October 19, 2005
Men of Munich...
Gsood point from the Belmont Club...
...There may be valid technical criticisms of Saddam's coming trial. But attitudes toward the trial are colored by the extent to which parties feel themselves philosophically in the dock with him. Some in the direct sense, as his accomplices; others as his hirelings; still others implicated indirectly as the Men of Munich were, the enablers of evil by omission. For too many Saddam's trial must never be the day of judgment....The whole world is somewhat complicit...and the incredible thing is that there are plenty of sick and twisted appeasers who wish Saddam were still in power, who would retroactively stop the liberation campaign if they could go back in time and do so. And would fight to prevent the liberation of the even more cruelly-treated people of North Korea. That they rely partly on the old "Treaty of Westphalia" arguments, saying we have no business interfering with a "soverign nation," highlights what a vast advance in human history the Bush Doctrine is. Thank you God for this President!
And, scary thought, if a handful of Supreme Court justices had not stopped the hijacking of the election process in Florida, Al Gore would have been President in 2001, and Saddam's brutal minions would still be torturing and murdering tens-of-thousands of people every year, and the mass graves of hundreds-of-thousands would still lie undisturbed beneath the sands. Liberalism = death.
But hey, we would surely have taken a strong symbolic stand against Global Warming! That's much more important than the sufferings of a few distant foreigners. they are probably polluters anyway, and Gaia would want them snuffed.
If guilt-by-doing-nothing-to-stop-it (call it Burkean guilt) is a new standard you wish to employ, we must blame the Conservatives and the Republican party for Milosevic’s tyrannical reign. Let’s not forget that Humanitarian intervention was a hallmark of the Clinton years, and has not been on of the Bush years...
In point of fact the “Bush Doctrine” you mention has nothing at all to do with humanitarianism, it’s one of preemptive warfare. We can debate the rightness or wrongness of that doctrine and that principle, but let us never forget what it is. The Bush Doctrine is one which explicitly puts American interests first, and any humanitarian considerations are merely incidental...
Amen to that.
Posted by: Self Proclaimed Librul at October 19, 2005 01:01 PMI'm writing a response to this, but it's kinda growing out of control, so I'll probably make it a post...
Posted by: John Weidner at October 19, 2005 01:45 PMAndrew writes:
"If guilt-by-doing-nothing-to-stop-it (call it Burkean guilt) is a new standard you wish to employ, we must blame the Conservatives and the Republican party for Milosevic’s tyrannical reign. Let’s not forget that Humanitarian intervention was a hallmark of the Clinton years, and has not been on of the Bush years..."
And I guess we have President Clinton to thank for coming to the rescue of millions of North Koreans starved and enslaved by Kim Jong Il and his Communist henchmen. It was so gratifying to see North Koreans liberated, and finally able to eat, never mind speaking their minds freely, after so many years of darkness and death. And now they've been able to exercise their new freedoms by establishing a government in Pyongyang that obeys their wishes, and which is competent (as the servant of the people it governs) to try Kim and his minions for the ghastly crimes they committed. And we can all hope now that the 60-year-long division of the Korean peninsula will end peacefully as the governments of its two halves engage in talks on reunification.
Oh, the humanitarian interventions of the Clinton Administration were such a wonderful thing!
What? You say that never happened? But, but, but... President Clinton surely ordered American troops into North Korea, didn't he? After all, "humanitarianism" is America's highest interest, one which trumps all others, isn't it??
[/sarcasm]
Andrew, in case you haven't noticed, Uncle Sam lost his virginity a long LONG time ago. OF COURSE any Administration (Republican or Democrat) will do what it thinks is in its best interest. It's staffed by PEOPLE, not ANGELS! We're fortunate in that those people are generally not some remote elite but instead drawn from the country as a whole, from places high and low. And, if nothing else, they know they have to do what seems to "middle America" to be the "right thing to do" or else they don't get to stay in office very long. And so an Administration's interests are generally the same as the American people's interests.
If you want to deal in specifics, yes, President Bush 41 probably did err in not discouraging Milosevic more than he did. On the other hand, I'm not sure how much he could have done-- Russia has always had "special interests" in the Balkans (see World War I, the First and Second Balkan Wars, etc., etc., etc.)-- and I'm sure the Soviet Union, crumbling though it was, would not have looked kindly on direct American action in the Balkans.
And to be fair to President Clinton, he didn't order an invasion of North Korea, VERY desirable though it is, because he knew that doing so would only enrage China and break the truce that keeps the Koreans from slaughtering each other, not to mention us from slaughtering the Chinese and Russians, and vice versa.
But let us grant your blaming Bush Sr. for the awful events at Sarajevo and elsewhere in the Balkans. If we're going to be fair, we should blame Clinton for not invading North Korea, and FDR for not invading Nazi Germany in the 1930s, and Truman for not invading the Soviet Union in the later '40s, and Eisenhower for not pushing the Korean War to a more positive conclusion (if a conclusion it is-- the truce at Panmunjom gets more and more frayed with every passing year), and Nixon for not winning in Vietnam and thereby preventing the mass slaughter that went on in Southeast Asia after our departure in 1975, and so on and so forth.
Yes, we drop the ball a LOT, Andrew. But why can't the knee-jerk critics of the present Administration be grateful that an Administration (however much it is run by those hated Republicans) actually did something wonderful in overthrowing a dictator guilty of mass murder; bringing an entire people out of a place of misery, darkness, and death; and finally putting that liberated people in charge of their own affairs?
Nope, they can't be grateful to America (especially an America run by those awful jack-booted Rethuglikkkans) because America is "imperialistic", "blood-thirsty", and "cruel". (Their words, Andrew, not yours.) Nope, the knee-jerk critics' street-cred depends on holding our country to a standard that NO human institution can possibly meet: perfection. Nope, because American isn't perfect, it's not worthy of love.
Andrew, ask yourself something: what kind of twisted, arrogant, selfish, INHUMAN bastards are America's knee-jerk critics, that they can't bring themselves to love something that's imperfect, that they can't applaud it when it does something GOOD?
Posted by: Hale Adams at October 19, 2005 07:01 PM
