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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (106361)	7/18/2003 9:32:33 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Any standard of morality, any set of rules for behavior, have to be applied consistently and universally. Tell us one thing today, and a different thing tomorrow; apply one set of rules to your friends, and a different set of rules to your enemies, and none of your reasons will be believed. Are you trying to tell me, seriously and with a straight face, that the Left's standards of morality wrt to humanitarian catastrophes has been consistently applied to a) Kosovo b) Iraq c) Rwanda d) the Congo e) Libera? If there is one standard that the Left seems to be trying to apply, it is a kind of moral puritanism - that the US can only interfere in places where it comes free of prior sins and with no taint of national interest. Thus Kosovo and Liberia are worthy endeavors, Iraq is a no-no. Whatever this standard can be said to care for, the amount of human suffering involved is not very high on its priority list. By any measure of that, Iraq ranks high. But we have dirty hands and, what's worse, national interests, at stake, so mustn't touch. Face it, Jacob, there's plenty of hypocrisy to go around, on all sides. I find the conservative stance, "we're going into places in force only where our national interests are involved", quite straightforward and not particularly hypocritical. If they also make humanitarian appeals, well, it's a little hypocritical but people are alllowed to have more than one motive for their actions. The idea of pursuing some sort of imagined purity in foreign interventions strikes me as self-evidently cracked from the get-go. So where does that leave us? The Right cares about national interests, the Left pursues some imagined purity, and neither side gives much of a damn about humanitarian catastrophes. Given that, I'd rather follow the side that can make itself practically useful.