Michael Wolraich's picture

    UN Declares Afghan Election "Credible" and Pope "Jewish"

    In a unanimous resolution, the United Nations declared the Afghan presidential election to be "credible" and "legitimate" despite widespread fraud allegations and the withdrawal of President Karzai's opponent, Abdullah Abdullah. In a separate unanimous resolution, the U.N. declared Pope Benedict XVI to be "Jewish" and "possibly Buddhist" despite his Catholic baptism, confirmation, papal election, and long history of pro-Jesus sentiment.

    The U.N. General Assembly also encouraged President Karzai to press ahead with "strengthening of the rule of law and democratic processes, the fight against corruption (and) the acceleration of justice sector reform" and Pope Benedict XVI to press ahead with "abstaining from pork products, eating matzoh on Passover, rejecting Jesus, and keep wearing the beanie because it's kind of like a yarmulke. Plus the retro look is very cool."

    Encouraged by its success in Afghanistan and Vatican City, the U.N. then launched a tour de force of unanimous resolutionizing, including the following declarations:

    • Israelis and Palestinians "love each other"
    • The world is "pretty much flat"
    • White men can "jump"
    • Size "doesn't matter"
    • Global warming is "a fascist conspiracy"
    • You can too "pick your friend's nose"
    • Canada "is a real country"

    But the night was not without discord. An attempt to encourage the Afghan candidate Abdullah Abdullah to accept the election results and change "one of his names" was thwarted by a faction of developing nations led by former U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who argued that the U.N. should take its "head" out of its "tuchus."

    Comments

    Canada is a real country? A bridge too far, my friend.

    Sadly, the American public is disinterested in this fraud as they had their fill protesting Iranian elections. Plus, on Twitter, #IranElections is a much more economical hastag than the character-hogging #Afghanistanelection.


    I don't care who the president of Afghanistan is as long as I can get my opium.


    The Peacenik Coordinating Committee wouldn't go for #BigAfghaniErection, I guess.

    Plus, Afghanistan always looks like it's spelled wrong, even when it's right. There is a non-binding U.N. resolution in the works to encourage Karzai to change the name of the country to Stan.


    Yeah, that's about the size of this farce.  I knew when I heard Hillary Clinton say that the whole thing was legit that we were on our way to rubber stamping Karzai as a valid partner in order to continue the Afghanistan adventure.  Yeeha!

    Then again, it's been our long-standing policy in the Middle East, South America and elsewhere to pay lipservice to and support the appearance of democracy rather than getting behind the real thing.  After all, real democracy sometimes has unpredictable results, like legitimizing Hamas.


    After all, real democracy sometimes has unpredictable results, like legitimizing Hamas.

    I think I know you well enough to know that you're just being snarky, but some people take that argument quite seriously. (I'm not one of them, mind you.) I really think you've hit the nail on the head with that comment. I wish we were much more sincere about allowing true self-governance. (Here's one place where we're in complete agreement with the Von Mises people who have been popping up here recently.)


    I believe that GW's neocons are supposed to be in your camp too.

    Actually, I'm not sure if I agree with your camp though. Or rather, I think that there are limits. While we should certainly be predisposed to support democratically elected governments, dangerous (and undemocratic) extremists have on occasion been popularly elected, particularly in unstable democracies. It's not clear to me why we should always support the popular choice at any cost.

    While I believe that the U.S. (and Israel) missed an opportunity by marginalizing and delegitimizing Hamas, I can see why Israel supporters who believe that Hamas poses an extreme threat to Israel, might feel otherwise.


    I'm not saying we should support them. I'm saying we shouldn't actively undermine them. I.e., I'm referring to a general policy of non-interference. Of course, unlike the Von Mises people, I'll put exceptions into that general policy.

     

    Maybe I've just watched too much Star Trek.


    I suppose I'm being half-snarky.  I clearly remember the headlines when Hamas won the election.  Rags like USA Today were plastered with blurbs like "SHOCKER: HAMAS WINS" as if that was a totally unimaginable outcome.  It just left me scratching my head.  Regardless of certain activities that Hamas has engaged in, it's not at all surprising to me that Palestinians would vote for leadership that they thought would put Palestinians first.

    I do think it's fair to say that if you want to tout democracy as a principle, it doesn't do much for your credibility when you back-pedal in the face of undesirable outcomes.

    But the foreign policy realists that have been running the show through the last half-century or so definitely view it as a mistake to go too far in touting the principle.  I know the neocons and others would probably take the statement you highlighted quite literally.  There are no shortage of examples that illustrate that the U.S. is frequently willing to disregard democratic outcomes because they simply contradict with the geopolitical strategy at play.  South and Central America are rife with such examples.

    They know what the score is.  By their own writings (Walter Lippman for example), they don't even necessarily have a preference for the principle of democracy at home, much less abroad.  It's something that people like hearing, nothing more.

    There is, therefore, something very different in their eyes about a social democracy in the western hemisphere and those in central and northern Europe.


    Leaving aside political disingenuousness, U.S. foreign policy has always been torn between pragmatism and idealism. You can argue that it's essentially pragmatist, but that would have to be based on some relative scale. What's the ideological extreme? Communist expansionism? Medieval crusades? And what's the pragmatic extreme? Mongolian rape-and-plunder?

    I don't think that either pure pragmatism or pure idealism are tenable. Even pragmatists need some principled end to justify the means, and idealism suffers from counterexamples that violate the rule. The debate would be a while lot healthier if we stopped juxtaposing democracy-at-any-cost against pure national self-interest. Then we might be able to discuss a reasonable threshold for supporting or disregarding democratic elections.


    I didn't say pragmatist.  I said realist.  I don't mean for the two be used interchangeably.  I mean realist in the political science sense, the sense of Hans Morgenthau and everyone after him right on down to Bill Kristol.  You can't just push aside political disingenuousness on this point because it's instrumental to understanding that the dichotomy you focus on, that of pragmatism on one side and principle on the other, is simply false.

    The realists absolutely have principles.  They're just fundamentally different than the liberal/idealist view because they look at the world in a fundamentally different way.  They see the world as anarchic and view the pursuit of security and stability as the ultimate end.  That's why they prefer the appearance of democracy to the principle of self-governance itself.  They don't even think that people are generally competent to govern themselves.  The very notion that this is even possible is regarded, as Lippman said, as a "false ideal."

    So, I agree with you that pure pragmatism and pure idealism are untenable because I can't even imagine what either would look like.  You could hold a principle, but without some notion of how to reach your goal in the context of the world in which you find yourself the principle wouldn't mean very much.  Principles are ultimately revealed through action or are consigned to be syllables in the wind.  Likewise with pragmatism, to what end would a pure pragmatist act?  Pragmatism without the context of worldview or goal doesn't make any sense to me.

    This is why I think the frame of pragmatism versus principle is just wrong.  I can't even conceive of what it means.  Everyone has principles and everyone must employ pragmatism.  However, there is a genuine and fundamental difference of principle at work here that I would argue is obscured by the false dichotomy of pragmatism v. principle.

    This is unfortunate because it benefits the realists much more than the liberals.  The Iraq war is a perfect example of this.  Instead of discussing their real principles, which they don't generally discuss on television, but are quite candid about in the relative quiet of the low-circulation journals that they routinely publish, they just act like they care about liberal principles.  So we heard a lot about being greeted as liberators, freeing Iraqis from tyranny, enabling them to democratize, etc.  In reality, they don't care about any of this.  They care about hegemony.

    Of course, they don't want to debate their principle versus the liberal principle.  Liberal principles, like the liberal view in general, are much more popular.  People like the idea of self-governance.  The realists don't really care about that.  They don't even deign to argue for their principle because whether or not the mass of people agree with it is immaterial.  The whole point is that the mass of people don't get it in the first place.  They don't and won't, so what you need to do is manufacture their consent.  It's not a question of what people want.  It's a question of conditioning their preference such that they go along with the game plan.

    So, the debate ends up being about who is the most pragmatic.  Cui bono?  I think we can see who benefits most from this frame, which we even see the evidence of in the academic names for these opposing views: "realist" and "idealist."

    And, frankly, that's what I see here in Afghanistan: Lip-service being paid to an obviously bogus democracy, rubber-stamped as legitimate so we can continue to profess that we're doing whatever it is we're doing there with the noblest of intentions.


    I hate the term "realist" because the connotation attributes delusion to those who are not realists, but I accept your explanation and distinction with pragmatism.

    But do you mean realism as an acadamic theory or a political bloc? The theory entails no disingenuousness. The practitioners have chosen disingenuous lip service as a means to enact policy in accordance with their theory.

    In any case, let me reframe my point in terms of the ideological differences you present. I doubt that there are many who are pure idealists, in the sense of valuing freedom/democracy at any cost, and I also doubt that there are many who are pure realists, in the sense of valuing stability/security at any cost. The difference does not lie in one side rejecting the other's principles but in one side assigning greater import to its own principles, which leads to different strategies in specific cases where the principles conflict, e.g. Hamas' election.


    I agree with you about the way the term "realist" is used academically, but that's still what academia teaches in political science courses.

    Right, I meant disingenuousness not on the part of the architects of the theory of realism, but on those who are transparently adherents to that view by their own admission in writings that are public, but who also pretend to hold a different set of beliefs when they appear on television or write op-eds for major newspapers.

    I'm not sure what you mean when you say that you doubt there are pure realists or pure idealists.  I can see real world examples of both.  For example, John Bolton is a pure realist.  He has nothing but contempt for the notion of international institutions, which are core to the idealist view.  What is important to him is U.S. hegemony alone.  It's this fact that made his appointment to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. so comical.

    On the other hand, Ban Ki-Moon is clearly an idealist in this sense.  In a recent speech given at Stanford, he clearly emphasized that he does not think there can be stability in the world without these institutions and that our ability to deal with global issues depends entirely on cooperative efforts via these institutions.  A lifelong diplomat, he does not believe that security is the be all, end all mission of the state.  He believes, as idealists do, that we face problems that simply cannot be solved without cooperative (and generally assumed to be democratic) institutions.

    I think that the distinction you make here is largely semantic.  You say that it's not about rejecting the principles of the other side, but I don't see how it's possible not to.  Emphasizing national interest and security in the realist view happens at the expense of de-emphasizing all other factors.  The same goes for the idealist view.  If the core of your belief is that security is more important than everything else, then I most certainly do reject your view when I place greater importance on a different factor or set of factors.

    There's a reason that this pitched ideological battle has been raging for decades.  I don't think that this is a subtle disagreement as you seem to portray it.  I also maintain that the realists have largely dominated the debate in the decades since WWII.  We see, not surprisingly, a realist foreign policy in Republican administrations, but also in Democratic administrations.  Zbigniew Brzezinski brought foreign policy realism to the Carter administration.  More recent Democratic administrations, both Clinton and Obama, have certainly been less hostile to the idealist approach, but I think that maintaining a level of military spending that dwarfs what the rest of the world spends, a policy that hurts the economy in the long-run despite Democrats professed commitment to creating jobs, illustrates the adherence of American Democrats to the maintenance of hegemony.

    Regardless, I'd still be interested in further detail on your notion of thresholds for supporting democratically elected governments.  I think the Hamas example is fascinating, especially in light of findings of war crimes on the part of both Israel and Hamas.  Since terrorism and/or other crimes of war or otherwise are usually given as the reason to de-legitimize the election of Hamas, what is the reason for the legitimacy of the Israeli democracy if they share in similar shame?  Would you propose such thresholds in a standard way that could be applied universally?


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