Let me join Daniel Davies in expressing disappointment in Michael Walzer’s badly underreasoned article on mercenaries in The New Republic. The whole crux of the argument comes here:

Whatever Blackwater’s motives, I won’t join the “moral giants” who would rather do nothing at all than send mercenaries to Darfur. If the Comintern could field an army and stop the killing, that would be all right with me, too.

Look. Of course if you make the alternative to “do nothing” sending in Comintern (or whomever) to “stop the killing” then sending in Comintern looks good. But when you’re considering the wisdom of sending a Stalin-directed military force into the situation you don’t get to stipulate that doing so is going to work. Similarly with Blackwater. There aren’t people sitting around saying “wow, the situation in Sudan sure is terrible and for a reasonable fee Blackwater could make it all better but I’m against that because it’s, like, wrong man.” Rather, I highly doubt that introducing a bunch of heavily armed unaccountable mercenaries into the situation would actually make things better.

I do think it’s worth asking if we can come up with mechanisms of control and accountability that would make dispatching mercenaries into situations where troops are needed but nation-states are unwilling to send their national militaries into an attractive option. It’s clear, however, that we do not in fact have any such mechanisms in place. Under the circumstances, you don’t just unleash a plague of mercenaries somewhere in order to demonstrate your good intentions.

In honor of PSOE’s successful re-election campaign, I thought I might revisit my April 2006 revisiting of Spain’s nightmare of appeasement:

The pro-war left had a more sophisticated take, with The New York Times’s Tom Friedman saying he understood “that many Spanish voters felt lied to by their rightist government over who was responsible for the Madrid bombings, and therefore voted it out of office.” Nonetheless, Friedman said, for the new Zapatero government to follow through on its wildly popular commitment to withdraw from Iraq — a commitment made long before the bombings — would be a mistake. Spain “should now follow that up by vowing to keep their troops in Iraq — to make clear that in cleaning up their own democracy, they do not want to subvert the Iraqis’ attempt to build one of their own. Otherwise, the Spanish vote will not be remembered as an act of cleansing, but of appeasement.”

Spain declined to take Friedman’s advice, and having returned last weekend from a weeklong visit there I can report that the consequences of choosing appeasement have been dire indeed. Superficially, Spanish democracy is still intact and Zapatero’s government in Madrid runs the country. Real power, however, is now in the hands of the radical mullahs whose will the government dares not oppose. The city of Toledo, like most of Spain, fell under the rule of Muslim “Moors” in the eighth century who referred to their Spanish possessions as al-Andalus. Toledo was one of the earliest cities brought back under Christian control (by Alfonso VI of Castille in 1085) during the centuries of warfare known as la reconquista. The modern city features a large traffic circle just outside the medieval town walls known as the glorieta de la reconquista in honor of this distinction. But today in a new ironic twist, it is from that very plaza where the Mullahs issue their fatwas that the craven Spanish government, having chosen the path of appeasement, invariably follows. Toledo’s women, who only in the recent past enjoyed basic legal equality with men albeit in the context of a culture that was highly traditionalistic by American standards, now fear to walk the streets unveiled. Spain’s historic wine industry groans under the crushing yoke of the Islamists’ informal power, the riojas of the past but a fading memory. The Mezquita Cristo de la Luz, for centuries a church, is once again a mosque.

Two years on, the satire still holds up.

Photo by me available under a Creative Commons license

Warren Strobel takes a look at Barack Obama’s foreign policy team and views. The term “pragmatic” comes up a lot, which can mean a lot of things. I think it’s important to see that Obama and his inner circle not only have their catch-phrases, but also like to illustrate what they mean by them by referring back to Iraq. When they talk about pragmatism, they see the march to war in Iraq as the reverse; as a deeply ideological movement determined to ignore contrary evidence, plus a Democratic establishment too rigidly wedded to a set of verbal formulae, catch-phrases, and narrowly political thinking to recognize what was happening and respond appropriately.

I’m not really sure pragmatism is sufficient to the challenges we’re facing as a country and I think there’s more to be said for doctrine-driven thinking than some of this rhetoric implies. Still, pragmatism would be more welcome than the alternatives that seem to be on the table.