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Lumifer comments on [Link] A rational response to the Paris attacks and ISIS - Less Wrong Discussion
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So, what are you willing to pay to accomplish the goal?
Technically, it's not hard -- just repeat either of the Iraq wars. But if you take just a slightly wider view, those wars were not successful in making the region West-friendly and stable, and the overall cost, in both lives and money, was very high. What makes you think another military excursion into the region will fare any better?
The second was until Obama decided to unilaterally pull out prematurely for no particularly good reason.
He promised that to his voters, if I remember correctly.
May be not a good reasons strategically, but still a good reason politically.
You're going along with a blatant and partisan lie. GW Bush accepted a deadline for withdrawal after the Iraqi government made noise about Iraqi sovereignty. Obama technically tried to negotiate a new deal to keep troops there, but could not reach agreement about legal immunity. If you squint and turn your head you could try to see this as Obama choosing to withdraw, but to say he did it "unilaterally" is a bald-faced lie.
Only in the most technical sense, as soon as the Iraqi's made a counter-offer different from his first one he called of negotiations.
I think it depends on the quality of the nation-building that happens afterwards.
IMO merely defeating IS shouldn't be that expensive, but I can imagine the nationbuilding bit being very expensive and I can imagine IS going underground and executing a suicide bombing campaign, just like Iraq and Afghanistan.
Still, militarily defeating IS counts under the "benefits" column of the analysis - as a pure point of rationality - even if the cost is too great.
Why would the answer be any different from "the usual"..?
True. And just as true for North Korea.
ISIS doesn't have nukes and isn't being implicitly backed by a neighboring superpower.
The neoconservative attempt at nationbuilding in Iraq may, in fact, count as "worse than usual" for this purpose...
Actually, are there any positive examples of Western nationbuilding after the poster children of post-WW2 Japan and Germany? I don't know if South Korea would count, but for clarity let's take the last 50 years. Is there anything?
The French intervention in Mali comes to mind. Sierra Leone also. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_military_intervention_in_the_Sierra_Leone_Civil_War#Impact
That's not nationbuilding. That's just old Western powers keeping their former colonies from disintegrating into failed states. You can also read it as picking a side and propping it up with military force.
If Mali is a successful example of nationbuilding, thank you, I'll pass.
They both look better than Afghanistan though.
Still, I think you are correct to be pessimistic here. Nation building is a task which we really are pretty clueless about, sometimes because political correctness forces bad epistemological habits onto us.
Um, "not disintegrating into a failed state" is a pretty clear prerequisite to any sort of sustained social/economic development (what you apparently mean by 'nation building'). This may be somewhat sobering for a few advocates of pure anarcho-capitalism, but is not really a surprise to anyone else.
Nope.
Try again.
If France and the UK do that to their former colonies in Syria and Iraq, it'll be a significant improvement over the status quo.
Maybe yes, maybe no, but they are probably not able and certainly not willing.
How about a rationalist article encouraging them to become willing rather than the "let's not alienate muslims" idiocy Gleb wrote?