Posted on 08/29/2005 9:54:32 PM PDT by goldstategop
Nice.
I use that at times, but put that way, it that really puts it in a way that should put any thinking person on their heels.
That's pretty much been my response, but you word it much better.
Come now, CO. That's not fair. It's not that the left was completely indifferent to the murder of 25 percent of the entire population of Cambodia (and the murder of thousands more, the internment of hundreds of thousands more, and the enslavement or dispossession of millions more in South Vietnam).
The lives and freedom of millions of black, brown and yellow "little people" is certainly a priority for them. It's just that it's a much lower priority than humiliating America and foiling it's foreign policy. Or impeaching the president. Or building the socialist utopia. Or protecting "sovereign" dictators from wars of liberation waged by liberal democracies. Or saving the whales. Or publicly funding the immersion of crucifixes in urine. Or scoring a bitch'n pair of birkentocks. Or hooking up with some "chronic" for this weekend's drum circle...
Interstingly, during the Kosovo crisis, leftists were making the same pro-intervention arguments that current conservatives on free republic are making for the Iraq war. At the same time, antiwar conservatives on free republic (during the "mission" much less) were making the same anti-interventionist arguments as current antiwar leftists. Knee jerk partisanship trumps principles on both sides I guess.
You hit one of my "buttons" with that comment. I was pro-intervention wrt Kosovo, but I was pretty damn bitter about it. I felt like Milosevic could have been defeated early and decisively (and probably repudiated by his own constituency) without any intervention at all if it hadn't been for the stupid arms embargo the EU slapped on the Balkans, and which the U.S. went along with. (And, yes, I complained about the arms embargo even under Bush I.)
When you have people willing to defend themselves, give them the means to do so and you won't need to intervene. Lifting the embargo would have had the added benefit of obviating the need for Bosnian Muslims to turn to Jihadists for aid and arms -- the effects of which I fear we have yet to fully experience. (I don't think they would have done so given alternatives. Muslims in the Balkans were traditionally suspicious of Muslim radicals because they correctly viewed their ideology as a means of exporting and imposing Arabist cultural hegemony.) A good, decisive ass-kicking administered early to Milosevic and other hypernationalist Serbians (such as they eventually received in Croatia) might also have discredited the policies that lead to the fracturing of Yugoslavia.
As usual the peace and disarmament crowd only made things worse by reducing the costs to land-grabbing regional bullies, drawing out the fighting years longer than it should have taken, and eliminating the clarity of decisive resolutions. The result is that we still have thousands of soldiers there on babysitting duty (and likely will have long after Iraq is handling its own security).
BTW, that's not my recollection. Generally speaking it was liberals as opposed to leftists (i.e. the center-left versus the hard-left) who tended to argue for intervention. I remember the hard-left as being strongly opposed to any American intervention in the Balkans. Ramsey Clark volunteered to defend Milosevic just like he did Saddam, and the ANSWER crowd generally were likewise Milosevic supporters. (Remember that Milosevic is a communist.)
I admire anyone who can talk to a moonbat long enough to try to get some sense out of them. I gave up long ago.
Answer: "Do you advocate that as a general principle, that if one can't do everything one shouldn't do anything?"
Are you saying that the majority of conservatives in the Senate (as well as Hannity and Limbaught) who voted against bombing (e.g. opposed the "mission" while are troops were in action) were pro-Communist?
I agree about the embargo but am skeptical that it would have led to a better result in the end. Had Misolovic been defeated earlier, I suspect that the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Kosovo (one of the great ignored crimes of the last decade) would have even been more brutal. The trouble is that there are no easy answers, and unintended consequences are par for the course.
"Do you advocate that as a general principle, that if one can't do everything one shouldn't do anything?"
Going after NKorea would be not doing anything?
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