foreign policy and the folly of measuring intent

I find that people are acting like these new revelations about the Georgian-Russian conflict of this year are a bigger deal than they really are. We already knew that the Georgians indiscriminately fired rockets and mortars into separatist territory. We knew they killed civilians. We knew they killed Russian peacekeepers. I don't think this changes the equation too much.

It does, I guess, provide more cover for Vladimir Putin's preferred reading of Russia as protector of democracy and human rights. At least, it does in other countries, and maybe would in some sort of bizarro- world America where other nations are allowed to use the same excuses for military aggression as we are. I've said before that Vladimir Putin is a neocon dream. He's a leader who is unafraid to use vague notions of democracy-promotion and the protection of human rights as justification for starting armed conflict, and then wages that conflict with an all-out dedication to the complete eradication of the enemy.

Once you've put "we're doing it for freedom" on the table as an excuse for military aggression and expansionism, other countries are going to use it. This democracy promotion is unlikely in most cases to rise to what we would consider a compelling case for military aggression but, well, neither do spy satellites of goat water troughs. Again, internally, it doesn't matter that these countries have the same neoconservative justifications for going to war as we ourselves use. The most important element of being Very Serious about foreign policy, after all, is knowing that it's preposterous to expect the United States to be held to any of the same standards that we hold other countries to. But there is an international community, and I suspect these sort things do hold water. So Putin has at least a talking point for his surrogates to use in justifying aggression.

Many of the neocons and other foreign policy types in the US, I'm sure, would say "But Putin doesn't actually care about democracy and human rights!" Which gets to one of my hobby horses, the folly of trying to measure intent in foreign policy.

The fact of the matter is, it is impossible to know the motives of a country. We are all aware that there is a difference between what a country says and what it intends. Indeed, a vast amount of ink is spilled arguing about what a country "really wants". And yet at the same time, for all of our inability to consistently measure a country's intentions, we make intentions wildly important for how we judge a given foreign policy situation. The perfect example of this is Israel, where almost everyone proceeds from the assumption that Israel never intends to kill civilians, so that the many dozens of Palestinian civilians killed by Israel each year, or the hundreds killed in Lebanon in 2006, are all tragic mistakes; whereas Arabs are always out to murder Israeli children. So Israel (which has killed more of its enemies' civilians than it has had killed, by a factor of two or three times) is the benevolent defender, and the Arabs around Israel or confined in quasi-statehood within it are all murderous savages, bent on destruction. (Which, of course, is not excusing Arab aggression against Israel, which is always and only unjustifiable and horrific.)

So Putin says he's protecting human rights, a justification given credence by our own invasion and occupation of Iraq, and we are left in a position where we have to say "No, that's not really why he's doing that." Far better to eliminate trying to divine intentions from the tea leaves-- which suspiciously always leaves us convinced that our antagonists have only sinister and destructive intentions-- and instead judge countries by how they act, what they do in the world around them. So we would both condemn Georgian destruction in South Ossetia, and Russian overreaction in attacking Georgia. (Necessarily, there would still have to be a lot of sorting out of what we though were appropriate responses to provocation on both sides.) We could leave intentionality out of it. Of course, this move is made much more easy if we broadly withdraw from our program of extending our military all around the globe, involving ourselves in every conflict possible, and acting on grounds of imperial privilege to do whatever we particularly feel like at the moment.

Certainly, a country that worried more about the actual pragmatic effects of its policy, and that privileged action over intention, wouldn't do things like invade Iraq. Invading the country with the world's second largest oil reserves, toppling its dictator, having him executed in a show trial, dictating policy to a people we say have been given democracy, doing nothing to secure the capitol, sitting by during a civil war between two religious groups with centuries-old antagonism, then declaring victory when the outcome of that civil war is necessarily a reduction in violence (with the added bonus of an almost completely ethnically cleansed country).... Well, that sort of thing loses it's luster when you can't dress it up with freedom and democracy rhetoric.

Update: Conor comments and adds a crucial point I didn't: large-scale foreign policy excursions, particularly those from democratic countries, necessarily have many fathers. And each of the people advocating military action probably has several different motives as well. That's why I tend to find "Iraq was all about the oil" arguments unhelpful. Of course, some of the impetus for invading Iraq was securing oil fields. But that wasn't the only reason. It probably wasn't even the only reason for the people most interested in the oil angle. Which again is merely to say that considering motives for foreign policy maneuvers is a sticky business. I mean, I do absolutely believe that there were people motivated by genuine concern for the Iraqi people who advocated invading Iraq. (Paul Wolfowitz springs to mind.) I even imagine that many of those who had grander designs were similarly concerned. It's just that, in the final analysis, it doesn't really matter. As Iraq shows, good intentions, like those of Paul Wolfowitz, are deeply inadequate to achieving a beneficial result. We have to judge consequences.