And Now For Something Completely Ad Hominem

Via Crooked Timber:

The staff of BBC2’s late Late Show used to have a little joke about one of its presenters, Michael Ignatieff. Everyone knows what an idiot savant is: someone who appears to be an idiot but in fact is a wise man. Well, Ignatieff was a savant idiot.

Update: Some guy named David Rees points out that Ignatieff -- having by his own account failed in academe and politics -- has a great future as a Rush lyricist.

Iggy Says "Sorry About the War"

Michael Ignatieff's mea culpa on his support for the Iraq war can be found here

Ignatieff's line is that as an academic he was too interested in ideas, and didn't have the horse sense he's subsequently developed in the political trenches. I think that's disingenous. Ignatieff was never really a theorist: he was an academic politician, and from the very beginning his cause was humanitarian war.

When he's prepared to consider the problems with that construct, it will be time to listen.

Perpetual War for Perpetual Pogrom?

I occasionally get in trouble with commenters for being a Kosovo war skeptic (I can't think of any argument against the Iraq war which does not also apply), but Matthew Yglesias has done us all the favour of quoting something official reasonable moderate Tom Friedman said in 1998:

Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (the Serbs certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set back your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.

The trouble with humanitarian war is that the psychology of war is the opposite of the psychology of humanitarianism. When you stiffen up the sinews and summon up the blood, you revert to tribal thinking, no matter how civilized you thought you were to begin with.

With Friends Like These, Liberty Hardly Needs Enemies

After noting that a number of libertarians, like Ron Paul, thought the Iraq war was not fought in self-defence (for obvious reasons), Randy Barnett makes the preposterous argument:

Other libertarians, however, supported the war in Iraq because they viewed it as part of a larger war of self-defense against Islamic jihadists who were organizationally independent of any government. They viewed radical Islamic fundamentalism as resulting in part from the corrupt dictatorial regimes that inhabit the Middle East, which have effectively repressed indigenous democratic reformers. Although opposed to nation building generally, these libertarians believed that a strategy of fomenting democratic regimes in the Middle East, as was done in Germany and Japan after World War II, might well be the best way to take the fight to the enemy rather than solely trying to ward off the next attack.

Barnett is a subtle man when it comes to contract theory. It is therefore a bit sad that the rebuttal points are so obvious:

1. Overturning the Ba'athist regime couldn't be a war of any kind against Islamic jihadists, since they and it were enemies.

2. "Self-defence" must have some natural limits as a concept if it is to be a genuine limit on when violence is justified. One such limit is that the violence must be directed primarily against the person or persons who are aggressing against you. On Barnett's theory, killing a bunch of people unrelated to the act of aggression will cause a democratic revolution in the Middle East which will reduce the political appeal of the aggressing organizations. Even granting some reasonable probability that this will work, it isn't self-defence. It would be like attacking Tsarist Russia in the hope that it would undermine the possibility of the Bolshevik revolution. Even if the Bolsheviks would be a threat, this is just aggression.

3. The whole thing was a quadruple bank shot with a low prospect of working. It was far more likely that an unprovoked American assault on a Muslim country would increase support for jihadis, as has in fact happened. Democratic reform requires the solution of political problems that Western occupiers are powerless to solve and will likely make worse. Barnett ends with the lame "Bush screwed it up" line. Libertarians are supposed to realize that government policy will be implemented by imperfect bureaucrats. How people who think agriculture bureaucrats are clueless about farming can persuade themselves that unilingual ideologues unfamiliar with the difference between Shi'ite and Sunni will transform a foreign polity is beyond me.

4. Overthrowing the "corrupt dictatorial regimes that inhabit the Middle East" will not necessarily bring about "democratic reform". Whatever repression indigneous democrats face under Mubarak or the Saudi royal family is less than they will under what happens next. We can all take comfort from the end of the corrupt Shah and the repressive Hashemite rulers of Iraq.

5. Democratic reform, even assuming it was possible, would not make the West safer. Democracy means that the people get to decide what policies the state follows. When the people hate you, that's bad.

Update: Gene Healy, actual libertarian, takes Barnett apart here.

"Preventive War" and Preventative Diplomacy

Daniel Larison calls out the cafeteria Catholics at First Things* for rejecting Church teaching on the immorality of "preventive war." Since all states potentially threaten their neighbours, if war could be justified on the basis of "prevention", then all aggressive wars would be preventive ones. Therefore, the Vatican's position is a necessary implication of holding on to any just war theory at all. The point is a so obvious, one despairs that Larison has to make it. But he does, and does it with his characteristic erudition, so I commend it unto you.

I also commend Matthew Yglesias's response to Dennis Ross. Ross thinks it makes sense to impose, as a precondition on negotiations with Abbas and Fatah, that they prevent any attack on Israel by their sworn enemies in Hamas. Yglesias makes the obvious point that imposing such conditions would make it trivially easy for Hamas to prevent any negotiation from occurring. The fact that Ross was Clinton's main man on the Israel-Palestine dispute and Yglesias is a snot-nosed kid may explain why the situation in the Middle East has gotten as bad as it has.

*Since they have rejected "Thou Shalt Not Kill" (Fifth by the Catholic numbering) in favour of Reagan's Eleventh Commandment.

Update After 14 comments: I think the discussion has been interesting. In the end, Andy seems (to me) to retreat from arguing that preventive war is justifiable to arguing that the war was necessary to enforce the peace terms Iraq accepted after 1991. I disagree "on the facts", but I accept that such a justification isn't in principle contrary to the just war tradition.

But while I recognize that some arguments along these lines were advanced, the Bush administration clearly did present itself as putting forward a new doctrine. Lee at Thinking Reed has the goods.

Further Update: On the Internet, you can even get a discussion by an "Independent Catholic Priest" on how Augustine's comments on the Third Punic War anticipate the arguments about Iraq. (Via Thinking Reed)