spending a week in space

[amw]

I have been on holiday all week. This week was a twofer of Children's Day and 清明節 Tomb Sweeping Day, so i took a couple days annual leave and made it a full week off. My plan was to do some traveling, although i was discouraged a bit when colleagues told me it'd be even harder to find a hotel over 清明 than it was over the 228 holiday. Well, i would

Comments

[siglinde99]

First off, I’m glad to are feeling better after your week of rest and relaxation. Second, this is the kind of thoughtful post that made me friend you. I have been a Star Trek nerd forever. I love the stories that seem plausible, but are also at least a little hopeful. It’s why I am most drawn to certain dystopian books (Margaret Atwood is a perennial favourite).

Also a military brat (my dad was a secret hippy with a buzz cut), and most of my friends who joined the military share that value of being there to defend, but hoping never to be used. Years ago I was in a meeting with some senior diplomats and military and the question of resources for something or other came up. I was struck by my grandboss’s response: as a diplomat, no one wants the military to be properly resourced than I do. He went on to be our ambassador to the UN.

I disagree on the invasion of Iraq, not just because it was done on the basis of faulty intelligence. I think it was a distraction from efforts in Afghanistan that ultimately led to the tragic failures of 2021 and current humanitarian crisis. There was a chance for real change, but we collectively blew it because we don’t have a long enough attention span to follow through with supporting multi-generational cultural change. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Lord knows, we don’t keep sustained attention on similar (but much smaller scale) issues within our police or military (two organizations where governments can have some control over training, promotions and firings, so we can measure and attribute results).

[amw]

I didn't support the invasion of Iraq as part of the War on Terror. I agree that those justifications were weak and a distraction from dealing with other countries that absolutely harbored terrorists. I supported the invasion because Saddam Hussein was a dictator and i wanted to see him gone. I think in some ways the coalition forces failed the people of Iraq when they crossed the border in 1991 after liberating Kuwait but then pulled back before taking Baghdad.

I still think it is the right thing to do to help liberate countries under authoritarian rule, but after the Iraq War i'd think a lot more carefully about supporting it now we have seen how wrong it can go when the "liberated" populace isn't completely invested in rebuilding as a democratic society. I'm not sure that outside investment on its own is enough to affect multi-generational change.

This is why i think what happened in Hong Kong was so tragic, because there you had millions of people who already, legitimately wanted democracy, and they were utterly crushed under the jackboots of Xi Jinping's thugs.

I have a feeling this is also why people in the west generally support giving military aid to Ukraine - not just because Russia is obviously the aggressor, but also because the Ukrainian people have shown that even though their country is corrupt and has problematic pockets of nationalism/racism/etc, they do generally seem to want to move forward from that. From the perspective of spreading democracy, perhaps Ukraine (or Hong Kong, or Taiwan) is a better investment than somewhere like Afghanistan where after 20 years of trying, whatever democracy the country had was immediately overthrown the moment the Americans left.

Yeah, the best military is the one you never need to deploy. The ideal situation is that it only exists as an intimidation measure of last resort when you are dealing with sociopathic/authoritarian actors who refuse to engage in a reasonable and trustworthy way.

[siglinde99]

True regime change and democracy take a really long time. We like to think twenty years is more than enough, but we took several hundred years and still aren’t fully there. It is tempting to focus on the countries that are “closer” but I think that just adds to the inequalities that foster violence and corruption. And I don’t think any of these countries will end up with a democracy that looks exactly like ours, but we also need to accept that there are other ways to ensure communities and individuals have a say in how they govern themselves (and are governed). One of my university profs once said that the best way to help Africa become peaceful and prosperous was to put a giant (metaphorical) fence around the continent and just leave them alone to figure things out. It would be brutal for a while and it would take a lot of guts to let it happen. And of course it’s not realistic because there are too many foreign interests. It wasn’t realistic even in the days before mass migration and the internet, but it was an interesting thought experiment.

But yeah - Hong Kong. I remember watching the handover. We were literally sitting around TVs at work and halfway expecting th PLA would come marching in the moment the ceremonies were over. That didn’t happen and then people got complacent.