Even if we were to disregard all the cynical barbs about oil thirst and manifest destiny, America's ongoing struggle to stabilize the Middle East has still yielded some troubling consequences. We have spent a great deal of diplomatic capital over the past few years in assembling all of our various “coalitions of the willing,” and even leaving aside the important role humanitarian aid should play in our policy, if a real threat were to suddenly emerge (e.g. Russia, North Korea, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan), we might be left high and dry. Where exactly does this leave President Obama?
Hopefully learning from the geopolitical mistakes his predecessors made—in Africa.
The year was 1994, a lifetime ago in African politics; civil unrest was rampant, social collapse was imminent—and furthermore, had been for some time—and after having given the nasty idea some deliberation and tested it in the international press, the US and the rest of the United Nations member states withdrew their peace keepers as quietly as they could and watched as the region imploded entirely, with apocalyptic results. The lives of at least half a million Tutsi probably could have been saved, Clinton himself admitted later, if he'd sent even a few thousand of the requested troops. The withdrawal from Rwanda was the darkest hour of his presidency, he said, and like many, many others, I won't disagree, but we shouldn't forget that he simply turned around and twice repeated himself, first with Bosnia and then with Kosovo.
And, of course, we mustn't forget about Somalia, the war-torn coastal nation two countries to the east of Rwanda; its infrastructure has been irreparably destroyed by a civil war that promises never to end, its culture is under the hideous spell of Sharia law, and its international significance these days consists mostly of chatter among pundits about its ongoing problem with piracy. Black Hawk Down came out not ten years ago, and already, we have forgotten everything we might have learned about human solidarity. Actually, that's not true—we never learned anything about it in the first place, and the only reason anyone saw the movie is because it gave us a romanticized impression of ourselves, never minding the collapsing scenery of Mogadishu. A century from now, the cities of Somalia will still be getting riddled with mortars, and we will still be watching that movie, clapping as the credits roll.
This isn't to excuse President Bush; whatever he might have been fighting for in Iraq, it seems inexcusable that he didn't notice Darfur, the region of western Sudan in which the government has essentially decided to orchestrate genocide as a matter of public policy. Not that the rest of the world bothered to do anything, either; never before has so much shouting and hollering about injustice from so many disparate sources led to so little. Yet again, while the UN member states quibble about jurisdiction and responsibility, another country in the heart of darkness rots.
So say whatever you wish about our incursions into Iraq and Afghanistan; it's too easy these days to take shots at Clinton and Bush, but we must ask, what kind of legacy have they left their successor? And more importantly, what will be the Obama Doctrine? What can our new President learn from Africa? It is clearly true that borrowing neo-conservatism from Bush will land him in a quagmire, but if he just squirms, spins around and adopts the stupid isolationism of Pat Buchanan, it won't be merely cowardice, but apparently protocol as well. Please choose wisely, Mr. President.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
...but mostly, it's because he dresses his daughter like an American Girl doll.
The Supreme Court ruling in Iowa a few days ago in support of same-sex marriage has since gotten me into more than a few blistering arguments. Why should a private agreement between two consenting individuals I neither know nor care about have anything to do with me, and why exactly should I feel compelled to disagree with it on principle? Intuition is slanted toward the proponent of same-sex marriage, and the opponents implicitly seem to recognize it.
The savvy opponent is likely to begin by offering a litany of his own intuitionist critiques: same-sex marriage contradicts my religion; it violates tradition; it deprives children of a proper parental cross-section; it isn't natural; it makes me feel uncomfortable. But why are any of these legitimately within the purview of the legislator? Maybe gambling violates my religion; should we ban it? Divorce and one-night-stands often functionally deny children of one or both of their parents, and do so in much larger numbers; should we ban them? Heart transplants aren't natural; should we ban them? Soulja Boy makes me very much more than uncomfortable, and is offensive to the aesthetic sensibilities of every single person I've ever met; should we ban him? Because it's protocol in this country not to concoct tyrannical, ad hoc laws to satisfy the whims of even a majority, these arguments are the easiest to dispatch.
The opponent might then argue—à la Rick Santorum—that legal same-sex marriage leads to legal polygamy, bestiality or any of the other usual silly conjectures. But this is a patent non sequitur. It isn't as if marriage has some kind of universal taxonomical tree denoting its structure, on which a marriage of two men or two women is an intermediate between a marriage of a man and a woman and a marriage of a man, a woman, four goats and a toaster. In reality, same-sex and opposite-sex marriage differ only in that one is already accepted and that one isn't, and opponents have just slipped in a preexisting norm as a piece of its own evidence. Even if there actually were that empirical suggestion of causation—which there isn't, by the way, not the faintest whisper—would this be a reasonable basis to begin restricting rights that are, by hypothesis, otherwise legitimate? Of course not. After all, legal marriages in general are themselves also a prerequisite to legal polygamy, but no reasonable person would argue to ban the former simply to rid ourselves of the possibility of the latter.
In lieu of all of those arguments, the opponents of same-sex marriage are likely to assert that gays can change their orientation, a fact which is neither straightforwardly true nor relevant. They might argue that it leads to the breakdown of the family, a curious assertion to make in a country with a fifty percent divorce rate. They might argue that procreation is the true warrant for marriage, which can only make us question where they place the infertile. They might even support the civil union “compromise,” a seemingly pragmatic position that has gained ground on both sides in recent years but is actually entirely arbitrary and self-evidently unnecessary if it has been properly defined.
But in the end, they are forced to recognize that their position is not rooted in fairness or the earnest happiness of man but rather some kind of selfish predisposition, and that while they might well be decent, ordinary people who don't support visiting gays with violence, they still provide ideological cover for those who do. At any rate, both public policy and public opinion in the United States and elsewhere are clearly moving in the right direction, and, as this proxy war begins to draw to a close, we can realize that although the ruling in Iowa is a big victory for gays, it's a bigger victory for the rest of us.
The savvy opponent is likely to begin by offering a litany of his own intuitionist critiques: same-sex marriage contradicts my religion; it violates tradition; it deprives children of a proper parental cross-section; it isn't natural; it makes me feel uncomfortable. But why are any of these legitimately within the purview of the legislator? Maybe gambling violates my religion; should we ban it? Divorce and one-night-stands often functionally deny children of one or both of their parents, and do so in much larger numbers; should we ban them? Heart transplants aren't natural; should we ban them? Soulja Boy makes me very much more than uncomfortable, and is offensive to the aesthetic sensibilities of every single person I've ever met; should we ban him? Because it's protocol in this country not to concoct tyrannical, ad hoc laws to satisfy the whims of even a majority, these arguments are the easiest to dispatch.
The opponent might then argue—à la Rick Santorum—that legal same-sex marriage leads to legal polygamy, bestiality or any of the other usual silly conjectures. But this is a patent non sequitur. It isn't as if marriage has some kind of universal taxonomical tree denoting its structure, on which a marriage of two men or two women is an intermediate between a marriage of a man and a woman and a marriage of a man, a woman, four goats and a toaster. In reality, same-sex and opposite-sex marriage differ only in that one is already accepted and that one isn't, and opponents have just slipped in a preexisting norm as a piece of its own evidence. Even if there actually were that empirical suggestion of causation—which there isn't, by the way, not the faintest whisper—would this be a reasonable basis to begin restricting rights that are, by hypothesis, otherwise legitimate? Of course not. After all, legal marriages in general are themselves also a prerequisite to legal polygamy, but no reasonable person would argue to ban the former simply to rid ourselves of the possibility of the latter.
In lieu of all of those arguments, the opponents of same-sex marriage are likely to assert that gays can change their orientation, a fact which is neither straightforwardly true nor relevant. They might argue that it leads to the breakdown of the family, a curious assertion to make in a country with a fifty percent divorce rate. They might argue that procreation is the true warrant for marriage, which can only make us question where they place the infertile. They might even support the civil union “compromise,” a seemingly pragmatic position that has gained ground on both sides in recent years but is actually entirely arbitrary and self-evidently unnecessary if it has been properly defined.
But in the end, they are forced to recognize that their position is not rooted in fairness or the earnest happiness of man but rather some kind of selfish predisposition, and that while they might well be decent, ordinary people who don't support visiting gays with violence, they still provide ideological cover for those who do. At any rate, both public policy and public opinion in the United States and elsewhere are clearly moving in the right direction, and, as this proxy war begins to draw to a close, we can realize that although the ruling in Iowa is a big victory for gays, it's a bigger victory for the rest of us.
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