wrong Hurley, I read a lot of nonsense without caring about it. How else will one decide if one cares about something, by not reading or listening to the nonsense?

The evidence of this show being anti-Israel is subtle but overwhelming.

“It’s not an accusation to be taken lightly, unless of course the accuser is taken lightly, which might well be the case.”

I don’t care what you think, hurley. People in the Jewish community where I reside think differently.

I hope the moderators will delete the last 6 or so posts. This is a serious topic and if you don’t have anything to contribute don’t post!

How original!

Jebediah Springfield/Hans Sprungfeld used it best:
“A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man,”
“Patriots will embiggen America.”

List of neologisms on The Simpsons

http://www.tnr.com/

Speaking as a Democratic hawk, a fighting liberal as it were, I would suggest the Mr. Lieven mind his own country which is on its way of being Islamicized and not pretend to know better than we do about how to defend ourselves.

You can’t have it both ways. It’s US foreign policy because it’s the US taxpayers, soldiers, citizens, reputation, properity and security that’s at stake. The “whole planet” isn’t helping us pay for these adventures in either money or blood. There are limited financial and military resources, and the risks and costs are not distributed evenly on every person and every nation, so hard decisions have to get made. We need a rational, objective way to decide where, when, and with what resources it’s appropriate to get involved.

After the first Gulf war Saddam had no capacity to invade anybody. And massacres happen all the time and no one has ever proposed that it’s the responsibility of the US to intervene on every continent where they occur. Instead, what happens is that those massacres that happen to fit into some political agenda get lots of press.

But “lots of press” seems like a bad basis for foreign policy. Was the massacre of the Kurds by Saddam really worse the the bloodbaths in Rwanda, the Congo, the Ivory Coast, Uganda, Liberia, etc? Human Rights Watch said that governmental killings in Iraq were actually in decline in the years leading up to the invasion. How do we rank the starvation of North Koreans compared to the number of people killed in border fighting in Myanmar, or disputes in Kashmir? Some estimates of the number of people killed in the ongoing independence conflicts in PGN run into the 10′s of thousands, but most Americans have never even HEARD of that one. What about Chechnya or Colombia or Sri Lanka? What about Darfur?

If we’re going to be all realistic and rational about intervening on purely humanitarian grounds to stop massacres and ethnic cleansing then it’s up the advocates of such a strategy to explain how such crises should be ranked or prioritized, who should do the intervening, with what resources, and how to estimate the cost of paying for it and cleaning up the mess afterwards.

For me the answer is a deeper sense of ethics and a deeper (more aware) realism.

It seems to me that, if it is true that the only legitimate purpose of US foreign policy is to advance our own interests, those interests have got to now become global. In other words the “our” has to be us all, the whole planet. We have to stop thinking so narrowly. This to me is a step towards a more ethical foreign policy.

Regarding realism, that begins with knowing and understanding the real world more deeply than we do. And there is an enormous lack in this area. Those who design our foreign policy put us at real risk acting out of their ignorance. To mention two areas of willful ignorance, the current disdain of science, and ignorance understanding the nature other cultures.

We cannot enhance our own well-being uniformed. If outcomes of our actions (including aid) are poor then our knowledge and understanding ( with regard to solving those problems) is at fault.

No, I’m saying:

#1 The fewer situations we consider becoming involved in the less chance we have of making a mistake, since outcomes cannot be reliably predicted

#2 The purpose of government is to advance the national interests of its citizens, so one way we can pare the number of such situations is to not even consider those where a strong case of national interest cannot be made.

#3 Another way we can pare the number opf potential situations is by having fewer economic and natural resources dependencies.

It’s not realistic to expect to eliminate all uncertain high-stakes decisions, but if we can even cut the number of potential decisions in half we can reduce the risk of a major mistake like Iraq or Somalia in half.

Obviously someone will argue that intervening for purely humanitarian reasons IS in our national interest because it reduces regional instability, etc but then the burden of proof is no them to show that this is actually true, and not conjecture, and that we are likely to be able to intervene successfully, AND that it necessarily falls to us to do it. Since it is unlikely that any of those preconditions of proof can be met I think a philosophy like mine will keep us out of a lot of trouble.

But if Americans free themselves of that belief it will at least REDUCE our tendency to get involved in all kinds of situations where we are clueless. Somalia Haite, Iraq, Bosnia, and Kosovo, all represent cases where the public was cajoled by unscrupulous politicians into supporting costly interventions that did not benefit us in any way using strictly emotional manipulation.

I agree there there will always be some situations where we can’t be sure whether inaction might be worse than action. I don’t agree that Iraq was one of them – I think Iraq was a case where any calm, cool, dispassionate analysis would show that the risks of going in were much higher than the risks on NOT going in.

No I seem to think that WE would be as well off. As I said above, US foreign policy should be calibrated to to advancing our security, liberty and prosperity. Unless our interests are at stake we should not be intervening in every conflict in the world. Bosnia, Kosovo etc were not nearly as bad as other situations in Africa, for instance, and no one was advocating intervention there. Moreover the Balkans were much more likely to have a direct effect on Europe (because of floods of refugees) so it was up to the Europeans to act if action was required.

What would you cite as evidence that social justice works, and how would you define “works”, that is, what could we test for that would indicate whether it was worth the cost?

There is a widespread belief mong both liberals and neocons that spreading our “values” – democracy, women’s rights, pluralism, secularism, etc, produces some sort of general goodness. But we don’t actually know that. These things might just be a sort of peculiar western affectation, sort of like the belief that free markets and capitalism in the PRC must perforce lead to political freedom.

I think that spreading our “values” is just as imperialistic as anything else. If we think these ideas are so great the best and lowest-cost way of spreading them is to do a really good job of them here at home so people in Iran and Syria and the PRC etc will want to emulate us. A billion dollars spent in the US to improve education, infrastructure, health care, etc, will not only help Americans, but will be more effective at promoting the benefits of our system than the same money spent on USIA and VOA propaganda overseas. Let’s clean up our own act first – Al Jazeera etc love to seize on reports of corrupt US politicians and election problems. We shouldn’t waste one second lecturing to them while we have mud on our face here in the US.

I’m not supporting the Iraq war, but

You won’t get an argument from me on the deficits — I would in fact argue that the Bush administration’s most significant foreign policy blunder, long-term, is not the war in Iraq but the decision to pursue a reckless and unsustainable fiscal policy.

But I still don’t believe you’ve addressed the key issue here, which is that the distinction between action and inaction is much murkier than you acknowledge. Yes, we are unnecessarily susceptible to political shifts in the Middle East (because of oil) and the Far East (because we rely on Japan and China to finance our debt). But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have other interests, or that living more like the Nelson household would insulate us from the great bulk of world affairs. Even if we applied your (strict realist) foreign policy platform, we would continue to be affected — pervasively — by simple stuff like the basic economic circumstances of our trading partners. To take a good example: The Asian financial crisis in the late ’90s. We (in part through some of the Bretton Woods organizations) intervened and put a lot of money on the line to solve the crisis before it tanked the world economy and the domestic economy. Many economists believed we would be unable to fix the situation. I don’t have the expertise to evaluate what the odds of success resulting from an activist policy were at the outset. As it happened, though, it mostly worked, and American families were mostly spared. These kinds of crises will arise no matter how (or whether) we put our own affairs in order, and in many cases the risks associated with trying will be low compared to the risk of doing nothing.

And of course, this is only taking the most extreme “realist” position into account. For those of us who believe that there are reasons outside the narrowly defined “national interest” that might matter, the stakes will remain even higher than suggested above. Even if there’s no immediate self-interest involved, for example, many people believe that there may be a moral obligation to prevent genocide, and that if the American people support that policy at the polls on those moral bases, then steps taken to stop a genocide constitute a valid exercise of national power. (I know you disagree here, and I’m not trying to debate you on this point — just to show that in a pluralistic society, these issues will come into the policy debate.) In these cases, your point — that it is harder to effect the change we want reliably — should be heeded, but it should not be the end of the inquiry.

But there was no serious evidence he had WMD’s. And what do the massacres have to do with it? Was he killing Americans? Did he massacre more people than were killed in the Iran/Iraq war? Should we have stepped in to stop that? Look at Darfur or North Korea. Darfur has massacres, N Korea has nukes (AND massacres if you count all the people who have died from famine).

And where is the evidence that we even know HOW to step in? Bosnia, Kosovo, and Haiti are all in sispended animation, Somalia is taken over by Islamic fundies, Vietnam only started to settle down after we LEFT – we have no good track record on nation-building – “doing nothing” looks pretty good to me in terms of US interests.

In most cases that’s exactly what it means, precisely because the stakes are so high. The physician’s pronciple, “First do no harm” should be the operative guideline here.

One reason the “stakes are so high” is because the US has continued to put itself into situations where we are exposed to high-stakes situations. For instance, our reliance on oil from dangerous and unstable places in the world forces us to have to pay more attention to those places than we otherwise would. Our huge budget and trade deficits make us more dependent on places like China for both loans and manufacturing. We’ve deliberately pursued policies that expose us to these unstable gambles.

To use an analogy – my wife and I are fiscally conservative. We have a huge rainy-day reserve. We pay cash for our cars and drive them into the ground. We have a tiny fixed-rate mortage on our house so small we could easily pay it on unemployment compensation and so small that our equity is so big that house prices could drop 80% and we’d still be in the black. These policies insulate us from swings in interest rates and house prices and whether we get laid off. As a result we are not forced to always be in high-stakes situations.

I do not purport to support this particularly aggressive form of “social justice foreign policy,” but ethicist Peter Singer made a provocative argument in 1999 on this topic, which is worth consideration: http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/19990905.htm.

I was referring to our back-and-forth about Japan’s welfare system as off topic not about foreign policy and Africa, though I think you know that.

From what most posters have suggested in this threat, there is an agreement that ethics and realism, in all its flavours, are are a bit like oil and water.

So the question is what should be/can be an alternative.

plnelson proposes a self-interested more stay-at-home policy unless outcomes can be predicted. SutterSutter reminds us that non-action is a form of action and both have unpredictable results. Also, whether aggressive or passive, policy focused on national interest is real-politick.

I would propose a policy, not of grande-realism, where one attempts to impose democracy and freedom with the sword and the consultant, bombing and buying distant others into submission to gain access to their markets and resources, but rather a policy of social justice, where the goal is equality and the means all kinds of grass-roots efforts, such as micro-borrowing, fair trade, etc.

If a nation is trying to win over hearts and minds, to be respected, emulated and even loved, why support dictators, bomb villages, impose your way of life, create economic barriers, and generally bully other peoples?