Best of the Web Today: Is 'Liberal Interventionism' Dead?

Wall Street Journal ^ | April 24, 2009 | James Taranto

[slowhandluke]

Yesterday Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, delivered an important speech in Chicago. As Oliver Kamm of London's Times notes, it was a follow-up to a speech 10 years ago, also in Chicago, in which Blair, as Kamm puts it, "rightly perceived that rogue states posed a threat to civilised values and regional stability" and, in Blair's own words, "set out what I described as a doctrine of international community that sought to justify intervention."

When Blair spoke in 1999, Saddam Hussein still held power in Iraq and Slobodan Milosevic ruled what was left of Yugoslavia. The end of Saddam's dictatorship was four years away, but NATO was already acting to liberate Kosovo from Milosevic's domination. The Kosovo operation proceeded fairly smoothly, but the liberation of Iraq turned out to be more complicated. That, combined with distaste or hatred for George W. Bush, caused many liberals to lose their nerve and abandon the idea of intervention on behalf of human rights.

Not Blair. He acknowledges a mistake, in that in 1999 "I thought that removal of a despotic regime was almost sufficient in itself to create the conditions for progress." Nonetheless, he says, "I still believe that those who oppress and brutalise their citizens are better put out of power than kept in."

...

Obama's bitterest opponents see him as actively hostile to American ideals and interests, à la former president Jimmy Carter. A more plausible worry is that the president is naive and egotistical [ed.] enough to believe that his own luminous personality is sufficient to solve the world's problems.

[slowhandluke]

It seems that Mr Taranto is naive enough to believe that Mr Obama never meant what he said in all his statements that were actively hostile to American ideals and interests, and that he never listened to his Alinskyite professors, or Bill Ayers, or Rev Wright.

When everybody you associate with is very actively hostile to American ideals and interests, it's a good bet you are too.

The person being naive here is Mr Taranto, and Mr Obama is depending on the naivety of such as Mr Taranto to give him cover while he does his 100-days rush to socialism.

[arthurus]

Liberal interventionism is certainly not dead. It will go after a different set of targets, though. Remember Serbia? How about invasion and occupation of Israel?