With polls showing the candidates neck and neck, I’m fairly obsessed with the poll data right now. After taking account for the margin of error and likely voters, Bush might have a slight lead but not a huge one. For an incumbent president to win, he has to go into the election with a five percent lead. Carter and Reagan were also neck and neck at this point.
Dan writes that he is 80% likely to vote for Kerry. I’m about 95% likely to vote for Kerry, but am only 20% happy about it. I would never say that I’m 100% likely to vote for someone, because it is entirely possible that Kerry could do something ridiculous.
I’m not a partisan-ho. I refuse to take any asshole that my party serves me. I like weighing the two candidates until the last minute, keeping score during the debates, and monitoring spin. Each has to show me what they are going to do for me and how they reflect my values. Straight ticket voting strikes me as slightly antii-intellectual.
What makes me unhappy about Kerry? One thing that did irk me during the debate was his insistence on multilateral responses to global problems. I refuse to believe that France and Germany are more reasonable and have less selfish motives than the United States. Sometimes, if the cause is good, we just have to go it alone. More on Kerry’s foreign policy from Dan.
Of course, I never thought Iraq was a good cause and feel that it has been handled terribly, so I’m not voting for Bush. But I do think that we can’t cut our losses and pack up the troops now. We must finish off work there before we leave. Which brings me back to some worries about Kerry. I’m not sure he’ll have an interest in rectifying mistakes and committing more troops to Iraq.
Apt. 11d 
I’m also skeptical about multilateralism, but what bugs me about one flavor of skepticism is that it rests on whether France and Germany (or anyone else) is an ethical actor in the international arena.
You don’t reject multilateral solutions to problems because your partners don’t share your values. You don’t go alone out of distaste for other nations/elites/leaders.
You go it alone not only when you must (because there is something of surpassing importance that no one else wants to do) but also when you can. That’s the real reason for seeking multilateral strategies a goodly proportion of the time: not because they’re ethically preferential or desirable, but because they’re practical necessities for accomplishing a number of important missions. You cannot, for example, spread liberal democratic norms by yourself, because that requires persuasive dialogue with other societies. It’s a dialogic effort by its very nature. You cannot create free trade by yourself, because by its nature it requires other nations to cooperate. You cannot sustain multiple large-scale military operations by yourself–we don’t have the capacity to go it completely alone, financially or logistically. And so on.
That’s the only reason to prefer multilateralism in many cases: it’s right tool for right job. Not because we’re all fuzzy, kind-hearted and just love playing along with our buddies abroad. This is about pragmatic pursuit of ethical objectives. I’d say by and large that’s what I hear from Kerry about multilateralism: not that he’s for it because he loves the French and Germans or because Sesame Street says it’s always good to share your cookies with the other kids, but because you can’t accomplish many noble ends without it. Bush, on the other hand, seems to live in a fantasy world as far as this goes. You can bomb something all by yourself, but transforming another society is no more unilateral than making a baby is. Even if you do that via turkey baster, you’re going to need a sperm donor.
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hey, look, if you can get multilateral wars, peace efforts, whatever, that’s great. It’s good for us to spread the blame and the cost for such efforts amongst the different countries.
But I don’t think we should wait around for others to join us. Like I said, I didn’t support the war in Iraq, but if I did, it wouldn’t matter to me if France or Germany were in or out. And frankly, I wouldn’t assume that we’re likely to get much support from any countries in such efforts. Why should they do anything, when they know that we’re going to pick up the tab no matter what?
Tim, I’m not quite sure about your point that only multi-lateral efforts can yield noble ends. I am thinking about it, but I’m not sure that I buy it. Look at the UN.
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You missed my point. Actual multilateralism is often corrupt, useless, an active part of the the problem rather than a solution.
But unilateralism isn’t just a choice you make because you want to make it across the board–the point is that much of what could be good in the world is effectively impossible without more than one state actor pitching in. Making it multilateral doesn’t guarantee that things will turn out well; multilateralism is not a philosophical preference. It may be a practical necessity in some cases, the kind of trade-off that grown-ups accept as a precondition of achieving positive ends. If you can figure out a practical way that the United States all by itself can spread liberal democracy, use military force to take down dictators, act productively on global issues like the control of epidemics or environmental problems, dictate terms of free trade with other nations, and so on, then by all means, that would be preferable, in the same way that I often prefer to do things myself in my work life rather than get others involved–it’s faster, easier, less fraught with the concerns and needs of others. But in practical terms, I cannot do everything I need to do by myself, so I not only work with others, but do my best to work *well* with others, well in the sense of achieving as best I can the things that are most important or ethically central to me, and ceding to others the things are most important to others as long as they don’t contradict my own priorities and ethical sensibilities.
Like I said, if you can tell me how all the things that need doing in the world can be done by the United States without any collaboration or connection to any other nation-state, I’d be glad to hear it. The way I see it, we don’t have the money, the manpower, the capacity, let alone the basic factual ability (in the case of things that are intrinsically dialogic or mutualistic) to do that.
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Of course, in an ideal world, we would sit at a table with nations as equals with similar values and interests and cooperatively bring the goodness of democracy and capitalism to the rest of the world. Sort of global X-Men.
I completely agree that the US can’t/shouldn’t take on the role of World Cop. But I’m just not optimistic that it will happen multilaterally either.
I’m not sure whether my pessimism leaves me. But my main point of the original post was that 1. Kerry is too optimistic about the prospects of building these alliances of good. 2. Though I’m unhappy with just about everything else about this war, the fact that France and Germany sat it out doesn’t really bother me.
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Doesn’t bother me that they sat out either–because they were smart to sit it out. They are also absent in other cases where their cooperation is needed, but one can hardly fault the leadership of either nation for failing to eagerly fall into lockstep behind a foolishly planned and conceived war. They were doing their job for their citizens.
As to whether Kerry is too optimistic, I don’t hear that in his public statements. But it may be that the team he would build might be so–there certainly are people in the Democratic elite who are philosophically committed to multilateralism as a matter of principle, which I think is as flawed as a principled rejection of multilateralism (the Bush policy).
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I happen to intensely dislike Kerry. On the other hand, I happen to despise Bush. Of course, being in California, I have the opportunity to cast a protest vote, because the vast majority of Californians are going to vote for Kerry. I have already voted (absentee) and voted for the platform of issues that I most supported (I don’t like the candidate there, either), but it was neither Bush nor Kerry.
If, however, I had been in a swing state, I would have voted for Kerry, mostly because if Kerry is president, not much will be passed in the way of legislation. That’s always been a good thing, historically. And the past 4 years have shown that you can’t trust the Republicans on anything important, such as preserving civil liberties or upholding the Constitution.
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Its nice to find some thinking conservatives. You guys should make more noise, all I ever hear are the lunatics.
Here are some practical reasons unilateralism failed in Iraq and multilateralism would have helped:
1) Cautious allies would have forced the war planners to consider the aftermath beyond where they would store all the “flowers and sweets” showered on the troops.
2) Cautious allies would have made the occupation seem less like a colonization/oil grab.
3) The US military is very hardcore about force protection. Europeans are much more tolerant and less likely to call in airstikes on a city block. The US method is great for winning wars, but it breeds insurgency. Even if they didn’t help in the invasion, European military forces would have helped prevent the insurgency from becoming popular.
4) Arab and african forces relate better to the last 20 years of Iraqi life. Yeah, there would have been some corruption, but it would have been /familiar/ corruption.
5) French, German and Russian companies built or supplied most of Iraq’s infrastructure. Our efforts to prevent their involvement have Tonya Harding’d the knees of the reconstruction. Iraqi’s still live through constant brown outs, even though the country has enough power plant capacity to fulfill its needs – if it worked. It is impossible to quantitate and obviously not the major problem, but how many US soldiers have died because Iraqi’s couldn’t get air conditioning after the invasion?
We needed one of two things for this war to succeed – a major dedication of US resources to winning, or allies. To get either, the administration needed to be truthful in the run up to war, and they very clearly weren’t. Powells UN presentation was a joke (I watched it live), and he was the only credible face out there. Rumsfeld and Rice and Wolfowitz had no credibility because they so often stated things everyone who was paying attention knew were false.
Whether you consider yourself a multilaterist or unilateralist or don’t consider that a rational divide, there is little doubt that a real coalition would have really helped in this particular case. Alliances are inherently less efficient for short term goals, but can be a significant boon for long term objectives.
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