Steven Den Beste tries to figure out what, exactly, the left is arguing for, as the arguments make so little sense on a mechanistic or diplomatic level. How's he do?:
When they say, "Ask yourselves why everyone hates you" what they're trying to tell us is that we've built up such a huge load of bad karma that at this point the universal principle of cosmic justice has mobilized nearly the entire rest of the human race against us, which is why dealing with just the Arabs is a pointless waste of time.
I think this idea of cosmic justice and historical inevitability pervades much of leftist thinking. Take, for instance, the idea of any kind of international law, whether it be the UN or the International Criminal Court or "Just War" ideology or the "law of nations". I don't believe in any of them.
It's not that I think the concepts are evil or stupid; it's just that I don't believe that they can be implemented in practice in the world I live in. There's too much possibility of free riding, of spoiling of the commons, of defections (per the Prisoner's Dilemma). There's too much opportunity for abuse, for those systems to be subverted and used to fulfill some particular group's agenda.
Those on the other side, who favor those things, don't see it that way. International law isn't just a construct of humans; it's actually a cosmic principle. It doesn't need to be enforced through war, because it will be enforced by cosmic payback. The legal system won't be subverted because in a real sense doing so would violate a law of physics.
The US objects to the ICC because our government is concerned that the ICC will be used to get revenge on Americans, as a way of pursuing vendettas against our nation. Many elsewhere object that though a narrow reading of the charter shows that such a thing is conceivable, that it won't actually happen. But when pressed to explain why not, they don't have any answer. I think the reason is that they truly believe that it's impossible for it to happen; God, or Karma, or Cosmic Justice or the flow of history won't in the long run permit it. There may be short term abuses, but in the long run justice will out and those who attempt to abuse the system will get their comeuppance, as indeed the US is getting its comeuppance now because it is violating the system of international law.
And so, when they say that the right answer for the US in the face of the attacks is to ratify Kyoto and the ICC treaty and all the rest of that stuff, to cease to be unilateral and start being multilateral, to increase aid and reduce military spending, they're completely serious. What all those things will do is to reduce our burden of sin, and thus reduce the amount of punishment that the universe will mete out to us.
I can't be certain that this is how they're thinking. But I can't come up with any other rational explanation. I have no doubt that some will instantly accuse me of creating a strawman, but that's not what I'm trying to do here. I'm just trying to figure out how anyone could think that having the US work to bring clean drinking water to everyone in Peru and reduce our CO2 emissions would somehow stop radical Arabs from trying to destroy America. Those things don't seem connected to me in any important way, within my mechanistic view of the universe, but perhaps to others there actually is some sort of connection.
http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/09/Cosmicjustice.shtml |
