Foreign Policy and "First-Order" Questions Posted by Shadi Hamid

I’m a bit worried that some people mistook my post on the “inappropriateness of a left-right spectrum on foreign policy” last week. In some ways I did, as Dan Lehr put it, “[celebrate] the end of the old ‘left-right/war-peace’ dichotomies.” But this does not mean that other dichotomies, or dichotomies in general, are inappropriate. Brent Scrowcroft and I may agree on many things now, but this convergence, in my view, is an accident of recent history. It tells us little about our competing visions of a global system, about the ends of foreign policy, and, then, how means and ends are to be matched. Grappling with these same issues, and taking a more positive view, Ilan says

There is relatively universal agreement among [liberals, liberal hawks, and realists] that we need to begin withdrawing from Iraq, focus more on Afghanistan, opt for direct diplomacy with Iran, reengage with the world, improve our image, strengthen our alliances, close Guantanamo and deal with global warming and energy security.

He is of course right. But the fact that agreement on these issues would be cause for relief, or perhaps even celebration, is itself a grim indictment of our foreign policy discourse. The lowest common denominators are quite low. That aside, my bigger problem with this emerging “consensus” is that it fails to address what one might call “first-order” questions. Glenn Greenwald, in a very interesting post, touches on this here.

For starters, were we against the war because of its consequences or despite its consequences? I worry that the answer to this question is no less clear today than it was several years ago. This is not necessarily a bad thing. I don’t have a clear answer myself. Was there something morally wrong with launching the Iraq war in and of itself, and, if so, what is the nature of the "moral" component in this case, but, more importantly, in so many others? Is what makes such wars immoral the fact that they are pre-emptive, or is it that preemption, as a matter of fact, fails much more often than it succeeds? In other words, if pre-emption was successful from a pragmatic standpoint, would it be less immoral? Or would the very fact of its efficacy negate, or supercede, moral considerations?   

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One step in the direction of clarity is to stop using the term "preemption" when what is meant is "prevention". A preemptive attack occurs when one has good reason to believe one faces an urgent threat and an adversary's attack is imminent, and rather than wait for the first blow to be struck against one's own people or forces one strikes the adversary first.

A preventive attack occurs when no attack by the adversary is imminent or even in the planning stages, when there is no urgent threat, but where there is an estimation that the adversary constitutes a long-term threat, and a decision is made to strike at the adversary now to prevent his capabilities from growing into a more urgent threat later.

International law has long recognized legitimate occasions for preemptive attack. If there is a moral certainty that war is upon us, we need not wait to let our adversaries inflict the first damage. But there is an equally long and established tradition of rejection of preventive war.

There is no doubt a spectrum of possible military actions falling between clearly preemptive attacks and clearly preventive attacks. But there are clear cases as well. Many of the most prominent arguments advanced for the Iraq War were frank recommendations of preventive war. Kenneth Pollack's book was an extended argument for the position that Iraq did not constitute an urgent threat, but that it did constitute a long-term threat, and that in turn justified us in attacking them.

The cause of international law has undergone great damage In the United States as a result of the Iraq War and the debate surrounding it. The UN charter, to which we are still signatories, seems to recognize only two legitimate bases for the use of military force against a sovereign state: individual or collective self-defense, which can be exercised without Security Council authorization, and unspecified "threats to the peace" for which UN authorization is required. Neoconservatives don't seem to care much for international law and the internationalist tradition at all. And liberals who do not oppose international law in principle still appear to have grown weary of the international laws of war as they were understood for decades, and appear to regard those traditions in somewhat Nietzschean fashion as the sophistic shield of the weak and corrupt against the righteous power of the strong and good. They have pushed for all sorts of modifications of these rules, allowing military intervention in other countries for a variety of reasons, including the repair of unsatisfactory, sub-optimal or ineffective domestic political systems.

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