Americans and distress abroad: The vital “Who” question?

One thing I’ve noticed again and again and again is the– in many ways admirable– instinct of many Americans to think that they (we) and/or the US government has to “do” something about every reported incident of distress or dysfunction overseas.
In Iraq, this morphs easily into the so-called “Pottery Barn” rule… That our government broke it so therefore our government should fix it.
(Hey guys, ever stop to think that precisely because our government’s track record in Iraq is so abysmal, that probably makes our government uniquely unqualified to take any kind of a lead role in the fixing that very evidently needs to be done in Iraq? Pay reparations to Iraqis to let them fix it themselves– yes… But that’s a different manner.)
Or take Afghanistan: The whole official discussion in Washington DC right now is over how many additional US troops are needed to “fix” Afghanistan. This is a specific, and specifically militarized, version of the “Who” question.
Rejoinder #1 to this: Military force is centrally not what’s needed in order to “fix”/heal Afghanistan’s chronically traumatized society and governance system. Any country’s troops operating in a military way inside Afghanistan are most likely only to make things worse.
Rejoinder #2: America’s means of “intervention” are overwhlemingly the tools of military intervention. (See point 1 above.) But even when Washington deploys “reconstruction teams” or whatever, why would anyone assume that they have anything special to contribute to the complex tasks of social and political rebuilding in Afghanistan? The idea that “the west” can build or rebuild societies in distinctly non-western environments is incredibly 19th century. But hullo! That’s two centuries back from today.
Or take Zimbabwe, just for another recent example. In the aftermath of the recent fiasco of the Mugabe-stolen election, many American commentators earnestly asked “What should Washington do about Mugabe?”
Why should anyone think that Washington, as such, should do anything in particular to help “save” Zimbabwe’s people? Why not leave it to those of his neighbors who have a very much greater stake in trying to restore stability to the country… and who seem to be doing a not bad job of crafting a political path forward among Zimbabweans?
… As I’ve written a little in my Re-engage book, many Americans have this great urge to rush around the world trying to “help” or “save” people in distress elsewhere. But they seldom take the time that is required to look coolly at the effects of our own country’s policies on vulnerable societies elsewhere, to look at the sheer harm our country inflicts on those societies, and to engage in the campaigns that are needed here at home to change those policies and thus end the harm that our government’s policies inflict.
This is so much less “romantic” than traveling overseas as saviors to try to “save” or “help” people in distressed countries… But it is a whole lot more necessary.
Two harm-inflicting policies we need to change, for starters:

1. Our country’s maintenance of, and use of, an enormously bloated military capability that’s deployed all around the world; and
2. The subsidies we continue to shovel into the pockets of US farmers, and disproportionately into the pockets of rich US farmers– subsidies that have (a) wrecked the livelihoods of millions of small farmers in low-income countries overseas, and (b) more recently, wrecked the “Doha round” of trade talks.

As you can see, working on issues like these is not only not romantic– it’s also incredibly difficult! So many hundreds of thousands of our own fellow-citizens here in the US have done very nicely indeed by feeding off either the taxpayer-funded military-industrial complex or the taxpayer-funded agricultural-subsidy complex… So persuading them that our country needs to change its ways is a real– though necessary– challenge.
I guess there are two parts to this short argument I’m making here::

1. Americans (and Europeans) need to become a lot more aware of the harms inflicted by some of our own governments’ longstanding policies, and focus primarily on ending those harms rather than trying to think how to apply band-aids of often temporary “help” to the affected communities overseas; and
2. We should not imagine, in the often self-referential way we have imagined until now, that every single distressed community overseas needs “help” that is uniquely or even mainly American in order to heal. Often, indeed, the injection of Americans into complex situations overseas can complicate rather than aiding the reconciliation and reconstruction that need to occur.

This latter one is the vital “Who” question. Yes, Iraqis and Afghans may well need some external help to resolve their current crises of governance. But why on earth would we imagine that it’s a specifically American, or US-dominated, helping mechanism that’s needed?
As I’ve written earlier here on the blog, in the present world information environment, the question of the legitimacy of any particular actor in the international field has acquired considerable new sensitivity.
Washington doesn’t have much legitimacy as a military-intervening actor these days. Certainly not in Iraq (where, in the view of most people and governments around the world, the original invasion of 2003 never had any legitimacy.) And US/NATO “legitimacy” in Afghanistan– among Afghans– is probably decreasing very rapidly, especially after the militarized over-“kill” that the US troops there have been engaging in there in recent months.
USIP recently reported that the US/NATO forces there increased their use of airborne munitions against ground targets in Afghanistan from “5, 000 pounds of munitions per month in 2005 to an average of 80,000 pounds per month since June 2006, peaking at 168,000 pounds in December 2007. The response of most voices in the political elite– except that of Zbig Brzezinski— has been to argue for considerably beefed-up US and NATO ground forces. But why would anyone imagine that the “solution” in distant Afghanistan is primarily a military one at all– let-alone a made-by-NATO military one?