Iraqi genocide: A case against trying to stop it

The other day, I wondered aloud what David Rieff thought about Obama's statement that attempting to prevent "genocide" is insufficient reason for the US to remain in Iraq. David, who knows a thing or two about humanitarianism and armed intervention, writes to say:

About Obama's statement, unsurprisingly I agree for a number of reasons. The first is based on fairly standard just war theory criteria, above all the idea that a war is unjust if it has no realistic chance of success. And the stark fact is that it is not within
America's power to prevent the Iraqi civil war from worsening. To the contrary, by destroying Saddam's regime, we seeded the whirlwind. This seemed clear to me when I was in Baghdad during the spring and summer of 2003 and the winter of 2004. Saddam had destroyed the Communists, we had destroyed Saddam. What was left
except Shia power?

We have two choices in Iraq: colonize the place for the foreseeable future (a decade at least) or get out. In the former case, we will have to commit many, many more troops, as well as civilian officials (hopefully competent ones this time, not RNC interns and the like), and stay for a decade, which is what the average length of insurgencies has been. A handful of soldiers always trumps a mouthful of arguments, the great Lichtenberg said. It might even work. The question is why should we Americans kill and die for years on the chance that it would?

The usual answer is that because if we leave there will be a genocide. As Ambassador Khalizad said in the NYTimes this morning, 'reasonable people' can disagree about whether we were right to overthrow Saddam Hussein but now that it's done we must all put our shoulders to the wheel to make it work. Let's leave aside the grotesque aspect of the argument---basically that we, the US, made a complete dog's breakfast of this but precisely because of that the world must support us and bail us out. The deeper questions are a) whether short of open-ended colonization, the US has the power to prevent the genocide whose preconditions we ourselves created through our hubris, b) whether the future of the Iraqi polity should be one of the main foci of our concerns, and c) whether the cost of preventing genocide is one we as a polity can afford to pay?

My answer to all three questions is no (as it was before the war: I have not changed my position). Having said that, I do think that Tony Blair was right when he in effect, in talking about the need for the West to engage of wars of values, not interests,
argued that the logic of humanitarian military intervention was the logic of regime change. And it is true that there is something profoundly morally and intellectually corrupt and dishonest about reading the same people who deplore the Bush administration's policy of regime change in the Middle East calling for a policy on Darfur that can only succeed if there is regime change in Khartoum. For this reason, I
particularly admire Sen. Obama's rejection of the military option in Sudan. His principles actually do seem to be, well, principles.

Finally, I would contend that it is high time the United States became a normal country---that is, that it abandon its univeralist revolutionary vocation. That is what made Iraq possible, when all is said and done. The stark fact is that it is precisely American patriots above all who should want to jettison the notion of American exceptionalism. Such hubris will destroy us if we are not careful.