The "temptation" to intervene with military force because we have the capability

AJC columnist Jay Bookman wrote a very thoughtful piece today about our military capability and our presumed obligation to act militarily in other countries.    The Obama administration has been called upon by the more hawkish among us to intervene with military force in:   Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Somalia, Libya, Iran, Pakistan, and a whole host of "Arab Spring" stuggles.    Are we, as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once put it, "the indispensable nation?"  The world's police?  President Obama has tried to move us away from that aspiration in a world that has far too many troubled spots.

Even today, they are struggling with internal debates about how and how much to intervene in Iraq . . . again.   We have been doing airstrikes;  do we go in with ground troops to rescue the refugees on Mount Sinjar?   Is that a slippery slope that we couldn't resist escalating?

Bookman asks:  Does having the capability sometimes get confused with also having the obligation to act militarily?

"Nobody else, for example, has the capability to intervene on behalf of those terrorized people on Mount Sinjar [in Iraq], and with genocide at stake, possessing the capability to act means we have an obligation to act."

"The problem is that overwhelming military power does more than produce an obligation to act.  It also produces the temptation to act.  Time and again, our inability or unwillingness to distinguish between temptation and obligation has gotten us into trouble.  In 2003, to cite the most relevant example, there was no obligation to invade Iraq;  there was merely temptation that was marketed to us as an obligation."

What wiser heads have learned in the past decade seems to have not yet penetrated the thinking of our hawks:  that our military might is not matched by our wisdom and knowledge of other countries and other cultures.   Look what a disaster resulted from the willful ignorance and blithe neglect of Iraqi culture and religions by the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld debacle in Iraq after our successful military toppling of their government.

Bookman writes:

"Having the most powerful military force on the planet does not in any way enhance our foresight;  to the contrary, the arrogance that it produces can blind us and deceive us into vastly exaggerating our powers to force others to behave as we think appropriate.

"I guess you could say that the closer we get to omnipotence, the further we get from omniscience.   Put in less fancy terms, power can make you stupid, and it's the stupidity that usually gets you."

Fortunately, President Obama and his advisers know this;   so we get an emphasis on diplomacy and economic sanctions and on building coalitions of allies to bring about solutions in these troubled spots of the world.    But meanwhile we have people clinging to a mountainside without food and water and facing certain death if we don't help.  Can we provide humanitarian help without succumbing to the temptation to escalate into another military war?

Ralph