"...when the United States has taken on the responsibility for the well-being of humanity, it has destroyed far more lives than it has saved." Like many liberals who are asked to explain why Syria will be a good war if Iraq was a bad one, Dexter Filkins in the New Yorker wrote, “This time it’s different… What can America do? It’s not unreasonable to ask whether even a well-intentioned American effort to save Syrians might fail, or whether such an effort might pull America into a terrible quagmire…. But how much longer are we going to allow those questions to prevent us from trying?” Even though Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post is aware that “History says don’t do it” and that “Most Americans say don’t do it,” he still insisted that “President Obama has to punish Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad‘s homicidal regime with a military strike — and hope that history and the people are wrong.”................. Because liberals are so often accused of being “soft” on communism, it is now largely forgotten that the Cold War was their war. Harry Truman invaded Korea “to win the world back to peace and Christianity” but was left with a stalemate, an implacably anti-American regime in North Korea, 37,000 American casualties, and an untold number of ordinary Koreans in graves. Similarly, John F. Kennedy followed through on his vow to uplift “those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery” by escalating the disastrous war in Vietnam. His successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, argued that his “Great Society” social welfare programs were consistent with the full-scale assault that he launched against Vietnamese communists, which resulted in the deaths of more than 58,000 Americans and an estimated 3 million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians. More recent progressive-led humanitarian interventions were smaller-scale but yielded similar results. Bill Clinton’s incursion into Somalia killed 18 American soldiers and hundreds of Somali militiamen and civilians, and brought no improvement to the world’s most misgoverned country. Likewise, NATO’s bombing of Kosovo left hundreds of civilians dead and gave the upper hand to the Kosovo Liberation Army — an organization described by Clinton’s own special envoy to the Balkans, Robert Gelbard, as “without any questions, a terrorist group” — which conducted its own campaign of ethnic cleansing after the war. History indeed says don’t do it. But as the recent talk on Syria shows, liberals are so committed to their self-imposed role as savior that they will do it anyway. Perhaps we need to save the world from saviors, instead. c4ss.org/content/21301
Posted on: Mon, 07 Oct 2013 09:53:27 +0000
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