When Progressives Love Intervention
Martin Ivens wrote what is, with ease, the column of the week. He wrote it for the Times (London) and it’s truly a masterpiece. It’s witty, clever, reasonable and intelligent. It has you laughing out loud every now and then, next you are serious, and then you laugh mockingly at the subject of the piece.
Just to give you an impression of the quality of the column, and the subject:
Today humanitarian intervention has, in any case, been widely discredited after the disaster that followed the toppling of the genocidal dictator Saddam Hussein, hasn’t it? The antiAmerican left and the little England right unite in scorn for the Texan cowboy and his British poodle.
But what’s that I hear? Massacres of Muslims by Muslims have approached genocidal proportions in Darfur, Sudan. “Something must be done,” cry the do-gooders of the left. In Burma, the generals let their people die in the wake of devastating floods rather than accept contaminating western aid. “Send in the US air force,” bellow the critics of American bombers.
The little Englanders have changed their tune, too. Fire-eaters are now calling for Britain and America to oust Mugabe, even though they have condemned all other allied interventions.
There is only one thing worse than humanitarian intervention by the West, it seems, and that’s no intervention.
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On the contrary – the left does not like intervention as much as you might think. Here is why. I remember a few years on campus “FREE IRAN” bumper stickers and activism was popular among the left… that is, until it looked like Bush might actually do it and now all you hear form them is that the US is putting Iran in an impossible position and is setting them up to “take the oil”. This is the very same nonsense that we heard before the Kuwait and Iraq wars. During Saddam’s rule since 1979, up to 5 million people were killed or driven out of the country making it a larger humanitarian disaster than Darfur, Rwanda or even Robert Mugabe. The torture and barbarity carried out by Saddam’s regime was as brutal as any. Saddam’s sons were known to go to weddings with soldiers and rape the bride. They would go to grade schools and pick out little girls to rape while the teachers cried knowing that they could not do anything to stop them. The human rights abuses by the Fayadeen are well documented and there are the countless mass graves. From the humanitarian angle alone the invasion of Iraq was more then justified. The left doesn’t want to hear it now do they? The simple reality is this; intervention is fine if a leftist is president. If a Republican holds office the left’s concern for human rights goes out the window in its attempt to break the political will of the United States to see the mission through.
I don’t think that liberals would really consider intervention to be OK, even if they had "humanitarian" impulses and the president was a Democrat. They may talk a good game, about Darfur or some other situation, but I suspect they’d chicken out when the actual time came for action.
In fact, weren’t many liberals upset with the Clinton administration for intervening in Bosnia and Kosovo?
No, many
liberalsleftists (sorry for the modern partisan Democrat – there is nothing truly liberal about them any longer) were upset about Kosovo. They and the antique media even gave Clinton a pass when he said that they would be out by Christmas. They didn’t even get upset when so much of their infrastructure was destroyed making life hard on civilians. Clinton never consulted Congress or the UN for the action, but the left was fine with that too and defended it with the zeal of a defense attorney. When you have situational ethics as they do it makes it clear how they "justify" it.