| Submit your comments on this article |
| Home Front |
| Liberal Democrats’ Perverse Foreign Policy |
| 2003-07-11 |
| By Charles Krauthammer - Washington Post - Friday, July 11, 2003; EFL He really hits the nail on the head on this one. It was the left that led the opposition to war in Iraq. Now it is the left that is most strenuous in urging intervention in Liberia. Curious. No blood for oil, it seems, but blood for Liberia. And let us not automatically assume that Liberia will be an immaculate intervention. But Liberia has three warring parties, tons of guns and legions of desperate fighters. Yet pressure is inexorably building to send American troops to enforce a peace. There are the usual suspects, Jesse Jackson and the New York Times, but the most unapologetic proponent of the no-Iraq/yes-Liberia school is Howard Dean, Democratic flavor of the month. [I love that line.] "I opposed the war in Iraq because it was the wrong war at the wrong time," says Dean, but "military intervention in Liberia represents an appropriate use of American power." [What a bunch of crap. This is the leading light for the Democrats?] What is it that makes liberals such as Dean, preening their humanitarianism, so antiwar in Iraq and so pro-intervention in Liberia? The same question could be asked of the Democratic Party, which in the 1990s opposed the Persian Gulf War but overwhelmingly supported humanitarian interventions in places such as Haiti and Kosovo. They all had a claim on the American conscience. What then was the real difference between, say, Haiti and Gulf War I, and between Liberia and Gulf War II? The Persian Gulf has deep strategic significance for the United States; Haiti and Liberia do not. In both gulf wars, critical American national interests were being defended and advanced. Yet it is precisely these interventions that liberals opposed. The only conclusion one can draw is that for liberal Democrats, America’s strategic interests are not just an irrelevance, but also a deterrent to intervention. This is a perversity born of moral vanity. For liberals, foreign policy is social work. National interest -- i.e., national selfishness -- is a taint. The only justified interventions, therefore, are those that are morally pristine, namely, those that are uncorrupted by any suggestion of national interest. Hence the central axiom of left-liberal foreign policy: The use of American force is always wrong, unless deployed in a region of no strategic significance to the United States. The guys from Powerline quibble slightly with this axiom. To wit: "Actually, I think that this statement of the central axiom of left-lilberal foreign policy and the pure essence of the Clinton Doctrine needs to be refined slightly. It is: "The use of American force is always wrong unless it is deployed for a purpose that bears no relationship to the national interest of the United States." http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/003941.php This is the core lunacy of Democratic foreign policy. Either it has no criteria for intervening militarily -- after all, if we’re going into Liberia, on what grounds are we not going into Congo? -- or it has a criterion, and its logic is that the U.S. Army is a missionary service rather than a defender of U.S. interests. What should be our criteria for military intervention? The answer is simple: strategic and moral necessity. Foreign policy is not social work. Acting for purely humanitarian reasons is wanton and self-indulgent. You don’t send U.S. soldiers to die to assuage troubled consciences at home. Their lives should be risked only in defense of their country. Should we then do nothing elsewhere? In principle, we should help others by economic and diplomatic means and with appropriate relief agencies. Regarding Liberia, it is rather odd for the Europeans, who rail against U.S. arrogance, to claim that all the armies of France and Germany, of Europe and Africa, are powerless in the face of Charles Taylor -- unless the Americans ride to the rescue. America will share the burden with them if they share the burden with us where we need it. And that means peacekeepers in Iraq. The world cannot stand by watching us bleed in Iraq, and then expect us to bleed for it in Liberia. |
| Posted by:ColoradoConservative |
| #3 JFM - LOL at your comments. Carl - I disagree. Partisan orientation only partially explains the left's motives. The underlying premise of its/their actions is as Krauthammer describes. |
| Posted by: ColoradoConservative 2003-7-11 2:00:11 PM |
| #2 I am a fan of the Kraut Hammer, but I have to disagree: the main grounds for the opposition of the "left-liberal" and "liberal Democrat" to the Persian Gulf War and their support of the later Kosovo/Haiti interventions, is due to the fact that Bush was Republican and Clinton was a Democrat. IMO, supporting US foreign policy according to party affiliation of the administration is still lunatic, but... |
| Posted by: Carl in NH 2003-7-11 12:51:49 PM |
| #1 I know this firsthand from going to law school in the lefty enclave of Boulder, Colorado. Very distressing. I was hopin' to move to CO sometime in the near future (not Boulder though). Of course, I can't imagine it would be worse than being here in CA... |
| Posted by: Bomb-a-rama 2003-7-11 11:24:14 AM |