Scott G. at Pros and Cons takes issue with my characterization of McCain’s statement (noted yesterday) that “In the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations.”
Says Scott:
As loathe as I am to argue politics with a political science professor, I think perhaps Steven didn’t take the statement in the spririt in which it was (to me, obviously) intended. I think any reasonable person would recognize the implied, but unspoken, qualifier that nations don’t invade other nations without cause — presumably a national security or defense reason. For example, Saddam invaded Kuwait without cause. We invaded Afghanistan for defensive and national security reasons. One can argue about the advisability of our invasion of Iraq, but at least the stated cause — recognized by just about the whole world at the time, by the way — was national security and defense (the much-touted but elusive weapons of mass destruction).
I have several responses:
The first is purely in the realm of campaign politics: if one’s supporters (or really anybody) has to rescue one from one’s statements by explaining what one really meant, then the original statement wasn’t a very smart one in the first place.
I think that this is doubly true of McCain and foreign policy utterances, as his clear strength in this race is FP.
The second one is a general one about the way states act: to the Russians, their actions in Georgia clearly have reasons (or “cause”) behind them. They can claim (with some credibility) that the actions were defensive, given that the Georgian appear to have started the latest round of fighting. Further, it is worth noting that the South Ossetia and Abkhazia situations are long-standing disputes among Georgia, those regions and the Russians. Further, the Russians view Georgia’s growing ties to the West (and NATO in particular) to be provocative. None of that makes the Russians “right”, per se, but it certainly is enough for a given state to decide that military action was in their interest.
If Scott is arguing that only response to a direct attack are grounds for war, that’s fine, but that wasn’t the case in Iraq, and hence even if one interprets McCain’s statement the way Scott wants it interpreted, it still means that much of the Bush Doctrine (specifically the preemptive war part) and a lot of what McCain seems to support in terms of foreign and defense policy don’t fit with McCain’s statement about nations invading other nations.
Really, it seems to me that Scott’s qualifier is mostly “if the US invades, there must have been a good reason, but other states, not so much.”1 From an American point of view, I understand the desire for things to work that way, but in terms of making a morally or analytically cogent argument, it simply doesn’t make sense. Beyond that, it isn’t what McCain said (unless there was more to the statement than the video indicated).
Third, in re: the Iraq invasion specifically, while there was a wide-ranging consensus that the Iraqis were not adequately complying with UN resolutions over WMD, there was hardly a global consensus on the US’ solution to the problem (indeed, quite the opposite).
Sphere: Related Content- Which, btw, may be exactly McCain’s thought process. [↩]
August 14th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
[...] Steven Taylor has responded to my criticism of his earlier post over at his place. This is my response to his response: [...]