I appreciate this article. There are a number of concepts you bring out which helped me clarify my own thinking. I'll highlight this one of many "if state actors deem secret information necessary to the case for military action, then that information must be revealed to the public."
Now apply your new beliefs to the 1930's as WW2 approached. Would the caveats you propose have justified action before Poland? I doubt it but earler action could have saved tens of millions of lives.
I feel like I probably ~80% agree with this article? Your point about the importance of being clear about the reasons for going to war is particularly clear and important.
In the spirit of "yes, and...": I think a general truth about human psychology is that when people have access to secret information, they tend (1) to overestimate its importance, (2) to overestimate the consequences (whether good or bad) of it being widely known. This applies to many areas of government action, where one need not take an absolutist view on government transparency to think that state actors tend to be overly prone to suppressing information which ought to be public. Military interventions are an area where the consequences of this unfortunately tendency are especially stark.
That's fair, but it's also quite telling that the typical arguments in favor of LI generally...don't cite convincing examples from the past. Not even the "smart" thinkers. In the GWOT, a lot of people were citing the occupation of Japan as the model, but John Dower (a famous historian of Japan) pointed out this was bunk and that the better model for Iraq was Japan itself invading Northeast China/establishing Manchukuo.
The funny thing is that Dower wasn't quite right either, because in retrospect it seems Afghanistan was more Manchukuo than Iraq was. Coincidentally, the Taliban clearly won the Afghanistan War, but one could argue Iraq was actually a feasible goal since Baathism is gone and Iraq is an electoral democracy, albeit in a soft-conservative Islamist sense, not the Portlandia Riviera liberals often think they're going to build. The problem to me seems to be #2 causing #3. Quite frankly, white liberals today generally just don't know things outside of racial/orientalist caricatures and their goals are non-feasible as a result.
The United States in Germany/Japan basically just put the prewar political class back in charge + muscled them to cave in to majoritarian popular demands. They didn't really try to Year Zero either of those societies like people wanted in Afghanistan/Iraq. Honestly, not that different from where Iraq landed at. To the extent Iraq came at a cost (bloodshed, $$$s) fair greater than anyone ever wanted to pay, there's a case to be made that was primarily caused by the incompetence of the Bush Administration (in a sense driven by liberal ideological ferver, such as liberal moralistic approaches to governance aka debaathization).
So the funny thing, I think it is actually quite possible to overthrow an oppressive regime and replace it with an electoral/liberal democracy. You just can't trust the actual liberals we have in the West to do it, because they won't actually like what that looks like (for one, it probably won't be pro-Israel enough for them), and they'll burn it all down to try to make their utopia real.
Interesting, but how do you move from saying "state actors are justified in withholding such information from the public only when doing so is in line with democratically deliberated and determined public rules" (i.e. there may be circumstances where withholding is justified) to "if state actors deem secret information necessary to the case for military action, then that information must be revealed to the public" (i.e. withholding is absolutely not justified)?
As regards the justification for keeping secrets, how do you think about scenarios where revealing secrets could itself result in harm, whether that is harm to the person who provided them, or the prospective enemy state taking pre-emptive action of some sort?
A very interesting and sober read. Thank you. I have a question about the example of someone holding a big knife and threatening you with it, and that justifying defensive action, because I think the issue of what constitutes a threat that justifies action is critical to what’s happening in Iran.
The government in Israel (and doubtless many outside of government) believes, correctly I think, that Iran wishes to wipe Israel off the map. A nuclear weapon in the hands of Iran is therefore a much greater risk to Israel than to any other country. And of course short of a nuclear attack, Iran is also behind/supportive of the attacks on Israel by its various proxies. Israel is therefore in a death struggle with the Iranian regime - while it exists, it will continue to work to bring about the demise of Israel.
Now, at present, that regime is weaker than it’s been for some time, and is not on the brink of building a bomb. So, there’s a weakened aggressor and a knife, but the threat isn’t immanent. Israel’s position seems to be that this situation offers it an opportunity to end the threat once and for all, and waiting for the aggressor to be strong and the knife to be big is to risk future annihilation for no good reason, given Iran’s continued desire to do Israel in.
I am sure one can criticize some assumptions here, but the question is does the mere existence of the Iranian regime constitute enough of a threat to justify military intervention given its desire for genocide and the eradication of Israel? I think it’s hard to expect Israelis to be complacent about the possibility that Iran might recover and seek again to bring out the big knife. Most of us don’t live in situations where people literally want to kill us and would if they could.
None of this is to suggest the current round of military action is a good idea, for various reasons I won’t go into here. But I am interested in your perspective on Israel’s position and defensive action.
Rebecca, I understand what you are writing about and I think you are mixing up two things here. There is a difference between military intervention(ism) and liberal military intervention(ism). That means that only because a nation or a coalition of nations is doing a military intervention against another one, it is not liberal interventionism, meaning intervetion based on liberal values and ideas, automatically.
I think that what you mean here is that you are regretting about your former opinions and thoughts as regarding the Iraq war and invasion ( or intervention). If you check more research and analysis, you can find that liberal interventionists as philosophers and thinkers in general were actually opposing what happened as regarding Iraq.
Also, one can be in favor of intervention as through ideas of world federalism, which in several ways is about liberal values at the global level. For example, Kofi Annan wrote about interventions and why they are necessary regarding human security
You are writing about Iraq War, Blair, invasion, support for the war, Chilcot Report, WMD.
You are writing about a war that in terms of international relations, political science and politology has been described as a process driven by ideas and processes such as neo-conservatism and realism.
My point is still that your opposition to interventionist wars is not about liberal interventionism but about other types of interventions.
I wonder whether the real lesson of Chilcot isn’t that trusting secret intelligence was wrong, but that many people reasonably believed (or "chose" to believe) claims presented as firm evidence that later proved unfounded. Perhaps the real issue was weak critical oversight and the absence of meaningful consequences for decision-makers when they get it wrong.
Isn't that the point? If the "secrets" are given to the public, then the "truth" can be crowd sourced. If I were going to war, I might want to open a Kalshi market for "Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction that are a threat to the US and US interests". "absence of meaningful consequences" is a problem, but at least "weak critical oversight" can be solved by recruiting the public.
I appreciate this article. There are a number of concepts you bring out which helped me clarify my own thinking. I'll highlight this one of many "if state actors deem secret information necessary to the case for military action, then that information must be revealed to the public."
thank you!
Now apply your new beliefs to the 1930's as WW2 approached. Would the caveats you propose have justified action before Poland? I doubt it but earler action could have saved tens of millions of lives.
And surely there is an approachable synonym for “ epistemic”, which sounds more like an herb than an adjective.
I accept your alibi, doc.
thanks! But I'm a philosopher and these are v standard philosophy terms :)
The writer’s prose becomes unbearably opaque and slow, resorting to new words such as “disvalue” (?) and “justificatory”(??).
I feel like I probably ~80% agree with this article? Your point about the importance of being clear about the reasons for going to war is particularly clear and important.
In the spirit of "yes, and...": I think a general truth about human psychology is that when people have access to secret information, they tend (1) to overestimate its importance, (2) to overestimate the consequences (whether good or bad) of it being widely known. This applies to many areas of government action, where one need not take an absolutist view on government transparency to think that state actors tend to be overly prone to suppressing information which ought to be public. Military interventions are an area where the consequences of this unfortunately tendency are especially stark.
"Or a convincing example from the past."
That's fair, but it's also quite telling that the typical arguments in favor of LI generally...don't cite convincing examples from the past. Not even the "smart" thinkers. In the GWOT, a lot of people were citing the occupation of Japan as the model, but John Dower (a famous historian of Japan) pointed out this was bunk and that the better model for Iraq was Japan itself invading Northeast China/establishing Manchukuo.
The funny thing is that Dower wasn't quite right either, because in retrospect it seems Afghanistan was more Manchukuo than Iraq was. Coincidentally, the Taliban clearly won the Afghanistan War, but one could argue Iraq was actually a feasible goal since Baathism is gone and Iraq is an electoral democracy, albeit in a soft-conservative Islamist sense, not the Portlandia Riviera liberals often think they're going to build. The problem to me seems to be #2 causing #3. Quite frankly, white liberals today generally just don't know things outside of racial/orientalist caricatures and their goals are non-feasible as a result.
The United States in Germany/Japan basically just put the prewar political class back in charge + muscled them to cave in to majoritarian popular demands. They didn't really try to Year Zero either of those societies like people wanted in Afghanistan/Iraq. Honestly, not that different from where Iraq landed at. To the extent Iraq came at a cost (bloodshed, $$$s) fair greater than anyone ever wanted to pay, there's a case to be made that was primarily caused by the incompetence of the Bush Administration (in a sense driven by liberal ideological ferver, such as liberal moralistic approaches to governance aka debaathization).
So the funny thing, I think it is actually quite possible to overthrow an oppressive regime and replace it with an electoral/liberal democracy. You just can't trust the actual liberals we have in the West to do it, because they won't actually like what that looks like (for one, it probably won't be pro-Israel enough for them), and they'll burn it all down to try to make their utopia real.
Interesting, but how do you move from saying "state actors are justified in withholding such information from the public only when doing so is in line with democratically deliberated and determined public rules" (i.e. there may be circumstances where withholding is justified) to "if state actors deem secret information necessary to the case for military action, then that information must be revealed to the public" (i.e. withholding is absolutely not justified)?
As regards the justification for keeping secrets, how do you think about scenarios where revealing secrets could itself result in harm, whether that is harm to the person who provided them, or the prospective enemy state taking pre-emptive action of some sort?
A very interesting and sober read. Thank you. I have a question about the example of someone holding a big knife and threatening you with it, and that justifying defensive action, because I think the issue of what constitutes a threat that justifies action is critical to what’s happening in Iran.
The government in Israel (and doubtless many outside of government) believes, correctly I think, that Iran wishes to wipe Israel off the map. A nuclear weapon in the hands of Iran is therefore a much greater risk to Israel than to any other country. And of course short of a nuclear attack, Iran is also behind/supportive of the attacks on Israel by its various proxies. Israel is therefore in a death struggle with the Iranian regime - while it exists, it will continue to work to bring about the demise of Israel.
Now, at present, that regime is weaker than it’s been for some time, and is not on the brink of building a bomb. So, there’s a weakened aggressor and a knife, but the threat isn’t immanent. Israel’s position seems to be that this situation offers it an opportunity to end the threat once and for all, and waiting for the aggressor to be strong and the knife to be big is to risk future annihilation for no good reason, given Iran’s continued desire to do Israel in.
I am sure one can criticize some assumptions here, but the question is does the mere existence of the Iranian regime constitute enough of a threat to justify military intervention given its desire for genocide and the eradication of Israel? I think it’s hard to expect Israelis to be complacent about the possibility that Iran might recover and seek again to bring out the big knife. Most of us don’t live in situations where people literally want to kill us and would if they could.
None of this is to suggest the current round of military action is a good idea, for various reasons I won’t go into here. But I am interested in your perspective on Israel’s position and defensive action.
Rebecca, I understand what you are writing about and I think you are mixing up two things here. There is a difference between military intervention(ism) and liberal military intervention(ism). That means that only because a nation or a coalition of nations is doing a military intervention against another one, it is not liberal interventionism, meaning intervetion based on liberal values and ideas, automatically.
I think that what you mean here is that you are regretting about your former opinions and thoughts as regarding the Iraq war and invasion ( or intervention). If you check more research and analysis, you can find that liberal interventionists as philosophers and thinkers in general were actually opposing what happened as regarding Iraq.
Also, one can be in favor of intervention as through ideas of world federalism, which in several ways is about liberal values at the global level. For example, Kofi Annan wrote about interventions and why they are necessary regarding human security
https://www.democracywithoutborders.org/reimagining-global-cooperation/
thanks! but i wasn't writing about those things..
How do you mean?
You are writing about Iraq War, Blair, invasion, support for the war, Chilcot Report, WMD.
You are writing about a war that in terms of international relations, political science and politology has been described as a process driven by ideas and processes such as neo-conservatism and realism.
My point is still that your opposition to interventionist wars is not about liberal interventionism but about other types of interventions.
I wonder whether the real lesson of Chilcot isn’t that trusting secret intelligence was wrong, but that many people reasonably believed (or "chose" to believe) claims presented as firm evidence that later proved unfounded. Perhaps the real issue was weak critical oversight and the absence of meaningful consequences for decision-makers when they get it wrong.
Isn't that the point? If the "secrets" are given to the public, then the "truth" can be crowd sourced. If I were going to war, I might want to open a Kalshi market for "Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction that are a threat to the US and US interests". "absence of meaningful consequences" is a problem, but at least "weak critical oversight" can be solved by recruiting the public.