Recommended Reading

Top Billing! Dan Trombly – Syria and Irresponsible Protection 

A brutal fisking of R2P as a self-defeating intellectual sham, well worth your time to read:

….Three very prominent foreign policy scholars: Steven Cook,Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Shadi Hamid, have all penned pieces calling for Western powers to put the option of military intervention onto the table. Although in the past many proponents of Responsibility to Protect, humanitarian intervention, and intervention in Libya (three groups with significant overlap but which were and are by no means identical) insisted that consistency was not necessary for their respective foreign policy visions to be credible or coherent, it seems the utter failure of the Libyan intervention to deter other states from ruthlessly oppressing their own people has caused some reconsideration of this stance.

Slaughter argues:

“If the Arab League, the U.S., the European Union, Turkey, and the UN Secretary General spend a year wringing their hands as the death toll continues to mount, the responsibility to protect (R2P) doctrine will be exposed as a convenient fiction for power politics or oil politics, feeding precisely the cynicism and conspiracy theories in the Middle East and elsewhere that the U.S. spends its public diplomacy budget and countless diplomatic hours trying to debunk.”

This was probably something advocates should have considered before launching an intervention that the administration insisted was not simply in the cosmopolitan interest of humanity, but the interests of the United States. If the US is launching interventions to debunk conspiracy theories, why should we be so confident a Syrian intervention would dispel them? Let me red team as a conspiratorial geopolitical commentator….

Seydlitz89– A Question of Honor? 

Seydlitz89 explores the work of Clausewitzian scholar  Dr. Andreas Herberg-Rothe entitled “The Concept of Honor in War“:

For Clausewitz, Napoleon was a “real enemy”, one that challenged the very definition of what not only Clausewitz but all Prussia thought themselves to be, but also one that brought their entire independent political existence into question (d).

Thus in Clausewitz’s original concept, wars could be bloody, but they were not questions of physical existence for one political community or the other, although individuals and even states were of course at risk, this being war. With the First World War we start to see a radicalization of this approach as the full weight of a political community using the consolidating/organizing/administrative powers of the state to mobilize its full potential to fight becomes a reality. By October 1917 the political conditions had ripened to usher in a new political concept of existence. 

An “absolute enemy”, the Leninist concept as presented by Carl Schmitt in The Theory of the Partisan I introduced in my last thread would conflate these subjective and “objective” perspectives, actually conflating a, b, c, and d, making the enemy an existential threat to the community as a whole as if it were an individual. The distinctions between individual, political community and state were lost. What makes this a totalitarian concept is that one side essentially has to exterminate the other, the other portrayed as an existential threat, but falling far short of such a reality, or in some cases constituting no actual threat at all…. 

SWJ  (Adam Elkus) – Death From Above: The West and the Rest 

This is part smackdown, part analysis:

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