To: GST who wrote (108972 ) 7/31/2003 2:32:22 AM From: frankw1900 Read Replies (1) | Respond to In each case you had civil war and/or genocide -- what country on earth suffered more than Cambodia. As for Hitler, if he had stayed completely within his borders it would not be moral for one country to invade. It would have been moral for countries to make a decision to condemn Germany and act on behalf of the international community. One country, acting alone, cannot judge the morality of another and invade it based on its own judgement. The institutions at our disposal for this process of decision-making are weak. The treaty tradition that developed was to protect the rulers, not the populations because the populations didn't count. Much has happened since the Treaty of Munster. The modern world has developed and its seminal political moments were those in which people found ways to run their affairs without rulers - the US being the outstanding example of this. It is not the case people in the modern world are only the property of their governments to be disposed of as the ruler wishes - as was done in Iraq under Hussein's regime, or Germany under Hitler, or Cambodia under PolPot, or the USSR under Stalin. The regime of Saddam Hussein had no place in the modern world because it disposed of its population as it willed.wait the necessary years for the UN or some other consortium of countries to make themselves responsible for dealing with criminal regimes such as Iraq's or Cambodia's while hundreds of thousands and millions die under tyranny or you can dispose of them when it's possible.Instead of making them stronger, most in the Bush Administration seem to intent on destroying any institution or institutional arrangement that might limit the unilateral exercise of raw American military power.
