Nietzchean Untermensch

Decision Making During the Kosovo War

2010-12-12T11:33:00.000-08:00

So this is the first posting of mine in several months. I know; I'm a lazy bastard. And today's posting topic is fairly esoteric and probably uninteresting to the majority of readers who aren't PS or IR/IS nerds. That being said, I still thought it was "cool" enough to write up. So without further ado...
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The field of International Relations utilizes many tools both for the synthesis and analysis of information. One of these, the Levels of Analysis, is used in the formulation of possible explanations for the actions of the various actors which make interact within and throughout the global arena. While the levels of analysis does not provide explanations on its own, it does group governmental and non-governmental actors, ideologies, influences, etc; into various categories, the four main ones being global, Interstate, domestic, and individual. In this way, various events and topics can be examined with regards to the levels of analysis.

To that end, the paper, “Coercive Diplomacy Before the War in Kosovo: America’s Approach in 1998”, is one such topic. In it, the paper’s author, Micah Zenko discusses the background of the Kosovo conflict, as well as several of the major key actors within the American administration. There are several possible explanations for why coercive diplomacy was used by the US and its fellow NATO members during the Kosovo conflict. Using the levels of analysis, we can put forward certain potential explanations.

At the global level, the involvement of the UN may certainly have been a reason why the US pursued coercive diplomacy. The need to attain wide ranging consensus among the General Assembly, particularly amongst the permanent members of the Security Council, might have curtailed the use of heavier military force. This divisiveness between the Security Council, chiefly on the part of Russia and China, was as a result of the differing views held by said parties. While accusations of ethnic cleansing appeared to have been substantiated post conflict, before the bombing China and Russia, as well as several other countries viewed the conflict as a purely internal affair to be resolved by the Serbian government. Ultimately, the UN was bypassed by NATO.

At the interstate level, and connected to the UN at the global level, was the matter of diplomacy. Prior to the air campaign, NATO members France and Germany both sought to receive UN sanction before becoming embroiled in any conflict in Kosovo. In the United States, several members of the Clinton administration were divided on how best to proceed with regards to diplomatic outcomes. NATO defense ministers were wary of military involvement while the US largely favored a more direct confrontation with Serbia. The initial compromise before the actual air war was the steadily increasing threats of military action which culminated in the July 15, 1998 air demonstrations-which proved useless in deterring Serbian aggression against Kosovars. This due in large part to Serbian perceptions of NATO disunity on the question of large-scale military intervention.

At the domestic level, coercive diplomacy may have been pursued in large part because of the perceptions of public opinion. American perceptions of themselves have been one of having a sense of fair play and standing up ostensibly for the under-dog. Rhetorically, this has been the practice as well, with American politicians couching their responses to international incidences of the scope and type of Kosovo conflict in terms of the “wronged” and “unfortunate victims”. Practically however, the American public has also been leery of long term foreign entanglements as well as the specter of casualties to be paraded on national television, as had been done during the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu. At the onset of the NATO campaign in March of 1999, a majority of Americans, 60% according to Pew polls at the time, supported the air strikes. While support dropped during the next two months of bombing, only rising again during the final month of the air war, support never dipped below a majority.

At the individual level, the policy positions of then Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, could have been a strong and emphatic motive for the use of coercive diplomacy. At its core, coercive diplomacy is the use of the threat of force to compel action in an adversary. Of course for this to work, said adversary must also believe that in addition to the capacity to use force is the intent and willingness to use force. In this context, Secretary Cohen can be said to have been a reluctant warrior. While he understood that the position of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo was tenuous at best, and indeed endorsed the negative opinions of Slobodan Milosevic by more hawkish supporters of intervention, Cohen’s concerns were broader. To his way of thinking, the domestic political fallout of a war in Kosovo, which included the possibility of Congress pulling funds for the peacekeeping mission in Bosnia, as well as the threat of destabilizing NATO if the US decided to act alone, was of greater consequence than the ethnic conflict between Albanians and Serbs.

Israel and Palestine

2010-08-12T23:38:00.001-07:00

The Israeli raid this past May of Turkish flagged aid ships is the latest in a long line of tit for tat shoot 'em ups in the long standing Middle East conflict between the state of Israel and occupied territories Palestine. For as long as I've been politically conscious, the conflict has remained a mainstay of controversy and aggravation for all sides concerned. And although the first fruits of the present turmoil can be said to have been planted in 1947 with the passing of UN resolution 181, it may be more accurate to think of the 1967 Six Day War as the starting point of many of the current troubles.

The capture of Gaza, the West Bank, and the Sinai had very little to do with Jewish religious fervor and more to do with the then very eminent attack led by Egypt in 1967. The pre-emptive war by Israel in '67 is actually, at least to me, an appropriate use of pre-emptive action, as opposed to our own (I'm American) "pre-emptive" strike on Iraq although granted, the situations are not totally similar. However, one of the rallying points which allowed Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Syria et all to contemplate going to war with Israel ( besides their ignominious defeat in '57) was the fact that there were large populations of displaced, actually refugees, living in both Jordan and Syria. Many of these Palestinians had been forced to leave because of the '57 fighting, some during the war in '48. In many cases, Israel simply "evacuated" Palestinian towns and villages only to late claim that the inhabitants of said towns and villages had voluntarily left. It was until the 80s and 90s that Israeli historians began to dig, and eventually found out that Palestinians had been forced of their lands.

The demographics of the Gaza situation should be simple to grasp; the Israeli settlers number about 8,000-9,000. The Palestinians living in the same area number about 1.2 million. Simple math dictates that if those settlers want to live in a Jewish state with some semblance of security, they would be better of living within Israel proper. If your only excuse or rationale for doing something that otherwise might be detrimental to your well being is that God said you should, well then we have a problem. So far as I know, most civilizations stopped using spectral evidence as evidence at the very least, 250 years ago. But the Israeli claim that they are God's chosen people on God's chosen land for his people is quite simply insane. If people weren't dying it would be comically insane. As it is, you have religious nuts on both sides that seem not to want to shift their opposition because as we all know, it's better to walk into a pizza parlor and blow up civilians or fire rockets from F-16s seemingly indiscriminately into neighborhoods, than to grant the other side may have a point and concede.

On my more pessimistic days I sometimes personally wish my country would just stay out of both Israel's and Palestine's affairs. If blowing each other up makes them happy, then let them do so. "National security" and economic interests are the only reason we even talk to that part of the world. Just think, if macadamia nuts and not oil were used for fuel...Oh the possibilities.

WARGH!!!!

2010-04-28T01:10:00.000-07:00

I realized something today: everytime I re-read Fiasco or Cobra-II, I get angry. I mean literally angry. For the whole period between late 2003 to 2006, you had people saying "you can't Monday morning quarterback", and "we couldn't have known about the insurgency". But for the entire year preceding the war, there were dozens of peole at the Pentagon, DoS, and various war colleges saying that the "planning" for the occupation was woefully inadequate and was almost entirely composed best case scenarios.

You have Conrad Crane at the US Army War College co-writing a report about the challenges we would face in Iraq. And what happens to the report? Rumsfeld and co. ignore it in favor of Wolfowitz's kool-aid. General Eric Shinseki testifies before Congress that the occupation will probably require something on the order of 500,000 troopers. Again, Wolfowitz stands up and says that Shinkseki doesn't know what he's talking about, nevermind that Shinseki was familiar with Desert Crossing, the decade old pre OIF war plans for Iraq.

The cold war between DoD and State, the inability to coordinate between various levels of civilian and military commands, the behind the scenes cocksucking of Achmed Chalabi, all of it adds up to an administration who had their heads firmly up their asses. It's almost as if some of the arm chair generals you see on too many web boards had suddenly been contracted to plan and prosecute the war.

I mean does anyone else remember people, notably Wolfowitz and one Daniel Pearle saying that this war wouldn't last more than a couple months? And fuck me, it's almost as if everyone's forgetten we're currently fighting two wars. While the people responsible for the clusterfuck now have cushy speaking and teaching jobs.

Scatter-Brained Musings on My Philosophy

2010-03-29T22:43:00.000-07:00

I was going to start this post by noting how I haven't posted anything in a while but then it occured to me that not enough people read this blog for me or anyone else to care about the rate of my out put. And since I don't get paid to do this, screw whatever anyone thinks about someone not updating their blog regularly. There are two types of people who have both the mental stamina and incentive to post on anything like a regular or semi regular basis; people with next to no lives outside their online personas and people who get paid to do it. I suppose one could postulate a third group of people who post to advocate and/or decry some cause, but really, any such third group could be integrated into either one of the first two groups.

Anyway, to the point. Some of the people who browse my blog or know me in person know I'm a political science major. And as some of my friends who happen to be involved in the physical or natural sciences have half-jokingly pointed out, my particular area of study involves less science and more educated guesses. It's no secret that what Aristotle called the "master science" involves far more qualitative analysis than quantitative analysis. But then again, the Ancient Greeks weren't really enamored of anything resembling empirical study. Nonetheless, the study of the "master science" still has enormous importance, and consequence, for the world at large.

By definition, society is defined by the individual members which make up its constituent parts. Unfortunately, the rules and that go into defining human society are haphazard and unpredictable at best. Although we have become quite adept at modeling human behavior at the macro level, more often than not such modeling only works along retroactive lines. We have not as of yet, constructed any type of predictive models of mass human behavior ala Asimov’s fictional psychohistory or the social theories which underlie Heinlein's Terran Federation. This is not to say that political science does not make fairly good educated guesses about the motivations of tribes, nations, governments, etc;. Various models of behavior exist to define the workings of the myriad amounts of hierarchies to which human societies have aspired.

Alternatively, as anyone who knows me knows, I've always maintained an interest in various philosophical ideologies. As my user name probably indicates, I've kind of settled on a sort of combined Nietzchean/Roussean mode of thought. I'm sure there are those who will insist that ideas of both men are contradictory, and in that I would agree. All the same, I would maintain that the philosohies of both men can be synthesized. It seems to me that Nietzche's aesthetics are the perfect counter balance to what can be Rousseau's insistence on the perfection of democratic government.

Exceptionalism: Myths and Legends (Part 2)

2010-02-27T00:01:00.000-08:00

In direct contrast to McClay’s piece, Zinn comes out and explicitly identifies exactly what the American “mission” is and ties it directly to the concept of American exceptionalism. Exceptionalism, the belief that one’s own country or people have been “chosen” or “fated” to greatness, is not new. Before modern expressions of the philosophy in the U.S, Zinn points out the 1632 exhortations of Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor, John Winthrop for the fledgling colony “to be as a city on a hill,” a beacon for peace and prosperity. Zinn later notes that not long after Winthrop’s words, the people from city on a hill committed what was essentially an act of ethnic cleansing against one of the neighboring Native American tribes. Explicit in the philosophy is the view that “we” are special and our goals always just. Of course, implicit in that argument is that “they” are not special must be judged accordingly.

Zinn’s piece illustrates what happens when fallible beings with fallible judgments, define themselves as being infallible by virtue of having not only a higher moral authority, but also as being the sole arbiter of that authority. This appeal to having an inside line to a sort of Platonic ethical standard sets up a line of reasoning whose premises begin flawed and lead ultimately to invalid conclusions. Thus the creation of a perpetual feedback loop, the argument being that where one is defined as being wholly good and just leads to the belief that all one’s actions are good and just, because one is good and just. This sort of circular reasoning on the part of the United States has been a part of the national consciousness ever since the founding and has led, as Zinn notes, to the belief that the “government is exempt from legal and moral standards accepted by other nations in the world.”

One of Zinn’s main arguments is that contrary to the notion that the U.S has been for a force for good around the world, it has been a less than equitable or even immoral actor. In his article, Zinn details several foreign policy decisions, all of them made in direct contravention of the ideals we as Americans associate with the ideals of freedom and democracy. From the Manifest Destiny of the 19th century to the doctrine of forced nation building and democratization in the 21st, American exceptionalism has shown itself to be not only immoral, but fundamentally damaging to the rights of all.

Between the two positions on the American mission, Zinn clearly offers a superior argument in terms of directly answering the issue at hand and naming the problems therein. McClay seems to dodge the question entirely, making what are, in his defense, good points, but which essentially miss the main point. The point being that exceptionalism is not a tenable position to hold if the ideology itself embraces what amounts to a form of nationalism that disregards the effects of its implementation on the lives of “they”.

Alternatively, the argument could be made that the U.S. is unique in the spread and extent of its interests. Even in the Cold War era its interests went far outside the direct areas of confrontation.

Of course, there have been many instances where the U.S. government foreign policy has not been for the “common good”. The most recent obvious example being the current Iraq War. Begun in part as a method for the democratization of the Middle East, most of the proponents have by now admitted defeat. This after several years of fighting, tens of thousands of American and Iraqi dead, and billions of dollars spent. The proposition that democracy could be forced on a people is anathema to the whole concept of democracy. Exceptionalism as a relevant ideology should have left the lexicon at the end of the 19th century. While positive institutions, events and beliefs can arise from exceptionalism, human nature, being what it is, more often than not doesn't allow for the fruition of those positive outcomes. Too many times throughout history, human beings have allowed feelings of 'uniqueness' and superiority to overcome good sense and dictate policy.

Exceptionalism: Myths and Legends (Part 1)

2010-02-24T11:34:00.000-08:00

A while back, I was on a web discussion board where one of the members had posed the question, and I’m paraphrasing here: "are liberals the only ideological group that oppose exceptionalism?" In my studied opinion, the guy who’d posted the query was an idiot and thank God several people told him so. The discussion devolved into several different side issues some of which questioned the very morality of exceptionalism.

Not too long after, my poli sci class was asked to answer a variation on that same question. For those who don’t know, exceptionalism, within a political context, is the belief that one’s own nation, tribe, people, etc; is special and unique- exceptional. As you can probably tell, there’s nothing particularly substantive about the idea that you, me, or anyone else is special. By my lights, the entire idea seems to be nothing more than the masturbation of one’s ego. Go into almost any nation on earth, and you will find overwhelming majorities of people who think that their county is "Number 1" and that the sun shines in perpetuity on their collective backsides. In and of itself, there’s nothing wrong with believing God himself is looking after the fortunes of your country. I suppose that if you’re so banal as to believe that an all powerful, all seeing super-being takes a daily interest in the lives of every single individual in the world, living and dead, it’s not that much of a stretch to believe that said super-being views the world as a giant game of Risk or Stratego.

Leaving aside the rationality of the above belief, exceptionalism alone isn’t dangerous or harmful to individuals, groups, nation states, or what have you. What is dangerous is the extra step our human brains find it so easy to take from "uniqueness" to superior. And of course if someone is superior to someone else, that other is by definition inferior. Human history is replete with examples of populations labeling themselves superior to other populations and then acting in a manner to guarantee preeminence. The Old Testament conquest of the Holy Land by God’s Chosen people, the Holocaust, the African Slave Trade, and the conflict in Rwanda are only a few examples of what the thinking which stems from exceptionalism has wrought.

And on that note, below is the first part of a paper I had to write on the topic of the American Mission/Exceptionalism. The first part is part of an analysis of a work by Wilfred McClay. The next posting will be a rsponse of sorts by historian Howard Zinn. Being who I am, I find Zinn's arguments much more convincing. Anyway, enjoy.
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The purpose of this paper is to both analyze the question of, "Should Americans believe in a unique American ‘Mission’," and give reasoned arguments for why we should not. Two articles are presented along these lines, one for and one against the idea of an American mission. In The Founding of Nations, humanities professor Wilfred M. McClay argues for a more positive view of the American mission by looking at the idealism that surrounded America’s founding. In The Power and the Glory: Myths of American Exceptionalism, historian Howard Zinn focuses on the negative and sometimes disastrous effects such a "mission" has had on America and the world at large. While McClay concentrates much more heavily on the idyllic mythological aspects of the American Revolution and Founding, he neglects to answer the main question of what the American mission is, what it should be, and what consequences, if any, such a mission might present. Zinn, on the other hand, clearly identifies what America’s mission has been, how it has taken shape, and what its real world consequences has entailed. Ultimately, McClay does not offer a definition of the American mission that addresses either its historical context within American exceptionalism, or its affect on anything other than introspection. Because of this, Zinn’s position becomes much more compelling as a reason for abandoning the notion of an American mission.

McClay’s main argument boils down to how our perceptions of the origins of our nation affect us as citizens. Specifically, the veneration for the events leading up to the War for Independence and the Founding, and the near deification of many of the key figures involved. That the Founders were giants among men is not in doubt. Characters like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison were the culmination of over 200 years of enlightened Liberal thought that strove for a more moral and equitable form of governance. From Grotius and Hobbes to Locke and Rousseau, the Founding Fathers drew from their writings and the past experiences of other failed republics to build a society and government that would look for strength based not along ethnic, religious, or nationalistic lines, but on the principle and idealism of democracy. And as McClay points out, this perhaps more than anything else has been the source of the nation’s longevity and prosperousness.

Our habit of looking back at the Founding and the resulting body of laws written into the Constitution has been engraved into the national consciousness. This, along with the strong American propensity for adaptability is the basis for American strength. As McClay says, "There should be a constant interplay between founding ideals and current realities." In this respect, McClay acknowledges the need for a constant evaluation of national progress. But at the same time such acknowledgements must not forget the fundamental principles which made such progress possible. To this end, McClay discards the idea of simply focusing wholly on the facts.

McClay rejects what he calls the "debunking imperative", that is, his claim that contemporary historians see the past only aa collection of faceless, context-less facts to be endlessly revised and corrected. The end result being the dismissal of America’s past as nothing more than the puttering about and dissembling of old, rich, white men.

Integral to a nation’s survival is its identity. McClay’s argument is that a nation’s makeup, indeed its very psyche is tied to the perceptions of that nation’s collective self. And undeniably, that bond becomes and maintains the framework upon which that nation’s society operates. In the American experience, that framework is inexorably fed by the stories, be they fact or fiction, we tell ourselves generation after generation. To quote an old John Ford Western, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."