If Interventionists Are Such Sophisticated Realists, Why Are They Consistently Wrong?

Bombings, blowjobs, hawkery, and hackery

"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue Iran and shoot bomb somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?"

(Originally published on my now discontinued second substack). Sorry that this will appear in people’s inboxes twice if they’re subscribed to both. If people are very irritated by this, leave a comment—it will determine whether I rerelease my other posts on the other Substack.

If you’re a person who has advocated against senseless wars, murderous sanctions, and horrifying drone strikes, very often the charge of naivete will be leveled against you. People will claim that your failure to support foreign wars that kill enormous numbers of people is evidence that you just don’t understand how bad the world is. If, for example, you claim that we shouldn’t arm Saudi Arabia, a country that funds Isis, transfers U.S. arms to Al Qaeda, and is responsible for the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, people will claim you’re some wooly-headed idealist who just doesn’t understand the intricate complexities of the modern world and the depravity of the globe’s bad guys.

One of my professors, Peter Railton, described a phenomenon by which people think that something is true just because it sounds cynical. You see this with tons of young people thinking Nietzsche was right about everything—despite him having been demonstrably confused about both psychology and history, as well as relatively bad at ethics. But because Nietzsche sounds very cynical, people will believe the lunacy that he spews.

When it comes to foreign policy, the claim that non-interventionists are naïve is exactly backward.

Suppose some communist supported invading another country because they thought that, while it would be a flagrant violation of international law, it would have good outcomes. International law for thee, not for me, they claimed. We would describe them as dangerously, murderously naïve. When one thinks that the righteousness of their cause is so great that they are above the law of nations, they are aptly described as a wooly-headed idealist.

Suppose that a Russian claimed that the invasion of Ukraine was great because they trusted their government’s official justification. We would similarly call them naïve—they trust a corrupt dictator to invade responsibly and reliably represent whether or not there was a good justification for the invasion. If they assumed that the Soviets had a good reason for trying to draw the U.S. into Vietnam, we’d call them crazy—the idea that the murderous Soviet Union is really acting benevolently when they are taking seemingly grossly immoral actions is one that requires starry-eyed, uncritical acceptance of official propaganda.

Now suppose that a person supports the Iraq war based on official state propaganda, claiming that Saddam was developing WMDs. Of course, this would not be a reasonable justification even if true, given that lots of countries have WMDs, and many have developed them without us batting an eye. Additionally, the reason we thought that Iraq had WMDs was based on propaganda from the Bush administration, despite Iraq, in 2002, allowing weapons inspectors to return without conditions. Of course, it’s no great mystery why Saddam didn’t want the weapons inspectors in Iraq, when they’d been used to spy on him, as the U.S. later admitted. Iraq—supposedly not complying—released a 12,000-page report on its WMD programs and was very cooperative. It was clear that Iraq didn’t have WMDs at the time.

Nevertheless, people blindly trusted that there was some legitimate U.S. rationale—that Iraq did, in fact, have WMDs. Surely that is evidence of naivete. If people who blindly trust the Soviets are naïve, why aren’t the people who blindly trust the U.S. similarly naïve?

Just like the Soviet sympathizers, Putin pawns, and defenders of British imperialism, the defenders of U.S. foreign policy have a whole host of reasons why the U.S. is really in the right. We’re told that the U.S. are the good guys, so when we mess up, we had noble aims. This claim is rather dubious, especially given that “The US is truly singular in violating international law.”

Take the savage attack on Sudan during the Clinton administration, during which we bombed one of their two medical facilities, committing an act of international terror far worse than 9/11. This was almost certainly to distract from the Monica Lewinsky scandal—as the article I’ve linked shows, the official rationale was complete bullshit and even if it were true, there was no need to attack Sudan right when Clinton did.

So America, the shining city on the hill, the country that generally is supposedly well-intentioned but sometimes messes up in its pursuit of global justice, killed tens of thousands of people to distract from a sex scandal. The blood of tens of thousands of people is on Clinton’s hands—as Hitchens suggests in an unbelievably scathing article titled “They bomb pharmacies, don't they?”

America committed a savage terror attack. And it was carried out to distract from a sex scandal. The blood of tens of thousands of Sudanese men, women, and children is on the hands of the American foreign policy establishment and a president who bombed another country to distract from an embarrassing blowjob. Hitchens concludes

In any event, he acted with caprice and brutality and with a complete disregard for international law, and perhaps counted on the indifference of the press and public to a negligible society like that of Sudan, and killed wogs to save his own lousy Hyde (to say nothing of our new moral tutor, the ridiculous sermonizer Lieberman). No bipartisan contrition is likely to be offered to the starving Sudanese: unmentioned on the "prayer-breakfast" circuit.

And this is not our only evidence that the U.S. sees foreigners as expendable pawns whose bodies can be blown apart by bombs if it furthers the pursuit of U.S. interests. One doesn’t need to look very hard at U.S. foreign policy for it to become obvious that we do not take the lives of foreign people remotely seriously. If we did, we would not, for example, starve millions of people with murderous and genocidal sanctions that do not work. Look at this bone-chillingly evil sentiment from Secretary of State Albright, defending U.S. sanctions on Iraq

“We have heard that half a million [Iraqi] children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima,” asked Stahl, “And, you know, is the price worth it?”

“I think that is a very hard choice,” Albright answered, “but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”

American empire demands blood and bone.

Let’s not mince words—these sentiments are roughly as pure an encapsulation of evil as one can find. If Iran, for example, declared an event “worth it” that was equivalent to a hundred 9/11s directed only at children under the age of 5, we’d call that evidence that they were the real axis of evil. Yet sophisticated bureaucrats, appointed to high positions in governments, make equally horrifying statements. The fact that this wasn’t disqualifying in the slightest is unbelievably decisive evidence that the incentive structure in the U.S. completely and totally neglects the lives of people born outside of the U.S..

Dustin Crummett once remarked that the prevailing sentiment in the U.S. about animals seems to be that we can’t cause them to suffer for no reason, but we basically can cause them to suffer for any reason. The same is true of foreign people. We’re willing to butcher enormous numbers of people in other countries for the sake of minor benefits.

When we highlight how terrible our enemies are, we point to explicit statements they make about wishing death to America and Israel and such. But with America, the evil is much more insidious. It is the banality of evil Arendt discussed. When Americans make the decision to starve a hundred thousand young kids—kids the same age as my young cousins—they don’t talk about their seething hatred for the kids. They talk about the national interest and cite sophisticated looking think tank reports. When Albright is willing to kill half a million Iraqi kids for a policy of questionable efficacy, it is clear that U.S. institutions dispense their fair share of evil.

The factory farmers that torture animals and grind them up don’t hate animals—they just see them as expendable products in pursuit of their real aims. In a similar way, U.S. policymakers and lobbyists don’t hate the foreign children that they willingly starve; they just don’t think about them that much. If the best way to boost their firm’s productivity is to support some horrifying foreign war, then they’ll favor doing it, consequences be damned.

U.S. bureaucrats are not like the fanatical terrorists that strap bombs to themselves and blow themselves up. They’re worse. Their evil is the cold, calculating, cunning evil of Eichmann¹—the one that sees 100,000 deaths via spreadsheet as an unfortunate number, perhaps the way one would see poor performance in the fourth quarter of the year. What they do not see are living, breathing children, mercilessly devastated in the pursuit of U.S. primacy.

When countries invade others based on flimsy justifications, and torture and kill the men while raping the women, it is not because they have burning hatred for the men and women. It is because they see them as expendable—they don’t care about their fate at all. Whether 5 perish or 1 million, they do not care. Most evil is banal.

How many Americans know what’s going on in Yemen? How many know that Yemen existed? American voters do not care about anything that happens if it does not affect us domestically. When American voters—the people who elect the politicians—votes are unchanged by U.S. complicity in a massacre of half a million people, there is no one keeping the special interests in check.

So the claim that the U.S. is some benevolent force that just occasionally blunders in the pursuit of bringing in utopia is a flat lie. U.S. decision-making in foreign policy is controlled by an incompetent blob of elites, bought off by weapons manufacturers who make vast sums of money when we go to war. The people that work in the think tanks that influence government policy are often former weapons manufacturers—so it’s no wonder the U.S. is so militaristic. It’s no wonder the U.S. has such a horrifying foreign policy given the people who are in charge.

We should see U.S. foreign policy bureaucrats roughly the same way we’d see the Soviet Union’s military establishment. When they committed their murderous invasion of Afghanistan, which killed 9% of the population, we’d rightly regard with a mix of disgust, revulsion, horror, and nausea any policymaker who declared that “the price is worth it.” We should see it exactly the same way when U.S. policymakers declare the lives of half a million Iraqi children a price worth paying.

Of course, the Soviet apologist could reply that they’re not naïve, they just think that, regardless of what incentives there are, the Soviet Union has a great track record of spreading global justice. This would, of course, be absurd—though it’s only as absurd as when apologists for U.S. crimes claim the same thing.

It was not the Soviet Union, after all, that vaporized 10% of Laos or destroyed Cambodia and Vietnam. It was not they who backed murderous forces in Latin America that killed about 200,000 people. It’s not the Soviet Union that armed the Saudis who killed 400,000 in Yemen, turning it into the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. It was not they who overthrew the Iranian Prime minister in the 50s, who was democratically elected. It wasn’t they who invaded Iraq or Afghanistan or trained the most dangerous Mexican drug cartels or conducted the war on terror or carried out dozens of other U.S. atrocities.

There’s a reason the U.S. is rated consistently by people around the world as the biggest threat to both global peace and democracy. It’s not that they hate our freedoms, it’s that they hate when we blow their country apart and displace and murder significant chunks of the world.

So we have a reason to assume that U.S. interventions won’t turn out well, just the same way we have a reason to expect that, if Putin invades some other country in the next five years or topples a foreign government, that won’t be for the best. The excuses about how ‘we can’t know how things would turn out absent the U.S. intervening’ should ring just as hollow as they would if Putin employed them. The bloodstained blob behind U.S. intervention cannot be trusted with the fate of another country. People generally recognize that the U.S. isn’t competent at carrying out complex tasks—this is the entire motivation for small government. Well, it turns out that nation-building is an immensely complex task and that the government can’t do it competently. When not even experts can predict things much better than chance, the idea that we can figure out how to reshape foreign countries for the better is absurd.

So it seems that there is a strong case for accusing the interventionists of being naïve—when the U.S. has such a terrible track record, it is naïve to expect its interventions to turn out well. But we can look at more specific things they claimed.

The hawks were wrong in Iraq on two fronts. For one, Saddam had no WMDs. For another, we weren’t greeted as liberators, and we did not succeed in leaving Iraq better than we found it, especially if we take into account the hundreds of thousands of people we killed.

They were wrong in Afghanistan—they said that we’d be able to prop up the government. It collapsed in a matter of hours, with the Taliban taking over the country after we left.

They were wrong about Vietnam—the government that we backed collapsed in months. They said we could win—we lost.

They were wrong about Yemen—they said the Saudis would win quickly. The Saudis lost.

They were wrong about Cuba—they said sanctions would topple the government; that failed.

They were wrong about Al-Shifa—no WMDs were being manufactured.

They were wrong in Nicaragua—they said the contras were more humane than the Sandinistas.

They were wrong in the rest of Latin America—they said we were backing the good guys.

They were wrong in Iraq in the 90s—they said sanctions would topple Saddam, instead, Saddam was stronger than ever until we invaded. We senselessly killed hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq with our sanctions.

They’ve been wrong with alarming consistency. They keep being wrong and they never face any consequences for it. As long as they can quote sophisticated seeming think-tank analysis, churned out by people who used to work for weapons manufacturers, no one bats an eye as they keep getting things wrong. They’ve claimed over and over again that the U.S. can prop up some regime with virtually no base of popular support, and they’ve been wrong every time. It always collapses in days or weeks when we pull out. And we learn nothing.

So when think tanks churn out some hysterical propaganda about Iran being about to launch nukes at Washington unless we invade RIGHT NOW, we should take it roughly as seriously as we’d take Soviet propaganda. When they claim that we’re naïve, that we don’t understand the Iranian threat, the response should be, as the title of the article suggests, “if the non-interventionist position is so naïve, why are the interventionists always wrong.”

1. At least, according to Arendt—it seems her original claim about Eichmann specifically was discredited.