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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bilow who wrote (36616)	8/9/2002 2:49:58 AM
From: tekboy	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

The Haitian case differs from the contemporary Iraqi case in two ways. One involves scale. It's not polite to say so, but very big strong powers throwing their weight around with very little weak powers in the vicinity is kind of routine behavior in the international system. I'd classify it less as "war" than as, oh, "intervention" or "imperial policing" or something like that. In practice, everybody tends to take big country-big country affairs more seriously, largely because of the potential costs involved. Not fair, and maybe not intellectually justified, but such is life. The other reason is that one could make a good case for viewing events from the coup against Aristide to the invasion as a single crisis. That crisis had different phases, to be sure, but the invasion was the culmination of a pretty linear sequence of events, all set in motion by the provocation of the coup. That is, the invasion might be seen as parallel to the Gulf War, with both following an initial outrage and a succeeding period of stalemate-cum-sanctions. Since we've lived rather calmly with the post-Gulf-War situation for a decade now, however, I think an invasion of Iraq at this point--with no new provocation--would represent a deliberate, freely chosen change of policy on our part. We would be fighting a war from a standing start, taking the initiative to head off something that might happen in the future rather than responding to something that has already happened. Hard to find an example of that in U.S. history, except perhaps metaphorically with the Cold War. (That is, we decided to avoid being dragged back into yet another world war in Europe by staying there and preventing it from starting in the first place.) Your point is a good one, though. I suppose one way of thinking about what's going on is to understand that U.S. global geopolitical dominance today is so great that we have the unprecedented ability to treat even major regional powers the way we have always treated the puny little banana republics. And so we're naturally tempted to do so. This fits in neatly with the analysis offered by Wohlforth & Brooks in the current FA. The best discussion of U.S. policy during the Haitian crisis, btw, can be found in the relevant chapter here: amazon.com tb@baronsamedi.com