A procrastination in of itself
Sorry I’m confused, are you arguing that because people disagree about when a thing should be done it should never be done?
"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran
Servant of the Omnissiah
Woodrow Wilson did say that the World had to be made safe for Democracy. I think the flip side is also true - Democracy needs to be made safe for the World.
It's not much use if the "Democracy" bit turns into a People's Republic of Tyranny.
American interventionism is a mixed bag. It was (and still is) entirely necessary. Either we do it, or the Russians and the Chinese will do it. And they won't even try to fix things - they'll just be straight up Colonials.
They might not bring in their own people to do it, sure, but it's still Colonialism all the same. America at least will try to fix things.
As for disagreement - two people, three opinions. There will always be disagreement. As long as it doesn't turn violent or so bad that it undermines national stability, that's fine. We can disagree and agree to disagree.
The moment it goes into burning things and pelting rocks, the gloves should (and often do) come right off.
Make no mistake, interventionism may be called a Necessary Evil, the key word is necessary. We should not be doing it for base reasons. We should be doing it so we can create a World where it isn't necessary.
I hold the secrets of the machine.
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That is because venezuela have create a refugee crisis so big like the one in siria except without a damn war in the middle of it.
As a venezuelan I have mixed feeling about intervention, for one side many have fuck up and I find position that "we are powerfull so someone have to do ti" inherely imperalistic and kinda "we have the power, so I have to use it" very disturbing.....
but we cant get rid of maduro by our own, that it, pretty simple.
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"
When a political, man-made catastrophe gets big enough to cause mass starvation and mass migration... it really shouldn't need a deliberate genocide in the middle of it to make it OK for neighbours and other concerned countries to go in and help fix things before it spirals into even more chaos and takes them with it.
And, sometimes, the idiots who continued to break the infrastructure instead of trying to fix it need frog-marching away from the control board (and national income) for everybody's good. It may even be the better solution than trying to prop them up. They usually have troops on their side, so... being really convincing would be a necessity.
When it starts getting bad enough to cross borders... things are bad.
So, yeah — if you fuck up badly enough that your problem becomes international... It's not just your problem anymore.
Edited by Euodiachloris on Feb 16th 2020 at 3:46:17 PM
Yeah, but who gets to decide when an intervention is necessary? The neighbour countries, whose government might be hostile to the regime in question? That might as well lead to dodgy situations, when neigbours want to abuse the situation for their own gain.
Ideally any intervention should be approved by the UN Security Council, but that of course can also be difficult, considering how polarized that body has become.
A procrastination in of itself
Preferably the UN, if the UN is locked down than I’d say a broad enough international consensus being reached (so something like NATO, India, Japan, Brazil and the Arab League) would be a pretty valid substitute.
Even simply a large alliance such as NATO wouldn’t be inherently wrong, but it’s dodgy and if you can’t even get an entire alliance to sign on (as was the case with Iraq and Vietnam) than you know you’ve lost it.
Honestly though, it depends on the merits of the case, everyone could be in favour of it and it might still be wrong, everyone could be opposed and it would be right for someone to act.
Yep it’s wishy-washy, subjective and ad-hoc, welcome to operating in an anarchical system.
"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran
That is best judged on a case by case basis. If the case for intervention seems justified then other powers can tolerate it if it's not then they can oppose it.
Yeah, this would be ideal, but as you say the UNSC is so dysfunctional that it's not viable. For example, there's never going to be a UN intervention in Venezuela now that Maduro has aligned with China and/or Russia. The absolute veto system really stands in the way of it being an effective institution for keeping the peace.
Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Feb 16th 2020 at 11:34:16 AM
"Sandwiches are probably easier to fix than the actual problems" -Hylarn
And I’ll point out that “it’s hard to decide so we should never do it” is faulty logic.
Edited by archonspeaks on Feb 16th 2020 at 11:34:48 AM
They should have sent a poet.
I was initially going to argue that legitimacy was crucial for any intervention to work, but then again arguably one of the most effective interventions, the one in Kosovo, lacked and UN mandate, whereas others that do like the one in Afghanistan, have been a failure. I suppose the key condition for any intervention to permanently to work is having a strong local ally, who can help you manage the aftermath and thus avoids the stigma of "foreign occupation".
Your friendly neighbourhood Regent
The f- are you talking about?
The Kosovo intervention did have a UN mandate and the invasion of Afghanistan didn't and still doesn't. Plus Afghanistan wasn't an intervention (humanitarian or otherwise) but a reaction to the Taliban refusing to meet the US's ultimatum to extradite Bin Laden directly to them. (They wanted to extradite him to Pakistan, who would then extradite him to the US. This because Bin Laden was, at that point in time, already in Pakistan, but admitting that would have been embarrassing for both Pakistan and the Taliban).
Angry gets shit done.
The Nato intervention in Kosovo had no UN mandate. Only the occupation later received one, but Nato was technically breaking international law when it intervened, which is also one of the reasons why our far-left in Germany has never forgiven our previous (also leftwing) government for participating.
The Afghanistan war was indeed not justified by the Security Council like I mistakenly thought, but it was still justified under the right of self-defense, which while dodgy, is a better legal justification than what we came up with Kosovo. Afghanistan was not initially planned as an exercise in nation-building, but quickly came one as a form of mission creep and ticks most of the boxes for one anyway.
In the name of being honest
Washington Post: Congress ceded the power to wage wars to the president after Sept. 11. A bipartisan pair of senators want to take it back.
Kaine (D-Va.) had resigned the day before as mayor of Richmond to focus entirely on his campaign for lieutenant governor, expecting to do local news interviews all day near the state Capitol.
Two decades later — after thousands of U.S. soldiers lost their lives in the ensuing wars, which cost trillions of dollars — these two senators are trying to shame their fellow lawmakers into taking ownership of American foreign policy.
Ever since Congress signed off on a war resolution a week after the 9/11 attacks, lawmakers have allowed two Republican and two Democratic presidents virtual free rein over fighting terrorists.
American troops killed Osama bin Laden 11½ years ago, knocked his hosts, the Taliban, out of power and spent the last decade in a low-simmer war without much direction. President Biden ordered the pullout of Kabul by Aug. 31, and U.S. diplomats are now negotiating with a newer version of the Taliban in order to get more allies out of that nation.
Yet that war resolution — drafted by then-Sen. Biden as chair of the Foreign Relations Committee — lives on. It’s now been cited as validation for missions in 19 different locations, according to the most recent estimate from Kaine’s staff.
The Virginian, who won his first Senate race in 2012, has tilted at this windmill almost from his first day in the Capitol. And Young, who joined the Senate in 2017 after six years in the House, has taken up the mantle of several other Senate Republicans who previously worked with Kaine on this issue.
These two senators both eschew the partisan broadsides that dominate today’s political culture, happy to embrace nuance while remaining diplomatic in explaining the congressional atrophy on foreign affairs.
“Politically, it’s sometimes a very difficult vote to determine whether to send our young men and women into combat zones, especially when the public hasn’t already been persuaded that it’s necessary,” Young said in an interview last month, before the withdrawal from Afghanistan. “It’s still our job. It’s still our job, but we need to own it.”
“He’s my thought partner on this,” Kaine said in an interview Thursday.
Translation: Congress suffers from political cowardice.
Kaine and Young scored a preliminary victory in early August when the Foreign Relations Committee approved a measure that would repeal the resolutions for the 1991 and 2002 wars in Iraq, both of which have grown obsolete yet remain in effect despite Saddam Hussein’s execution nearly 15 years ago.
Kaine, who is pushing for the full Senate to take up the repeal, is outright bullish that they will win. “We’ve got the votes,” he said.
Young is realistic in assessing this effort. He believes that repealing these authorizations for the use of military force — AUM Fs, in congressional parlance — is about reinstalling “muscle memory” for lawmakers to learn how engage in foreign affairs.
“It’s an act of legislative hygiene. You clear out things that have expired and are no longer needed,” he said.
The more critical effort will be rewriting the 2001 resolution to define the terms of the war against terrorists in the years ahead.
That 2001 resolution barely covered one page and comes down to a simple declaration that gave then-President Bush this power: “. . . to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States.”
The elastic nature of that language — “to prevent any future acts” — allowed presidents to act in expansive ways, sometimes drawing angry responses from lawmakers but never any actual legislation that would rein in their powers.
Kaine viewed Barack Obama as “delicate and subtle” in his approach to war powers, but deep down he happily took “unilateral” action as president.
With Donald Trump, Kaine said, “It was all executive power.”
Now, he thinks the “missing ingredient” has been found, a president who served 36 years in the Senate, including chairing Foreign Relations, who has given support to the push for a new AUMF.
Young, 49, thinks that the botched exit from Afghanistan gives Republicans more incentive to want to draw up a new resolution to define what Biden can do.
“I actually think this will give additional support,” he said in a follow-up interview Thursday.
Traditionally, Republicans want to impose fewer limits on the military and generally despise hard timelines, believing that enemy soldiers will just wait out U.S. troops and then swoop in after their exit.
Democrats want to clearly define the enemy and within which region the fighting will take place, with a true deadline that would sunset the authority for military force. “If you don’t put some kind of sunset provision in, these things go on in perpetuity,” Kaine said.
Kaine and Young argued, in a 26-page essay for the Harvard Journal on Legislation, for a sunset that would require Congress to review an ongoing military effort and afford lawmakers the chance to repeal the AUMF every few years.
Kaine’s past efforts suffered a bit from his partners, then-Sens. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.). Both Republicans bitterly clashed with Trump and whose renegade status made it difficult for Senate Minority Leader Mitch Mc Connell (R-Ky.) to support.
Now, in Young, Kaine has a partner who is close to the GOP leader. Young served as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee in 2020 and has avoided any Trump-inspired primary challenge in his own reelection bid next year. Young said he wants to “validate the successes” of the Trump years, but also wants to point Republicans beyond the last 40 years of Trump, Ronald Reagan and the Bushes.
“I am going to be part of, and all my constituents will be part of, writing the next chapter of Republican successes. And we can’t look back to what we’ve just done because that’s already been done,” he said.
Kaine, 63, no longer has “rising star” attached to his name. His party’s 2016 vice-presidential nominee, he’s now entered a more elder statesman role. He and Young are both part of a centrist-minded bipartisan coalition that occasionally works on domestic policy issues.
But they both know their biggest role would be getting Congress to once again serve as a coequal branch to the presidency on matters of war and peace.
“Congress must rise to the occasion,” they wrote in the Harvard journal. “We pledge our leadership and good faith.”
Also, I still don't think there was a clear line established on when it is supposedly 'ok' to invade a country. Some said, it's when people are getting mass killed by their government.
Yet I've also seen many people around here wishing for the US to intervene in Venezuela where, despite the entire humanitarian crisis, definitely NO mass killing are conducted by Maduro.
So again, it seems far too subjective for me.
Edited by Forenperser on Feb 16th 2020 at 11:46:08 AM
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