Iraq was hardly a a humanitarian catastrophe on the same scale as many places in Africa
There are hundreds of thousands of corpses coming out of those mass graves, maybe a million.
If you don't think a million dead (& that doesn't count the dead of Saddam's wars) isn't a real catastrophe, you have high standards for catastrophe.
We are not humanitarians- we are a capitalist nation, out for ourselves. This is fine, but let's not pretend we are anything else- because even if we can fools ourselves, the rest of the world isn't as interested in our self deception.
It's not an either-or choice, X. There is a limit to what we can do, and a limit to what we want to do. Do you really think we could fix the Congo? It's nearly as big as the United States! We would need to station half a million troops over there for the long haul. Why would we want to do that? If we went, how long would we stay?
Political realities and repurcussions always intrude. In the real world, we will usually choose the arena where national interest provides the lasting motive. If there is no lasting motive, we pull out too soon, like Somalia. What a disaster that was! doubly so, in that it convinced Saddam and OBL that the US couldn't take casualties. Now we have to stay in Iraq and take casualties to disprove the lesson. And because we took on Iraq, the cries are going up for us to fix Liberia (which we may because of our old ties to it) and every other disaster area.
Strange twisted self interest, masquerading as *humanitarianism*, looks worse than no humanitarianism at all- imo
Maybe you prefer the French approach, naked self interest, adorned with moral preening? |
