Now It's Basic History

Done teaching Chad Schuldt entry level public policy, how about we work on recent history.  Chad asks some questions about Bosnia and Clinton.  I will take them in reverse order.

Q: How many international allies did we alienate going into Bosnia?
A: Russia and all its close allies and also China when we accidentally bombed its embassy in the Kosovo campaign.  I point out that the UN would not support the bombing of Kosovo, which is why Clinton had to claim NATO sanction (and not Congressional sanction, by the way).  A related point: is Chad claiming that there should be a "global test" for the just use of force?  The "alienated allies", namely French, Germans, Russians and Chinese, were for removing all sanctions on Iraq and accepting Iraq into the decent society of nations whether Hussein allowed in weapons inspectors or not.  Is this Chad's position?  If not, what should we have done?  Did the experience of the previous 12 years and 16 UN resolutions convince him that just a few more sanctions and one more UN resolution would do the trick? 

Let's take two related questions together.
Q1: How many times did Clinton mislead America into that conflict?
Q2: How many times was Clinton less than forthright with the public about our presence there?
A: Remember after the signing of the Dayton Accords when Bill Clinton claimed we'd only be in Bosnia a year?  That was ten years ago.  If Clinton believed that claim he was dumb beyond belief.  If he didn't believe it he was "misleading" and being "less than forthright."  I dealt with whether Bush "mislead" the public several times, most recently in point #1 of this long post.  By the way, does accepting sexual favors from an intern while discussing Bosnia policy with members of Congress count for anything here?  How's that for taking foreign policy seriously? 

Last question.
Q: How many American lives did it take to bring Slobodan Milosevic to justice?
A: The answer of course is "next to none."  But what is Chad's point?  Does America support democracy only when it's easy?  Is the justice of the cause dependent solely on the number of lost lives?  What does Chad think of the Civil War?  Granted, that was an internal problem (although the South would have disagreed), but 600,000 Americans died in a war to bring a slaveholding yet otherwise democratic South back into the Union (here I sacrifice nuance for brevity).  Was it worth it?  What Chad has to do (and has done in the past) is pretend that Hussein wasn't really that bad, mock Iraqi attempts to found democracy, and hurl all sorts of unsubstantiated charges at the Bush administration.  Chad thinks the whole Iraq policy is a mistake.  So why is one drop of American blood worth it for Bosnia, Haiti, and Somalia, but not for Iraq?  Why was it ok for Clinton launch missile attacks against Iraq, but wrong for Bush to actually execute the Clinton era American policy of removing Hussein from power?  Chad apparently thinks it's ok to attack Iraq as long as it is entails no risk and is entirely feckless, but wrong if entails risk and actually attempts to create democracy in Iraq.  In reality I suspect that the real Schuldt theory, since Chad is apparently incapable of doing anything but shilling for his side, is that when it's Bill Clinton it's good; when it's George W. Bush it's bad. 

If someone wants to read an anti-war piece, read someone who actually thinks rather than shills.  It's Francis Fukuyama and it's in today's New York Times.  I disagree with almost everything Fukuyama says, and you'll notice he shares many of Chad's arguments.  The difference is that I still respect Fukuyama because he is known to be a very thoughtful man who is not merely interested in advancing a partisan agenda.  Chad, on the other hand, may have a very lucid mind, but it unfortunately seems to have slammed completely shut some time ago.  The blogosphere is full of unthinking hacks, right and left, and one would weary of debunking their bogus arguments it wasn't so much fun.