OxBlog

Thursday, June 12, 2003

# Posted 9:33 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

WHAT, ME HUMANITARIAN? Matt Yglesias wants to disabuse liberals hawks of their dangerous illusion that there is a humanitarian strand in the Bush administration's thinking.

Matt writes that
The administration's actions in postwar Afghanistan and Iraq have, however, made it clear that humanitarianism — like everything else — is a banner to be picked up and then discarded according to the immediate needs of political opportunism.
First Iraq. This morning, both the NYT and WaPo ran long articles on evidence of a remarkable turnaround in Baghdad.

According to the Post,
After weeks of looting and unchecked criminal activity, the U.S. effort to improve security in Baghdad has helped bring signs of normality to this city of 5 million people. As the Americans deploy thousands more soldiers and assign many of them to neighborhood patrols, merchants not only are keeping their doors open longer, they also feel confident enough to stack televisions, air conditioners and other high-priced goods on the sidewalk. Cars zip around until the 11 p.m. curfew imposed by the U.S. military. Parents have begun to let their children walk to school in the daytime.
According to the Times,
Just over a month into his Iraq mission, Mr. Bremer described considerable progress in restoring basic services: electricity now flows 20 hours a day in Baghdad, all 12 hospitals are open, 8,000 police officers patrol the capital and commerce is reviving.
In addition, one has to consider the remarkable progress made in major provincial cities such as Karbala, Kirkuk and Mosul.

Now, Afghanistan. I'm not going to defend the Administration on that one. The prospects for democracy are not looking good. But on strictly humanitarian grounds, one has to give the US considerable credit for the massive shipments of food it sent after the war, shipments which prevented a famine that Oxfam and others had described as imminent.

(NB: There are no indications of famine in Iraq either, even though Matt insists that people there are continuing to die of thirst as well as cholera. Given the absence of a link, I suspect Matt is waxing rhetorical.)

All that said, Matt does make some good points in his post about humanitarianism. He is right that Cheney and Rumsfeld do not share Wolfowitz's idealism. But Matt is wrong to think that OxBlog or any of the other authors he criticizes are unaware of divisions within the cabinet. (See here and here for examples of OxBlog's comments on Rumsfeld's shortcomings.)

Matt is also right to criticize paleo-cons for insisting that humanitarian objectives should have nothing to do with foreign policy. Still, it is somewhat disingenuous for him to cite the National Review as the source of Rumsfeld and Cheney's -- let alone the President's -- attitudes toward foreign policy.

While Matt is right that no one -- especially not liberal hawks -- can afford to be complacent about the Administration's foreign policy, it is no less imperative for doves to overcome their their resentment of the President and recognize that, for all his flaws, he has done certain things very right.
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