The Red Line

Is it too much to ask that the U.S. point to a single success story before embarking on a new adventure in disruptive interventions in the Middle East? What is Obama’s model for this enterprise? Has anybody in this administration asked about five years from now, ten years from now, twenty years from now? Does Obama live in an echo chamber wherein his advisors seek advice from their adviser’s advisers? Does he ever hear from anyone with a genuinely dissenting view?

There is raging hypocrisy in all the blather right now coming from Obama and Hagel and Kerry on Syria: after doing nothing while 100,000 people have been killed and thousands more tortured and millions made refugees, now— now! — we cannot stand by anymore, because Assad has used chemical weapons. Now, our integrity is at stake. Now, the world wonders if we have any principles. Now, our hearts are wrung with compassion for the victims of violent, repressive governments.

I would love to ask Obama if he feels the allies fire-bombing of Dresden and Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, and other Japanese cities, using M47 oil gel bombs, during World War II crossed any kind of red line?

Now we support democracy in Egypt. Now we don’t.

Now would be a good time, in fact, for the United Nations to vigorously assert that no government has the right to slaughter or repress or abuse their own peoples, whether it be Zimbabwe, North Korea, China, or Iran. But that would be a dramatic change from the prevailing doctrine, which is, what happens in your country stays in your country. Ever since the world community decided, when it formed the United Nations (from the ashes of the failed “League of Nations”), that it was more important that all states be represented and have some investment in the world order than it was to insist that all of them be democracies, we have lived with this devil’s bargain: we will not interfere when you commit atrocities within your own borders. We will only interfere if you cross the border to commit atrocities.

In fairness, one could make a cogent argument for the idea that the UN has actually been effective in reducing the number of wars on the planet.  That’s no joke.  We are all appalled at Egypt and North Korea and Syria, but at least they are not at war with Israel or each other.  That is nothing to sneeze at.  In the 1960’s, there were numerous wars at any given time, with an appalling cost in human lives and material destruction.

What is needed at the moment in Syria is not more U.S. intervention, but a cease-fire.

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