(September 14, 2017 at 3:39 pm)Khemikal Wrote: No one, but I'm not sure what the relevance is? We don't have to be the king of anything to try and use what we have...and that others don't...to help them.
Don't get me wrong, we can choose not to intervene....but I think that it's important that we don't offer convenient rationalizations for doing so. It's not that we can't or couldn't help and that nothing will ever work and that the people of the middle east are fundamentally barbaric. Maybe we just don't want to anymore. It's expensive, and really hard.
We're not holding back the red right hand for their own good. No good can come of watching a government execute it's people, for example. We're doing it to diminish our own malaise at the expense of whatever good we could have done.
The problem with this line of thinking is that it assumes that the US interventions (and UK and French ones for that matter) have an altruistic pupose in mind. These interventions have had three goals 1) topple a country's legitimate government 2) uphold the power of a favoured dictator or 3) topple the previously favoured dictator and replace him with a new one because he "went rogue".
None of these can possibly be construed as being in favour of the oppressed in whichever country intervention is happening.
Urbs Antiqua Fuit Studiisque Asperrima Belli
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