Friday, June 18, 2021

A Mess of Pottage

 

The U.S. Congress has, in the usual scatterbrained and dysfunctional way that body seems to work, taken up the issue of repealing the 2002 "Authorization to Use Military Force" that was the legal cover for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the mess-o-potamia that followed.

I trust that no one who regularly visits this place has forgotten the appalling clusterfuck that resulted from that cynical bit of Great Power stupidity, so it's obvious on its face that it is time and past time to flush the boneheaded and dangerous thing, full of more lies than nuts in a fruitcake, and I wish they'd 86 the 2001. 9/11, version while they're at it.

The notion of having a political rule just lying around that provides any U.S. government who wishes the "legal" authority to start throwing projectiles around the globe seems dangerously stupid. It's not like illegality will stop a cabal that wishes to do that, but to give them a sort of real-life "C'est par mon ordre et pour le bien de l'Etat que le porteur du present a fait ce qu'il a fait."?

That 's a Bad Idea.

Both of the 2000's AUMFs are Bad Ideas spawned by my country's weird and ugly combination of geopolitical hubris and laziness, the sort of mindless aggressive response to any sort of provocation that makes every problem a nail to be militarily hammered.

It's unfortunate that the mindset that produced them cannot also be repealed. But at the very least - given the lessons that the mindless ruin and merciless hatred that the two have spawned should have taught us - these two loaded guns need to be unloaded.

We'll see if there's enough political sanity left in the U.S. capitol to do that.

4 comments:

Ael said...

No fear of sanity breaking out. Biden has clearly decided that he doesn't need to be in the JCPOA. He also has concluded that it is better to push the Russians and Chinese into each others arms rather than try to play one against the other.

FDChief said...

The US has very little leverage to play off the two Eurasian powers. "Playing them off" would require snuggling up to one while pushing away the other, just like it does in romantic games everywhere, and the problem is that neither one has good reasons to snuggle up to. They are both trouble, and are best kept a way eye on while looking to find ways to live with and neuter their worst impulses. I don't see the foreign policy coterie in this country finding clever ways to do that, either - witness the whole "lab leak" fiasco which suggests the exact opposite of what it's primary proponents want it to; that it is in the US's interests to 1) keep a closer eye on what the Chinese biolabs are doing while 2) ensure that those labs have access to and employ the most effective containment and security practices and equipment.

Re: the Iran deal...everything I'm reading suggests that the Biden people want to try and get something like the JCPOA back (good piece here that suggests that that's actually a bad idea, and that the secret here is to make this not an executive act but a treaty, so when Trump gets "elected" again he can't fuck it up again - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-06-04/jcpoa-biden-should-aim-for-a-treaty-not-a-deal-with-iran) but that there's a lot of issues on ALL sides, including the Iranians.

But both of these are utterly different and side issues to repealing the 2002 AUMF. That fucker is straight-up obviously done-for other than as a tool for mischief-making, and should be flushed ASAP. The other two issues you mention are actually pretty difficult. This one isn't, and if it can't be dealt with easily says a lot about how truly WASSSSSSSF.

Ael said...

You are absolutely correct. The fact that these policies should be flushed ASAP and aren't says a lot about current dysfunction. But the JCPO and Russia/China also says a lot about American foreign policy.

Biden must figure that time is on his side with Iran. He pissed away his 4 months with the "moderates" in charge and now has to face the "hardliners". I fear that is mistaken that he can drive a better bargain from this new bunch than the old one.

And Russia/China is indeed a gnarly problem. After the revolution, USA treated Russia as a way to extract great quantities of wealth into Wall Street. The country tanked heavily and in reaction Russia set forth to keep Russian wealth in Russia (while maintaining an oligarchy.) Sanctions set on Russia has served to make their economy much more independent of global finance. Furthermore, the resource wealth of Siberia heads mostly to China these days. Their economies grow closer every year. I got my second vaccination a couple days ago. The nurse used a needle made in China. I bet the plastic (oil) came from Russia and the steel came from China.

FDChief said...

I think the "problem" with Iran is that a lot of the US FP community has lost the focus on nonproliferation and is trying to rope Iran into a bigger deal that includes a bunch of diplomatic objectives like ending Iranian support for the various Shiite factions involved in Shia-Sunni dogfights like Yemen. That's foolish and unrealistic, but when has that stopped US FP?

Russia is pretty much a kleptocratic petrostate at this point. The looting enabled by global capital didn't help, but whether there was ever a realistic chance that it would become anything else after the fall of the USSR? I'm doubtful. As we should have learned from places like Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, etc. etc. is that a place with no tradition of peaceful transfer of power is somewhere between "incredibly unlikely" to "never" going to magically become a peaceful democratic republic after the original autocracy is trashed.

The issue of global capitalism is...a huge issue. There's a worthwhile piece in Washington Monthly (https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/06/19/the-semiconductor-crisis-is-a-failure-of-modern-capitalism-it-may-require-new-answers/) discussing the problem as it applies to semiconductors, and the author doesn't really have answers because it may be that there ARE no answers - the existing political structures are utterly incapable of dealing with this issue, and the sort of political structures that would require an utterly unprecedented degree of international cooperation.