Ivory Coast

[Dayuhan]

As a kid I watched Superman in the comics fight for "truth, justice and the American Way" and over time (50 years) have observed how America has degenerated into a culture where everything is negotiable. A pretty lamentable state of affairs.

Superman was fiction, even in the 50s. The US wasn't exactly a champion of freedom in those days either. We were more likely to be found knocking down elected governments and democracies and installing dictators than the other way around... a truly lamentable state of affairs. Getting elected didn't help Mossadegh much, or Allende, or Arias, or Bosch, or Goulart, etc. Hard to see how America has "degenerated" from those days... when was the last time the US overthrew a democracy and installed a dictatorship? Stopping that nonsense is an improvement, it seems to me.

The first Principle of War is "the selection and maintenance of the aim" (the US just call it Objective). Now every Officer Cadet if asked what the aim for post election Ivory Coast should have been should have been able to produce something like this (or be given a train ticket home):

The aim is to ensure a peaceful transition of power to the newly elected President of the Ivory Coast.

Select the aim and then maintain it... difficult to do if you come from a culture where nothing is fixed and everything is negotiable.

Again you miss the central point... whose aim is this supposed to be? Whose objective?

Officer cadets don't make policy. Neither do officers, or military forces. They execute policies made by governments, and I don't think any government anywhere ever adopted a policy of preventing civil war in the Ivory Coast. Even if they had, that policy goal would have to be balanced against other policy goals, such as, in the US case, the goal of scaling back military intervention and refraining from unilateral intervention.

Is there a culture on the planet where everything is fixed and non-negotiable? I doubt it. If the US ever tried to play Surperman and commit itself to non-negotiably protecting everyone, everywhere, all the time, the US would quickly crumble. The US hasn't the resources or the ability to do that. Nobody does.

That the country was allowed to slip back into civil war is both negligent and incompetent and criminally negligent on behalf of ECOWAS, the AU, the UN and the world in general.

It's not negligent, because it's not the responsibility or the obligation of the world, the UN, or Ecowas, or of any country, to prevent civil war in the Ivory Coast, or anywhere else. The world has never assigned anyone the role of Superman, nor would the world ever tolerate anyone being appointed to that role, because everyone knows that anyone appointed to that role would use the position to advance their own interests.

Is negligence and incompetence responsible for not freeing the North Koreans or Burmese or Zimbabweans from capricious tyranny? For allowing the anarchic destruction of Somalia or the mess in the DRC? Easy enough to go on... the world's probably in better shape now than it's been in my lifetime, but there's no shortage of merde floating around in the pool. If so, whose incompetence and negligence? Easy enough to point the finger and say that somebody (somebody else, naturally) ought to fix all the mess, and easy enough to accuse those who don't of negligence, incompetence, degeneracy, etc, but in real, practical terms, it is not anyone's responsibility to clean up the rest of the world, and any government that tried to take the job on would be betraying its responsibility to its own people.

Great powers and empires don't generllly crumble because they fail to assert themselves abroad. They crumble because they over assert themselves, try to do too much, waste their resources on fights that do not serve their interests. Whatever desire the US, France, and Britain have to play Superman and Save The World has to be balanced against the reality that intervening in other people's problems is not their responsibility, is expensive, quickly becomes unpopular with the voters and around the world, easily creates adverse unintended consequences, and in the past has generally not advanced their interests.