Should
the west launch yet another war in Libya? You might think not, given how
calamitous the last one turned out to be—given, in fact, that the results
of the last war in Libya have become the
basis for the new one!—but fear not, you can always count on The Economist to assure you of why we
need yet another war. You see, what it all really comes down to is that, “In
a situation where there are no good options, doing nothing may be the worst.”
This
is the kind of thing I’m starting to think of as Peak Economist—when the
magazine can’t come up with an argument even marginally new, insightful, or useful
about one of the wars it’s constantly calling for, and so defaults to the kind
of sober- and serious-sounding but substantively vapid bromides that have
become the trademark of its warmongering.
So
let’s pause for just a moment—longer, apparently, than the Economist allotted
itself before publishing that marvelous bit of self-important onanism—to
consider a bit of what’s so embarrassingly stupid about it.
First,
why should “doing nothing” be inherently suspect—especially when the only alternatives
The Economist seems able to imagine all
involve war? Now, in fairness to The
Economist, war is only called war with regard to the “Libyan Civil War.”
Western bombings and invasions are instead understood to be mere “intervention.”
Seriously—“war” is used three times in the article, and only about the Libyan
civil war. Intervention is used four times, and only about a western attack. In
fact, I just decided on the spot to make “intervention” one of my favorite
war-mongering euphemisms ever, reserved only for the noble actions of the
beneficent west and denied to our adversaries such as the Iranians, who can
only “meddle” in countries adjacent to them after the west has “intervened” there.
(For
some of the best war euphemisms ever, including wars that aren’t wars but are
instead merely instances of “marching” and “pressing forward” and “continuing,”
see former CIA clandestine service chief Jack Devine and former “dean of the
Washington Press corps” David Broder in The
Definition of Insanity.)
Sorry,
I digress…we were talking about why “doing nothing” should be inherently
suspect when all The Economist’s
alternatives are so demonstrably awful. A question: is The Economist arguing that it would have been worse to have done
nothing in Iraq rather than invading and occupying the country, killing well
over 100,000 civilians and displacing
another four million in the process?
(Think
about those numbers for a moment. Even accounting for all our imperialistic
privileges and American Exceptionalism and all that, you could argue that’s
kind of a lot of human beings to slaughter and turn into stateless refugees,
and that it might possibly have been better to “do nothing” instead.)
Or would
“doing nothing” have been worse in Libya in 2011, when our war (sorry,
“intervention”) destroyed
the country and turned it into a breeding ground for ISIS? After all, if
we’d “done nothing” last time, we probably wouldn’t need another war this time.
Though in fairness to The Economist,
which does seem excessively fond of war and frightened of what might happen if
we were ever to Do Nothing instead, that last point might not be terribly
persuasive.
We
have a Hippocratic Oath in medicine. Why would the concept be applicable to
medical interventions, but not to military ones?
I
know, I know…they never really come out and definitively say “doing nothing”
would be the worst option. Instead, it’s “doing nothing may be the worst option.” Sure, it might be! But it might be the
best option, too. Or something in the middle. In the vacuum that passes for The Economist’s reasoning, who can
really say? But for God’s sake, if you really don’t know, if something “may” be
worse, or better, or whatever, what kind of sick mind would want war to be the default option?
Of
course, this whole “war or nothing” framework is itself bullshit, driven either
by ignorance or propaganda. Now, I don’t think the people who write these
articles at The Economist are so
dim-witted that they actually can’t imagine a way of conducting foreign policy
other than War/Do Nothing. So either they’re so morbidly attracted to war that
their desire for more of it is blunting
their imagination and occluding their reason, or they know full well that a
country as disproportionately powerful and influential as America has countless
tools at its disposal—War and Nothing being only two of them—and are
deliberately misleading their readers in the hope they’ll be able to gin up
another of the wars they seem to crave.
Watch
out, by the way, anytime someone tries to limit the discussion to only two
crappy alternatives while positioning theirs as the marginally less worse one.
I come across this with regard to torture fairly regularly—“Well, if we can’t
torture them, what are we supposed to do, offer them tea and crumpets?”—
because, right, no one has yet figured out a way to interrogate a criminal
suspect or captured enemy that doesn’t involve either waterboarding, on the one
hand, or finger sandwiches, on the other. Whether done cynically or clinically,
the technique is just a way to pull you into the confines of the box that
limits the other person’s thinking, and force a result that logic and reason
would otherwise reject.
The
final paragraph is like a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with the article
itself. It quotes a couple of think tank people to create the appearance of
balance and a modicum of thoughtfulness, and these people offer the kind of
stunningly fresh insights that only a seasoned think tank denizen could come up
with, such as that a western invasion of Libya might be “unwise and risky” (Really?
Another western invasion of a Muslim country might entail some risks? Are you
sure?), and even that the west might “need to proceed carefully” (Solid
advice—thank you!). These “balanced” asides are served up not to persuade
anyone that another war in Libya might not be such a great idea, but rather to
steer readers to the gloriously sane, serious, sober, centrist option The Economist is hankering to make real—air
strikes in support of small commando units.
Those
are your only options, people: a full-scale invasion and occupation; the
dreaded “do nothing” option; or some nice, sanitary air strikes and a handful
of semi-secret troops. Which is it going to be—one of the two really shitty
options, or the one that sounds a little less shitty by comparison?
If
this all feels as manipulative as a game of Three-card Monte, it’s because it
is. Pundits who want wars can’t get them unless they convince the public to go
along for the ride. And if that involves subterfuge, well, it’s all for the
greater good, right?
If The Economist gets its way and the west
does another “intervention” in Libya, and the latest “intervention” produces
results as horrifically counterproductive as the last one, and ISIS or an
ISIS-successor bogeyman then pops up in Algeria or Egypt or wherever, there’s
one thing I’m sure we can count on. The
Economist will tell us yet again that “doing nothing” will be—sorry, “may”
be—worse than yet another of their cherished “interventions.”
