enough of, even in our own nation).(Agrajag (talk) 01:52, 17 December 2014 (UTC))

Why?

Because the US isn't governed by people who care particularly much about what happens to foreign people. Also, the US army is full of bigots, so I wouldn't trust them to treat a foreign population respectfully when they're occupying their territory while constructing a democratic government there from scratch.

I wouldn't be opposed to an international armed force that protects people's rights around the world, but I sure as hell wouldn't want the US to lead it. 141.134.75.236 (talk) 16:00, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

I don't see why not. The US doesn't kill and torture people after all.--Weirdstuff (talk) 16:20, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

US prisons

  1. The USA is the country with the second largest percentage of its population in prison (after the Seychelles!). See the Wikipedia article on List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate#United_States.
  2. Under current law, all physically able inmates who are not a security risk or have a health exception are required to work, either for UNICOR or at some other prison job. Inmates earn from US$0.23 per hour up to a maximum of US$1.15 per hour, and all inmates with court-ordered financial obligations must use at least 50% of this UNICOR income to satisfy those debts. See the Wikipedia article on Federal_Prison_Industries.

Now go and invade someone to keep people's attention off it! Scream!! (talk) 15:03, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

a liberal country has moral responsibility to act

Really? Does any country ever have a "moral responsibility" to interfere in another country. Isn't this exactly the same argument that religious fanatics use - that they have a "moral responsibility" to impose their religion on others. Don't other countries have a right to self determination? Doxys Midnight Runner (talk) 16:10, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

What are the guidlines for moral responsibility as well? Every country can likely point to every another to say they are doing something not the way they should. It would be a global free for all war for moral superiority till we kill ourselves. US likely has as many moral failings in the eyes of another country so the US would not be immune from being invaded to correct something they are doing wrong. EmeraldCityWanderer (talk) 16:18, 15 December 2014 (UTC)
Again, I said sovereignty comes with responsibilities. Modern liberal national states are based on the concept of social contract, and the state has to protect the rights of its citizens. A state that fails to protect the rights of its citizens loses its legtimacy. --LobPo (talk) 16:26, 15 December 2014 (UTC)
What defines the rights threshold required to be invaded? The US has failed to protect the rights of its citizens and non-citizens, according to UN conventions, for years. When do we invade ourselves? EmeraldCityWanderer (talk) 16:29, 15 December 2014 (UTC)
So you want to send soldiers from a country which recently admitted to carrying out torture to civilise the rest of the world. From the Us experience in Iraq hundreds of thousands of people would die along with tens of thousands of American troops. Countries wound be devastated for generations and would be ripe for takeover by ISIS type regimes. Furthermore the US would be totally broke as it would have no way to pay for a series of was on such a massive scale. This is one of the most insanely counter-productive ideas I have ever heard.--Weirdstuff (talk) 16:33, 15 December 2014 (UTC)
What does sovereignity have to do with it when the people you want the US to liberate aren't US citizens? 141.134.75.236 (talk) 16:39, 15 December 2014 (UTC)


Two words: Mission civilisatrice... ScepticWombat (talk) 16:43, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

Blowback

Read it. wp:Blowback (intelligence). Hipocrite (talk) 16:24, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

I disagree. It did not happen with Germany and Japan after World War II. --LobPo (talk) 16:26, 15 December 2014 (UTC)
Right, it happened with the USSR. Hipocrite (talk) 16:31, 15 December 2014 (UTC)
Forget that, the blowback in WWII was from bombing pearl harbor. Ikanreed (talk) 16:37, 15 December 2014 (UTC)
I think that Hipocrite miss the point about blowback in that it refers to covert action, while LobPo is suggesting quite overt military action (as far as I can see). Conversely, Germany and Japan can't be used as examples of "non-blowback" in the way LobPo does since both were quite overtly invaded and directly run by the U.S. (and allies in the case of Germany) for a number of years. If we use blowback to refer to any sort of interference (incl. outright invasion and occupation), then yes, Germany and Japan are counter-examples - however, both had nowhere to turn but the U.S. and both had a common border with and lost territory to either the USSR, or, in the case of the Federal Republic, a Soviet satellite/puppet regime. Oh, and remember how, prior to the Iraq War, Germany and Japan were trotted out as examples of how Iraq might turn out? Curiously, there were less appealing examples, such as the U.S. supported juntas of South Korea and South Vietnam which were conveniently forgotten (the democratisation of the former in the late 1980s was certainly not due to U.S. support). ScepticWombat (talk) 17:05, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

Not in our interest

If anything, the US has a long history of supporting oppressive regimes. Ask the people of Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, Iran, Indonesia, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Cuba, Greece, South Africa during Apartheid, current day Saudi Arabia, Egypt and numerous other nations I'm not getting into.

Even if we could, we would probably cause more issues than we fix. When we invaded Iraq, we made the stupid decision of completely destroying the Ba'athist party instead of simply removing Saddam. The Ba'athist Party was salvageable, but we destroyed it. Now we have an obvious shill for Iran in power who uses the Iraqi military to openly beat and oppress Sunni Muslims for being Sunni.BlackProg (talk) 17:21, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

Found a good article

"If the world’s leading liberal-democratic nation doesn’t assume its role as world policeman, the world’s rogues will try to fill the breach, often in league with one another." --LobPo (talk) 18:39, 16 December 2014 (UTC)

It would be awesome if the world's leading liberal-democratic nations worked together to try and bring peace and fair treatment to all human beings. I wouldn't count the US as a particularly liberal or democratic nation, though. 141.134.75.236 (talk) 19:25, 16 December 2014 (UTC)
'Cause might makes right
until they see the light,
they've got to be protected
all their rights respected
until someone we like can be elected [1]
Doxys Midnight Runner (talk) 19:59, 16 December 2014 (UTC)
That Wall Street Journal article sounds like Max Boot's infamous Case for American Empire, in which "Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets," but necessarily "respun" by the less than optimal results the "Bootish" approach yielded in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
Contrary to the claims made by WSJ, it is highly dubious if the "broken windows" approach was actually central to, or even that influential in, changing the crime rate and patterns in the U.S. One provocative alternative, presented by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner in Freakonomics (2005), is that abortion is among the more influential contributors to lower crime rates. However, that doesn't have the nice (if you're a Wall Street Journal columnist) prospect of strict social control of the plebs to prevent even "the mere appearance of disorder".
WSJ also neglects to address one glaring aspect of a "broken windows"-style U.S. foreign policy that I doubt the WSJ would countenance, namely punishing Israel, as its behaviour (and the current lack of U.S. response to it) is a clear example of "Rules are invoked but not enforced. Principles are idealized but not defended. The moment the world begins to notice that rules won’t be enforced, the rules will begin to be flouted. One window breaks, then all the others."
It is also telling that the WSJ pundit is seemingly unable to imagine any alternatives to military force to batter down those criminals (again: Social control of those unruly plebs - not trying to actually fix any social problems).
Furthermore, claiming that the U.S. in a time of already tight budgets needs to increase its already astronomic military spending, especially from a paper so dedicated to cutting social expenditure, is simply obscene. The columnist, Bret Stephens, is really a clear-cut example of the kind of creeping militarism in the U.S. described by Chalmers Johnson in his "Blowback trilogy", since Stephens completely fails to acknowledge that there might be alternatives to armed intervention, that there are valid reasons why the U.S. ought to be able to spend less on its military than it did under Reagan (hint: the Cold War is long over), not to mention that Stephens also conveniently forgets Ronnie Raygun's most wasteful, futile and useless money sink or the gigantic deficits it contributed to.
WSJ's/Stephens' claim that the U.S. Army is returning "to its pre-World War II size" is pure and simple B.S. The suggested personnel cutbacks would reduce the Army to "only" ca. 450,000 men on the active rosters (i.e. only including National Guards and reservists actually recalled for active service), while a quick web search put the size of the U.S. Army in 1939 at 200,000 with an additional 200,000 in the National Guard. If you look at the long-term graph of the size of the U.S. Army since 1940 provided by NPR, not only are the cutbacks minimal as a proportion of the U.S. Army's size since the end of the Cold War, but the reduced army will not be much smaller than at the ebb between the end of WWII and the Korean War, and clearly far above the size of the Army in 1940. Stephens also seems oblivious to the fact that while the Cold War at least theoretically justified a huge U.S. Army to deter a Soviet invasion of Europe followed by a "red nuclear fait accompli", it is both dubious in theory and in practice whether a huge U.S. Army would even serve his purpose of a "broken windows" strategy. For instance, all of the "nice" cases of either real of hypothetical scenarios Stephens mentions of "preventing tragedy" involves nice "cheap" (at least in terms of U.S. lives and treasure) air strikes, making his whining about a minor reduction in the manpower of the U.S. Army utterly irrelevant.
In short, Stephens strikes me as something of a scaremongering militarist who is repackaging the Bush doctrine in more currently palatable window dressing (to mix metaphors). Even worse, Stephens repeats Bush claims that we live in "Hitler'esque times" to make his outrageous demands for more U.S. military spending in a time of tightened U.S. budgets seem like a necessary, even moral, priority. Bascially, political punditry at its glib worst. ScepticWombat (talk) 00:37, 17 December 2014 (UTC)
Stephens would also do well to remember the consequences of earlier eras in which something very like his "broken windows" approach was the U.S. foreign policy of choice, namely the aforementioned Banana Wars (which at best kept in power U.S. friendly elites and today would almost certainly lead to an even more pronounced anti-Americanism) and how the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, which was presented exactly as the sort of paternal liberalist intervention that Bret Stephens seems to be advocating, shaded into Philippine-American War.
I also can't help wonder what exactly Stephens is suggesting by emphasising "the borders that divide the free countries of Asia from China and North Korea; the free countries of central Europe from Russia; and allies such as Israel and Jordan from many of their neighbors." What exactly is the "broken windows" strategy towards North Korea and especially China and Russia? Is Stephens really advocating military strikes on, respectively, the power with world's second largest nuclear arsenal, and the one with the second or third largest economy? What about North Korea? How exactly is military sabre rattling going to "deter" a nation already so dysfunctional that it has experienced outright famine? Has Stephens forgotten the reason why South Korea, while accepting a U.S. presence, is certainly not keen on an outright military confrontation with the North (hint: look at a map to see the distance between the border and Seoul)? Hell, does Stephens even realise why neither South Korea nor China is keen on seeing North Korea collapse (the former could expect an even more extreme version of the East/West German unification problems, the latter a potentially strong and nuclear armed unified Korea on its borders, and both the immediate problem of hordes of refugees)? Such rather obvious questions makes me wonder how low the bar is for becoming a foreign policy pundit for the WSJ...
If I had to characterise the foreign policy ideology that comes out of Bret Stephens' WSJ piece, then it's one which seems to combine some of the worst aspects of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. It marries the gunboat diplomacy and Banana Wars style of interventionism of the former with the global reach and paternalistic control of "less civilised" nations (e.g. the League of Nations "mandates") of the latter.
However, Stephens' foreign policy completely lacks mitigating aspects of the open self-interest and limited scope of Teddy Roosevelt's foreign policy in practice (even if Roosevelt might have wanted to join the imperialist bandwagon), as well as the (albeit flawed and debatable) idealism of Wilsonianism, which at least suggested that democracy and liberty wasn't a luxury that by definition was limited to Americans and Western Europeans (even if in practice only (some) people of Central and Eastern Europe, i.e. in the European territories of the losers of WWI, was actually granted self-determination and even then tempered by geostrategical compromises). ScepticWombat (talk) 01:23, 17 December 2014 (UTC)

So you are not able to ...

r Are we to take it that you are not able to give an answer to a single one of the reasonable objections which people have made to your silly suggestion?--Weirdstuff (talk) 19:19, 16 December 2014 (UTC)

Not likely. Some people don't think through the justifications for their beliefs to the point where even the most basic and reasonable objections can be addressed. The sad thing is this does not stop the belief; it just makes the person leave in frustration to find a place where objections don’t happen. EmeraldCityWanderer (talk) 19:45, 16 December 2014 (UTC)
I will come back with detailed counter-arguments. --LobPo (talk) 01:15, 17 December 2014 (UTC)
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