Throughout the course of the post-9/11 2000s, the neoconservative Bush doctrine demanded the largest increase in so-called “defense” spending and troop deployment since the height of the Cold War. Under the current administration, these figures only continue to rise. Thousands of lives and over $6 trillion dollars later, critics of the conflict left and right have been vindicated by their warnings of an endless war on a tactic governments too often bread - terrorism. Like wasteful centralized efforts against poverty, poor education, and drugs beforehand, the growing global U.S. war on terror has only so far fueled more of it.
In the spring of 2007, activities of the anti-war movement were at a peak once Iraq was engulfed in a raging sectarian bloodbath. As the death toll was mounting from George W. Bush’s surge of 20,000 more troops into the country, public approval was plummeting faster than Iraqi access to electricity.
As 200 peers and me were about to leave middle school at the time, the political attitudes of public ed. intelligentsia were unforgettable. Despite ballooning budget approvals to school districts from local, state and federal levels (remember No Child Left Behind?), somehow no price tag was ever enough for teachers and administrators who would always demand more of our money. Of course, the “we’re all gonna die from global warming in five years” mentality was expensive for somebody to preach to us kids daily. It was often done side by side along with casual references to the Iraq debacle.
If this all seems like some unintelligible soap box so far, I promise this is all an effort to present a more thorough understanding of the Bush-era “anti-war” movement. Maybe a well deserved glimpse into the past will help shed some light onto U.S. foreign policy towards South Sudan today? In case there still remains any doubt by now, the populist Saturday Night Live circuit was only anti-war so long as the war in question was Bush’s; hence the lack of outcry from them over President Obama’s actions in Libya or Syria.
At the height of the reign of King George the V, a very memorable 8th Grade science teacher switched a classroom discussion on cumulus clouds one day to why “we” were in Iraq – as if his whole class were on a field trip together through some bombed out Baghdad suburb with him. While the veteran tenured tutor rightly condemned Saddam Hussein as “a bad man who needed to go” (the guy was in a roomful of 8th Graders remember), one point of his still strikes me in hindsight almost seven years since.
It seemed that my presumably progressive teacher (in the big government leftist sense of the word) questioned the dubious merits for war not so much on principled pacifist grounds that day in 2007, but on this collective notion that “we” weren’t ridding countries from other monsters the world over who were just as bad if not worse than Saddam(1). It was when he specifically asked the class why “we” weren’t also in Uganda(2), Rwanda, the Congo, Burma, or Sudan that I heard the phrase Darfur – the infamous site of an ethnic bloodbath – used for the first time.
This is not meant to call out an impromptu lesson plan of some individual who is likely well removed from the halls of a rural New England middle school by now, but to use his discussion as an example to address a key inconsistency too often offered by the progressive internationalist establishment(3). Why does this lobby worship and mythicize every United Nations-sanctioned U.S. war, while condemning any unilateral one the U.S. government goes alone (with few notable exceptions)?
A former Nuremberg prosecutor once argued that George Bush should be tried for war crimes only because Operation Iraqi Freedom was waged without a UN Security Council vote in favor. Call me crazy, but how many government diplomats have ever stopped to think about what makes that UN seal of approval so sacred? How would a vote by international bureaucrats most people of the world don’t know have made the mass murder of thousands anymore justified in Iraq?
These voices, however well meaning, place too much faith in a centralized global bureaucracy to solve global problems. The excess of American nationalism, a collectivist mentality wrapped around patriotic loyalty to the god of government, is instead replaced with another governing body. If it is any consulation, the train-wreck of Obamacare is only limited to the United States thanks to micromanaging from D.C. – a District of Corruption completely out of touch with the rest of the country. Now, picture how much more disconnected a global authority can be? Its implications circumnavigate the whole world over.
Since World War II, a number of wars have been rebranded and justified by the United Nations that seemingly violate the international body’s own charter. Articles 42 and 51 of Chapter VII strictly forbid any war whose aim is not either for self-defense or to maintain or restore international peace(4). It is arguably safe to say too many wars in the world never meet either criteria, yet the UN continues to sanction them.
To start with, a “police action” in the Korean civil war ended 3 million lives to save a bloodthirsty Southern dictatorship from a neighboring communist one in the North that had been backed by the Soviet Union and Mao Zedong’s China. U.S. President Harry Truman used United Nations Security Council Resolution 83 as legal justification to sidestep congress and draft 1.5 million Americans into explosive Cold War politics on distant foreign battlefields. Over 36,000 of them were sent to early graves. (5) (6)
The rest of the 20th Century never saw one crisis the UN was willing to let go to waste. The loss of nearly 300 U.S. marines and French paratroopers in Lebanon’s Civil War (1983) that gave birth to Hezbollah was part of a multinational peacekeeping force. The war that saved the Kuwaiti monarchy (1991) with the lives of just over three hundred British and American men and women was famously authorized by a “coalition of the willing” drawn up at the UN; as was an operation that lost 18 troops “doing God’s work” chasing warlords in Somalia (’92-’93). At least that’s how George H.W. Bush spun his UN mission that culminated in the events of Black Hawk Down…
Let us also not forget Bill Clinton’s Kosovo and cruise missile crusades over Iraq and former Yugoslavia that dominated the 1990s. Given the then recent release of Wag the Dog to the box office, a film whose plot revolves around a fictional war literally scripted by Hollywood to distract the public from a presidential scandal, many media outlets dubbed these actions Monica’s Wars(7). How many deaths of Iraqi children did Clinton’s secretary of state claim were “worth” the sanctions regime that emboldened Saddam Hussein’s and wouldn’t let modern medicine into the country? How many heaps of rubble did General Wesley Clark threaten to turn Serbia into when he bombed the place back to the stone age with “humanitarian bombing?”
Isn’t it safe to say that the United Nations’ track record in pacifying foreign conflicts is more bleak than many people realize? When the U.S. government picked sides to draw up borders in thousand year old Balkan bloodbaths(8), invaded Haiti in 1994 to install a corrupt nation-building corp. of America, fought a decade-plus no-fly zone war over Iraq, and most recently replaced Muamar Qaddafi’s tyranny with a warzone of genocidal jihadist militias; these actions were all authorized by United Nations resolutions. Why should the recent intervention in South Sudan be expected to turn out any different from any other third world quagmire American presidents have started in the past? When will bureaucrats learn lessons of history?
The world can’t be successfully remade in the internationalist image anymore than it can be remade in the George Bush neoconservative one of Pax Americana. The ugly situation in South Sudan is a product of both fallacies.
Just last week, in the name of preventing a civil war relapse that is likely to take place anyway, United Nations Security Council members you’ve never met agreed to commit more international armies to pacification of South Sudan. After decades of civil war and rampant accusations of genocide, it was made the newest nation-state in the world when 99% of voters in a popular referendum voted to leave the Muslim dominated north at the end of 2010. Like the American south, the Sudanese South is also predominantly Christian. Unlike Dixie however, it is anything but stable and many rebel warlords are known for anything but hospitality.
This all begs the obvious question; in the mind of the anti-Bush “liberal” Barack Obama, why could he be deploying U.S. troops with AFRICOM to prop up an unstable regime created by the Bush-era state department? Better yet, what national interest is the president ready to protect with more force he’s assured Speaker Boehner he is willing to use to save, and what Constitutional authority does he have to wield it without a congressional vote?
For reference, here is the demographic breakdown of South Sudan:
Even if 99% of South Sudanese want out of the North’s government, what sense does it make for outside forces to mold the other 1% into a collective entity they want no part of? Won’t this move to nation build only bread more animosity to Americans half a world away in a region many know nothing about?
Maybe this one really is over an oil company one South Sudanese rebel general is on the board of directors of? Is that Obama’s national interest?
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(1.) - One key concept of the libertarian thinker Murray Rothbard has since been elaborated on by historian Thaddeus Russell, and comedians Doug Stanhope, Bill Hicks, & George Carlin (among other libertarians). It is important to always remember, whether you believe in government or not, that we are not the nation-state, and the nation-state is not you or me. We didn’t collectively invade Iraq in 2003; our government did with our labor and fruits thereof. Unless you’re an Iraq War veteran, don’t claim credit for liberating or occupying Baghdad.
If the premise is accepted that we are not the U.S. government, how can the United Nations be us anymore so?
(2.) – Kony 2012 wasn’t made yet, and its filmmaker hadn’t lost it in San Diego.
(3) – Not that my teacher was one, they include former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, filmmaker and serial hypocrite Michael Moore, the Clintons, Kennedys, Gores, Kerrys, etc… The biggest problem many of them had with the war in Iraq was that the UN’s blue helmets weren’t the ones waging it.
(4) – The UN Charter fails to clarify how a war can be waged to maintain international peace. Isn’t that a contradiction of terms that sound vague enough to begin with?
(5) – I don’t pretend to understand what veterans experienced at Pusan, Inchon, or Onjong…but I tend to doubt my great uncle does either. After volunteering right out of high school, he lost his hearing at Pork Chop Hill to mortar fire while many of his comrades lost their feet to the bitter cold; if they were lucky enough not to lose their lives first. Understandably, my great uncle has never been a fan of any U.S. war since.
(6) – Following a well publicized massacre of student activists in 1980, and the wave of public anger that followed, South Korea’s cycle of military juntas finally ended in 1987. The North’s regime survives to this day.
(7) – On December 16, 1998, Operation Desert Fox targeted Iraq as part of a four-day bombing campaign under the UN-sanctioned sanctions regime, embargo, and WMD inspection team shenanigans that had been ongoing since the end of Desert Storm in 1991. The events’ timing was widely criticized by Clinton critics, as it took place during the start of his impeachment proceedings in the House of Representatives. When Bill Clinton was impeached on December 19, the bombing stopped that day.
(8) - The plot of the 2001 blockbuster Behind Enemy Lines is loosely based off the experiences of Air Force Captain Scott O’Grady. On June 2, 1995, O’Grady’s F-16 was shot down over Bosnian Serb territory. He was rescued six days later after surviving off grass, leaves, and bugs.