Stephen Walt echoes the point I’ve been making around here for some time:
Here in the United States, in fact, it’s hard to identify any looming or imminent external threats, and certainly none as dire as the dangers that other societies face or as serious as the challenges the United States has overcome in the past. As I’ve noted before, the United States still has the world’s largest and most diverse economy, the world’s most powerful conventional forces, and a robust nuclear deterrent. It has no powerful enemies nearby, close allies in every corner of the world, and it is insulated from most foreign dangers by two enormous oceans. Despite the hype about the shrinking of geopolitical space and the emergence of a tightly connected “global village,†distance and the “stopping power of water†still provide considerable security, if not quite 100 percent protection.
[…]
In fact, if you look at the past 25 years or so, it is abundantly clear that external enemies have done far less damage to the United States than we have done to ourselves. Saddam Hussein was a very bad man, but he wasn’t threatening or harming Americans after we kicked his ass in 1991. Ditto Slobodan Milosevic, Muammar al-Qaddafi, and the whole wretched Assad family. They were all problems, to be sure, but they weren’t threatening many Americans and U.S. leaders did business with each of them at one time or another.
What are the real threats? As Pogo said, we have met the enemy and he is us. Political corruption, bad policies, and misplaced fear are the real threats. We can mitigate any external threats we face at much lower cost than by using military force.
As Ben Franklin said
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
which seems appropriate as the Senate meets in a rare Sunday session, debating renewal of the Patriot Act, a law for which the government has not cited a single terrorist act that has been prevented through using the data collection provisions of the law (they assure there have been some; they just can’t tell us about them) and for which the Department of Homeland Security itself has identified scores of abuses. And those are just the ones they admit to.
Just like torture. They can’t point to a single instance where it gave us actionable intelligence, yet they claim they just can’t tell us about the times it worked. Bah. TBH, in both cases I find this kind of surprising. I would have expected torture to have provided us at least a few clear example of success. I would have expected this mass surveillance to have also provided a few examples. The lack of such examples makes it pretty clear that we don’t know how to use these methods, and given the costs, we should not use them.
Steve
“Saddam Hussein was a very bad man, but he wasn’t threatening or harming Americans after we kicked his ass in 1991.”
So, is Walt arguing that Hussein was a threat to U.S. interests prior to 1991? Is he arguing that the armed U.S. presence in the region to restrain Hussein from being a threat to U.S. interests from 1991 to 2003 was not warranted? Is he arguing that we should not have invaded in 2003 but continued the prior policy?
This is not directed at Dave, whom I believe opposed Operation Desert Storm, but there do appear to be a whole lot of people writing on this topic that believe Operation Desert Storm was justified and are now arguing the U.S. has no national interests in Iraq.
Yes, I noticed that and thought of commenting on it in the body of the post but decided to leave it for the comments thread because I was quite sure it would come up. I think we didn’t have any more interests in going after Saddam in 1991 than we did in 2003 but he can’t bring himself to say that because it turned out well.
But it didn’t turn out well. There’s a straight line connection between Desert Storm and 9/11.
And, yes, I opposed Desert Storm. Saddam Hussein was a bad guy and invading Kuwait was a Bad Thing. But he wasn’t that much worse a guy than the Emir of Kuwait and leaving Saddam in power, the price of George W. Bush’s coalition and sanction, was too high a price to pay.
Yup. IMO the law is and always has been political insurance rather than a security measure and we should dump every law of its type. Politicians should work without a net.