Paying the Piper

In this post I discussed how Canadian border guards are unarmed and pretty much useless because they don’t have the means to impose a monopoly of force. For decades the SOP was to let dangerous and potentially violent people in to the country, and then to call the nearest police station and let them handle it. The primary function of a border guard, essentially to guard the border, was passed off to other law enforcement agencies within the interior.

The incoming Conservative government has vowed to arm the custom agents. How many are to be armed, and what they are going to have so far as firepower is concerned, are issues that haven’t been resolved as of yet. But the one thing we can be sure of is that it’s going to cost money.

Don’t just mean the cost of a few thousand handguns. Training costs money and the people who go through it have to take refresher courses every so often. Realistic training is tough on equipment, so guns will have to be replaced and ammunition purchased in large quantities. And, of course, there will be unanticipated legal costs just as soon as a suspect sues the government because a law enforcement officer points a gun at them.

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Bush is Going for the “Soft Kill” in Iran

(This concept was referred to here.)

Bush’s SOTU had this:

Democracies in the Middle East will not look like our own, because they will reflect the traditions of their own citizens. Yet liberty is the future of every nation in the Middle East, because liberty is the right and hope of all humanity.

The same is true of Iran, a nation now held hostage by a small clerical elite that is isolating and repressing its people. The regime in that country sponsors terrorists in the Palestinian territories and in Lebanon – and that must come to an end. The Iranian government is defying the world with its nuclear ambitions – and the nations of the world must not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons. America will continue to rally the world to confront these threats. And tonight, let me speak directly to the citizens of Iran: America respects you, and we respect your country. We respect your right to choose your own future and win your own freedom. And our Nation hopes one day to be the closest of friends with a free and democratic Iran.

Glenn Reynolds had a reader writing in with this:

As an Iranian, I thought this was Bush’s best message to Iranians…it had a perfect balance and he did try distinguish between the Mullahs and the citizens and he did not name a reform group or anything like that.or even use a threatening language, when you threaten Iran people have not choice but to support the Regime..way better than ‘axis of evil’ message…

That sounds about right. A weak regime provokes foreign troubles to secure itself at home. That is exactly what the Iranian regime has been doing. It is a sign of weakness. Bush seems to be betting the Iranian people are going to solve this problem for us, without a new war. Our best ally against “Iran” is the Iranians? A win-win for everyone except the Mullahs? I hope he is right.

Substantial update here.

Lal’s Defense of Empires

A while ago I read two interesting articles by Deepak Lal. Helen Szameuly, of this blog, and Albion’s Seedlings and her home base at the EU Referendum blog recommended Lal’s book In Praise of Empires: Globalization and Order, which I have not read yet. I’ll get to it.

The two articles were Asia and Western Dominance and In Defense of Empires , which is a short version of the book. So, even though I haven’t read the book itself, I’ll go after Lal a little bit anyway. How unfair is that? If you can’t be unfair on a blog, where the Hell can you be unfair, anyway? And do, please, read these essays, if necessary rather than this blog post. Print them out and read them on the train tomorrow. Really. They are very good. That is why I bother to bring them to your attention.

My take-away is that Lal is solid on the econ side, and on the history, pretty much. Despite being mostly good, it does seem to me that he is wrong in two important ways. First, he misunderstands how different the Pax Brittanica really was from prior, land-based empires. As a result, he generalizes about “empires” in a way that I cannot fully buy into.

(As an aside, the best book to read about comparing how the various empires functioned and how they stack up against each other, you have to read Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals by Dominic Lieven, which is brilliant.)

The British Empired ruled with a relatively light hand and at relatively low cost. It imposed the most general types of rules. It only ran up the flag where that seemed necessary, and probably made just as much money on the informal parts of its empire in China or South America as it did anywhere else. The British Empire expanded by a process of “creep” at the margins, often over the alarmed cries emanating from a tight-fisted treasury. The British also bluffed a lot. Perhaps most importantly, the British wisely wound up the business when the costs got too high. They hauled down the flag, ran up a new one for the natives to salute, and scurried up the gangway and got out of town before the whole thing fell apart. They did not have anything like the French experience in Algeria, for good reason.

And the sorts of costs associated with winning and keeping an empire are only getting higher. Lal’s suggestion that anyone really undertake a new empire in any strong sense of the word is a century out of date, at least.

By failing to grasp this, Lal misunderstands the United States, which is more rational than he gives it credit for. We are a hegemon but we are not an empire in the sense of many of historical examples, and we don’t want to be. Moreover, in an age of cheap explosives and firearms and cellphones and the internet and television, there are no more backward, isolated places to conquer. The dirt-cheap but very destructive Iraqi insurgency shows how hard it would be to impose a real empire. A Pax Americana cannot and should not look like the Pax Brittanica, let alone a mission civilatrice or other, more heavy-handed examples of imperial rule. We are correct to want to let people rule their own affairs, but get them to buy into certain “rule sets”, to use a Barnettism. This is a rather minimalist vision, far short of “Empire”.

Lal also shows that he is coming from the “econ” side by a certain boneheadedness when it comes to political reality. Like many econ-trained classical liberals he is absolutely certain about the benefits of free trade, it is an old argument to him that should not even have to be made. So, he suggests that the USA should just “get over it” and create a free trade regime. This is an utter impossibility. The Jacksonian element in American life is what gives America the military muscle to go kill people in foreign lands, and it is the only thing that makes all this empire talk possible, that keeps us from being a vast Belgium. But that same element in our national life has no interest in righting the worlds wrongs generally. Nor does it like foreigners, or trust them, and trade is perceived as a way to gain advantage over foreigners if possible and a way to lose American jobs if it is mishandled. It is adversarial. No amount of exasperated lectures by econ profs in bow ties will change this perception. It is structural.

A good corrective to Lal, even in his short form, is Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition, by Jack Snyder. Snyder talks about how people come up with security rationales for some pretty far-fetched military and imperialist ventures. His discussion of the intellectual house of cards that preceded the Fashoda Incident is especially good. A little too cynical, but a good antidote for someone like me who tends to get worked up and want to send the Marines to faraway locales, unless I impose a cool-down period on myself. It is easier to get into these places than to get out of them again.

Cross-posted at Albion’s Seedlings.

Shock wave or, maybe, not

As all the world knows, Hamas has done better in the Palestinian elections than expected, pulling ahead of Fatah. Understandably, this has caused a great deal of commentary.

The BBC called it a “stunning victory”, going so far as to describe Hamas as Islamic, a term they tend to omit when writing about suicide/homicide bombings. With slightly more understanding, perhaps, Deutsche Welle referred to a “shocking victory”.

The Guardian wrote of it as a “shock victory” but it would, perhaps, be more of a shock to people who have been publicly proclaiming that the so-called peace process was stalled repeatedly solely because of Israel’s supposed intransigeance.

All the news services have been quoting various people, some named, some anonymous or semi-anonymous, in Arab countries, who were rejoicing in what they saw a victory to the people who had given their blood (and other people’s, of course). All of these are countries and people who are prepared to fight for the cause to the last drop of Palestinian blood and why the Palestinians allow themselves to be manipulated in this way has always been a mystery to me.

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