I’m honestly not sure what Anthony Cordesman’s point is in his post at RealClearWorld on the terrible conditions in four Middle Eastern and West Asian countries that we’ve either invaded or intervened in—Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Syria. That we should invade at will and let the chips fall where they may?
I found the post most useful in the catalogue of horrors Mr. Cordesman provides for each country. Those countries were horrible long before we invaded or intervened in them and they’re even more horrible after our meddling. How much responsibility should we bear?
Far from lowering our expectations for the results that can be achieved via military intervention, I’d suggest raising our standards for intervening. We should only use military force when there is no other alternative and when our national interests, narrowly construed, are threatened. If we can’t bring ourselves to use the level of military force required to achieve our objectives or don’t have the sitzfleisch necessary to deal with the consequences, maybe the interests weren’t that compelling to begin with.
Heh, I thought you were going to use sitzkrieg for a brief moment.
And emigrate tens of thousands of people raised in those cultures to our own grandchildren’s country?
Barrack Obama thinks he’s a new thing. Someone so intelligent it’ never happened before.
I’ll bet Him and Woodrow Wilson could have raised glasses to one another.
Cordesman leans on his data a bit. How has the end state of Germany or Japan differed significantly from what we set out to accomplish with them? Both prosperous, both democratic, both peaceful. Mission accomplished.
How has Europe more broadly failed to achieve the end-state we hoped for there? We wanted to avoid a third world war and we did. We wanted Europe prosperous and peaceful, and it is.
Even South Korea has grown up to be just what we wanted: strong, rich, peaceful.
Of the countries we have in effect taken under our wing either after WW2 or since, most are doing just fine.
The problem is specific to the MENA. Europe’s at peace, South America’s at peace, Africa’s . . . well, they aren’t starving at least. Asia’s booming. Absolute poverty has nose-dived, life expectancies are up, a number of diseases have been or soon will be eradicated, the entire world is less hungry, less sick, and less violent than is normal.
All except the MENA, if you don’t mind roping Pakistan and Afghanistan in there. If you take out a world map and stick pins in the most miserable shitholes that’s where you’ll find the bulk of them.
So, I think Cordesman fails to make his case. End states can be determined, if we are willing (as you say) to do the necessary. That’s what has changed. We are no longer willing to do the necessary. If all you’re willing to pay for is the flashy invasion then you’re not going to control the end state.
While I don’t completely disagree with your rejoinder, I think you’re being a bit too sanguine. There are probably between 50 million and 100 million people in China living in extreme poverty, in starvation or on its brink. There are another 60 million in India.
On the continent of Africa there are probably 200 million of these ultra-poor people, 80 million in Nigeria alone.
As to peace, I think that Latin America is shakier than you appear to think. There are still a number of countries that at any given moment are teetering on the brink of civil war. Will the cease fire hold in Colombia? Who knows. There’s still a low-level insurgency going on in Peru.
That’s a lot of people. I’ve noticed that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has spent quite a bit on childhood immunizations in the third world. That was 25 years ago. Now, populations have boomed.
Please tell me how this is not like feeding cats?
Africa’s population is supposed to soar above the four billion mark by the end of the century, about four times what it is now, and about nine times what it was in 1990, if memory serves. I wouldn’t count on Africa being such a great place for long. He’ll, they’re already swamping Europe with refugees.
Dave:
I wasn’t announcing paradise on earth, but human beings are by every measure better off today than they were 20, 30, 50 years ago. We’ve been living in a remarkable time in history.
That’s extreme poverty at about a third of what it was 22 years ago, a quarter of what it was in 1981. Our wars have been relatively small, or localized affairs – awful, obviously, but not 60 million dead in 5 years awful. Our epidemics haven’t come close to the Spanish influenza. Infant mortality is way down and (largely as a result) life expectancy is way up.
Sure, things could suddenly go bad. An asteroid could smack us out of orbit. But we’ve spent 70 years in the expectation that WW2 would have a sequel, and it didn’t. No nuclear holocaust. No global pandemic (unless you count obesity.) There are far more free countries today than there were even 30 years ago. And in a development I don’t think people have really grasped, the sum total of human knowledge is now available 24/7/365 virtually free to just about everyone.
Pretty good, really. Of course it’s sunny. If it were cloudy I would paint you a darker picture.
That’s mostly due to the decrease in poverty in China. In ’81 they had a couple of hundred million people in dire poverty.
I honestly don’t know what’s going to happen with China. Rather than providing it durability, the dominance of the CCP makes it fragile. The country could turn on a dime. The country could continue to modernize, it could collapse in civil war, it could fragment, it could foment a major power war, it could go back to gazing at its navel. There’s no real way to tell.
A viral epidemic today could kill ten times as many people as were killed back in 1918. It’s not really under our control. Heck, I may live to see us return to the pre-antibiotic days. Bad practices in a good deal of the world are promoting antibiotic resistance and we don’t have the intestinal fortitude to do anything about it. Rather than dickering with India about protecting the intellectual property rights of a handful of pharmaceutical companies we should be persuading the Indians to stop selling antibiotics over the counter.
This subject touches on something that’s come up in earlier comments section. The insistence of American physicians on artisanal medicine in a mass market world is really unconscionable.
“The insistence of American physicians on artisanal medicine in a mass market world is really unconscionable.”
Ouch! OK. I promise to take care of 10 people at a time today.
“A viral epidemic today could kill ten times as many people as were killed back in 1918. It’s not really under our control.”
Maybe, but in 1918 Ebola really would have killed many millions. It did not because we have much better public health abilities. We can identify and track viruses like we never could before. We have the ability, if motivated, to turn out vaccines faster than before. On the downside travel is much easier and faster. It is surprising that we have not had another huge pandemic. I think it is partially due to luck, but also the public health efforts.
Steve
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Vaccines had nothing to do with the Ebola epidemic in West Africa dying down. That was a combination of public health efforts and the very virulence of the disease.
IMO another pandemic is inevitable.
I said if motivated and was really referring to future viral infections. In the case of Ebola, since it was dying down efforts slowed, but there are promising vaccines in Phase 3 trials right now.
Steve