In seeking to move beyond the limitations of the limitation strategy, we can begin by observing the telltale quotation marks that Elkus and Prime put around the word “acceptable” in their description of the American strategic posture. With the same mixture of moral indictment and psychological denial that characterizes the policy itself, what the marks mark is a disjunction between revulsion and practical will or ability. The punctuation tells us that the authors themselves are hesitant about declaring acceptable what America or we have been accepting and under their framework will continue to accept. They know that what is acceptable for us will not be acceptable for others, may not have been acceptable for us in the past, may be declared unacceptable again in the future. The authors personally may not want to accept this acceptance, and may be setting aside their qualms in order to examine and finally adopt it. They seem to mean “acceptable in a narrow sense,” or “as we actually will accept rightly or wrongly,” or, to put the matter more precisely, “as in the end what will have proven tolerable.” In short, Elkus and Prime point to actually operative control thresholds without defining them except as embarrassingly unmentionable, and the same goes for “containment” and “management,” where in their post the quotation marks are absent but in effect implied.
What seems in fact to define successful levels of containment and tolerable if not fully acceptable levels of violence is primarily an inability to demonstrate a direct and sufficient effect on American lives or American prospects, or even on American sympathetic emotions. The presumption seems to be that Americans and American policymakers do not, and perhaps cannot and should not, care or care too much what happens to those in the “controlled” region. This presumption both conceals and re-constructs an additional difficult to acknowledge, possibly un-acceptable and yet accepted division between “them” and “us” in which “their” problems are to be contained and managed by being kept sustainably separate from our concerns. In this sense we have already annihilated the victims morally (or symbolically, yet for all intents and purposes really), or have recognized them as self-annihilated and therefore finally unrecognizable for us, before Assad’s forces or IS or perhaps one day we ourselves get to them physically. For us or at least for this policy, the gradual, intermittently atrocious physical destruction and immiseration of large numbers of people will be redundant. It has already been discounted.
The bases for this necessarily suppressed or unspeakable acceptance of the unacceptable are not difficult to locate, since they lie largely in the same or adjacent terrain and the quite recent past. If we can absorb the responsibility or guilt for vast destruction and suffering, for deaths beyond number, to no recognized end – the effective consensus on Operation Iraqi Freedom – then we cannot be easily moved by more of it, only indirectly at our hands. Indeed, it serves the requisite moral logic, or eases the process of administering the excesses, disappointments, and atrocities of the ’00s, if we can now point to Syria and say to ourselves and the world, “With us or without us, the same.” In sum, we – Americans, the West – have grown used to treating Iraq and its neighborhood as unsalvageable at least insofar as our powers are concerned. Some take pride in having learned this conclusion as a lesson. They scorn all those who have not done so, and police our public discourse for telltale signs of oldthink. ((This sensibility is subject to change, and commentary like this commentary will be occasioned and conditioned by, in the end must be understood a part of, the same control-chaos dynamic.)) The perspective is the precise opposite of a “responsible” one, and intended to be, but as a higher responsibility: We assert the responsibility of irresponsibility in the same motion that we accept the unacceptable. We perhaps would not have felt secure in this position previously to the last decade, or not have been willing to let this experiment in disdain run its course, but, at least up until the day before yesterday, we have come to believe that our best efforts on behalf of the people of the Middle East and in particular its “Iraqi and Levantine” portions will be poorly received, wasteful, likely abortive, and altogether counterproductive to the point of mass tragedy. We may at one time have been prepared to identify beyond body counts and cost-effect calculations with a notional Iraqi people, or with Arab Muslim peoples, or even for a moment with particular tribes and their sheiks as during the Anbar “Awakening.” We may, in short, have been ready to consider them a part of “us,” as people whose concerns would be our concerns, and we may someday reach that point again ((…for instance, if we become convinced against current expectations of a durable will to succeed in terms comprehensible to us, such as those of a coherent state-national project under popular sovereignty – as identified by Michael O’Hanlon: “Iraq Is Still Worth Saving.”)), but we seem to have concluded for now that there is far too little mutual understanding and there is far too much bad history on both sides. It sometimes seems that this conclusion may be the one thing we and they have in common other than our minimally shared membership in the human species.
Because for good and terrible reasons these perceptions also correspond to ethnic and religious divisions, so in a manner also quite unacceptable for mainstream multicultural and pluralistic discourse, they can hardly be addressed cogently at all, but that a concern cannot be politely articulated does not mean that it no longer functions or that it is not in fact of overriding importance, especially in matters of war. In this regard, it is telling, if all but un-tellable outside the flourishes of angry polemics and the despondent fury of tweets in broken English, that the moment of our return to the greater Iraqi battlespace came when Kurds, Yazidis, and Christians were placed under immediate threat, and a Shia-dominated and -allied government called for help: What the three former groups and our indispensable sovereign partner have in common is that they are not Sunni and Arab. Our history with the Kurds in particular gives a palpably different meaning to the word “acceptable” in relation to them. As for the Sunni Arabs of Iraq and Syria especially, but for the region generally even including all of those others as well as cooperative Sunnis and increasingly even the Israelis, our collective attitude has been the attitude of a relative or friend of a drug addict or other highly self-destructive individual: to seek and maintain emotional and physical distance. We have trained ourselves to accept leaving the destructive-victims to their self-mutilations on the way to self-immolation, unless whatever they do specifically requires our active and instructively overreactive self-protection. Collectively as individually, we may also like to think that at the limits we will know the truly unacceptable loss of control when we see it, or are compelled to view it, but we may surprise ourselves with our ability to look away from or to grow used to what formerly we found unbearable in harm to others: just the latest cadaverized child in a Twitpic, with the most popular shows on television and most popular games in our consoles helping to toughen the emotional callus. Before East Ghouta, after all, it was not only the President who imagined a “red line,” and who might have reasonably surmised that the mass murder of civilians with chemical weapons, assembled corpses lain out to prove it, would be treated as a crime against humanity requiring direct action – a step beyond the merely horrible to the intolerable or truly unacceptable.
If not use of WMD against civilians, maybe genocide, unilateral alteration of national borders, de-stabilization of friendly nation-states, and political violence directly against our fellow citizens are still intolerable for us. Returning to the abstract formulation – control as incomplete repression summoning the return of chaos in new forms – it may even turn out that our committed indifference overturns itself, or virtually necessitates the act to which we cannot any longer remain indifferent. The thought may make us re-visit our past inaction, re-joining those who have all along held out for intervention as stubbornly as hopelessly. The other alternative is to numb ourselves further, raising the threshold of the acceptable again, but every such adaptation also involves an alteration in our own self-concept pointing in the direction of self-dissolution, as it is very different to think of ourselves as God’s benevolent messengers spreading happiness and prosperity all across the globe than to think of ourselves as making the best of a bad situation and otherwise getting on with our lives; or than to think of ourselves as getting what we can just like all the others; or than simply not to think of ourselves collectively, but instead, separately, to assert some lesser self if any as alone sanctifiable, and therefore defensible to the death.
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How is it diminishing them to consider them the best arbiters of their own interests? I oppose empire precisely because I see them as equal human beings with their own goal, views & interests, that no one has the right to decide for them.
The explanation you give here rings more of paternalism than humanism — others as children and only children.