Posted by
Michael on Tuesday, May 13, 2008 11:41:03 AM
There's an F. Scott Fitzgerald line about
the necessity of living with flat out contradiction, and that's the
line I end up towing with the subject of American interventionism. I
don't like my country serving as a global policeman, but I fear for the
state of a world where third world disasters, of the natural and human
variation, are left in the hands of the United Nations or (shudder)
China.
So I find myself looking quizically at this article by Anne Applebaum in Slate,
where she makes a case for intervention in Burma. There are very valid
reasons to want to take out that government and in order to take full
control of relief efforts, and Applebaum cites at the top of the
article the terrible things that have been said about the Burmese
regime by decent people:
They are "cruel, power hungry and dangerously irrational," in the
words of one British journalist. They are "violent and irrational"
according to a journalist in neighboring Thailand. Our own State
Department leadership has condemned their "xenophobic, ever more
irrational policies."
She goes on to say about the intervention in Iraq:
Unfortunately, the phrase "coalition of the willing" is
tainted forever—once again proving that the damage done by the Iraq war
goes far beyond the Iraqi borders—but a coalition of the willing is
exactly what we need. The French—whose foreign minister, Bernard
Kouchner, was himself a co-founder of Médecins Sans Frontières—are
already talking about finding alternative ways of delivering aid.
Others in Europe and Asia might join in, along with some aid
organizations. The Chinese should be embarrassed into contributing,
asked again and again to help. This is their satrapy, after all, not
ours.
Was the Iraqi regime under Saddam Hussein not "cruel, power hungry
and dangerously irrational?" From his laundry list of atrocious acts to
not conceding that he had no weapons of mass destruction when it could
potentially avert disaster, Hussein met all three descriptions. The
people who would likely take over Iraq when a vaccuum has been left by
an American withdrawal would likely also meet those descriptions as
well, as the chances of a peaceful democratic transition in those
circumstances seem pretty miniscule.
Iraq is almost talked about as if there was a tolerable government
in place before the 2003 invasion, and not a psychotic dictatorship.
It's almost Orwellian to hear people speak about the tragedy of one
intervention and then talk fondly of another, as if the latter will be
without bloodshed. I wrote an article on this very subject for a
college paper in 2006 in regards to critics of Bush who argued that we
should try to intervene to remove the Arab dictatorship of oil rich
Sudan. It's funny how times sometimes don't change.