Comment by toomanyrichies
3 days ago
> We have the capacity to evaluate whether overthrowing a dictator is good or bad on its own terms.
The US has claimed the capacity to make this evaluation before, repeatedly, and has been wrong in ways that killed hundreds of thousands of people. Maybe we're not the ones who should be deciding this unilaterally.
"Oh, but this time is different", you might say. "Maduro is an unambiguous dictator who stole an election, caused 7 million refugees, and was already under indictment. This isn't like Iraq, where we invented WMDs."
The justification was "real and documented" for Libya too (Gaddafi was about to massacre Benghazi, remember?). The result: Libya was rated as the Fragile State Index's "most-worsened" country for the 2010s decade, with ISIS using the country as a hub to coordinate regional violence and Libya becoming the main exit point for migrants trying to get to Europe. The intervention may have also made nuclear nonproliferation harder, since Gaddafi had already given up his nuclear program and then been overthrown anyway. Iran and North Korea both noted that "the Libyan crisis is teaching the international community a grave lesson".
The issue isn't whether Maduro is bad; he obviously is. It's whether US military intervention produces better outcomes than the alternative. I honestly hope it does this time. I truly hope it's a case of "a broken clock is right twice a day". But am I holding my breath? Absolutely not.
Thanks, this is a more convincing argument than insisting that we must respect the sovereignty of a unelected dictator.
No serious person actually argued the category error of respecting the sovereignty of a dictator but rather respecting the autonomy of a a nation and a people. And the empirical historic reasons are WHY this principle/heuristic ought to be followed, even if those did not articulate that.
It's a litmus test for conservative value systems since anyone who paid attention in high school social studies and history should have at least passing familiarity with the arguments.
Claiming we must honor the autonomy of people who have had their autonomy stripped away by a dictator is just as silly as saying we need to respect the sovereignty of the dictator himself.
I'm not sure why we're debating this as if the people had a say in this at all. This was clearly an operation led by Trump and the military, planned for months in secret, and carried out in a single day. There were no debates in congress or the senate. There was no vote to the people.
All we can do is try to figure out what the short, medium and long term conesquences of this might be, and consider how to pressure the government to limit the power of the executive branch to do things like this without oversight in the future.
People want to determine if the inportant events surrounding them are bad or good, even if they don't have a say in them. Perhaps it's even a way to cope with the lack of influence we have.
But I do like the idea of imagining how to limit the executive branch. Spitball here - we use sortition, and permission to use force of any kind has to go through a council of say, ten, randomly chosen, representative citizens.