Aye Capn wrote:@Usenko:
You do always try to be fair. I think you're way off base thinking we wouldn't have made Rwanda better -- we're not that incompetent that we can't consistently do better than genocide. I would enter into evidence the fact that we've never intervened in a way that has caused genocide, and if we'd stayed in Vietnam we may well have stopped the Khmer Rouge from killing so many in Cambodia.
Libya is also a fairly simple problem: the military is slaughtering protesting civilians. That's the sort of problem we're good at solving.
The whole world excoriated us -- and President Clinton even apologized -- for not intervening in Rwanda. If we're not capable of stopping a genocide without making things worse then we have a ready excuse for the next mass slaughter. What if it's your country that encounters a genocidal upheaval? Do you still want us sitting on our hands claiming we'd only make it worse if we tried to stop the killing?
I'm not an interventionist because I believe America has some special responsibility to the world. Every country has a duty to safeguard its citizens and protect their interests, and that duty is compromised by some larger mission to save the world.
However, intervention in Libya could yield huge dividends if America gets credit for stopping the slaughter and bringing democracy. Rwanda had we intervened wouldn't matter to us economically or politically for the next hundred years. Libya, on the other hand, has oil, and that makes them important, not because we want the oil but because oil makes them wealthy and wealth makes countries powerful. A democratic Libya that owes its freedom to us could make them as strong an ally as Poland.
I believe in intervention where we have a realistic chance of getting something back. Rwanda we could've had on the cheap, and maybe in a hundred years we'd get something back, so maybe we should've gone in. "We'd only have made it worse," is a silly reason not to go. Nothing in our recent history suggests American intervention is worse than genocide.
I'm wary of putting words into anybody's mouth, and Usenko is at the top of the list of the people I am wary of doing so for. Mainly because he is more than eloquent enough on his own
.
I suspect he was talking to much the same that you are Aye Capn - limited realpolitik upside, and much realpolitical downside (the spelling difference is deliberate). The global jaundice, about the US, that sets in is because of the percieved double standards:-
* intervene when it's in our interest - the Gulf, regime change, protect the Marsh Arabs, or not etc, and don't intervene when there's no perception of upside for the US vis Rwanda
Picking and choosing your intraventionist outrage is only going to lead to more cynicism.
I am cynical enough to see that it isn't always straightforward, and old enough enough to know that there isn't always a "right" decision. But that is
not how the US is perceived by the disenfranchised of the world.
The disenfranchised of the world see the US through a prism of its cultural exports, combined with the restrictions of their current existance, and merged with the hard realities of what does happen on the ground, and what is reported.
Why isn't Tom Cruise coming to rescue them? Preferably with a sexually licentious Cameron Diaz riding side-sadle?
Instead their family is blown up by a Predator firing a Hellfire missile.
That's what you do right?
I can't breathe.
- George Floyd, 25th May 2020
