Isolation and Intervention (plus those damn pacifists!)

I’m happy to see that the rebels in Libya are on the cusp of overthrowing Gadhafi. With a little help from NATO, the rebels have turned the tide in this revolution. I would be talking about how Republicans are taking this time to criticize Obama for being on vacation, even though Congress is on a month long vacation, but that has been done so well by CNN.

 

 

When posting that story to Facebook, I got a response; “we shoulda never been part of it to start with let them fight their own damn fight”. Lack of punctuation aside, I responded, “I’m glad Spain and France didn’t think that way in 1779…”, referring to their intervention in our war for Independence, which helped us out dearly.

 

 

Isolationists bother me so much. I’m not a full blown interventionalist hawk either. I feel that we need a good balance between the two.

 

 

I am a big critic of Cold War era foreign policy. I hate knowing that we helped overthrow democratically elected leaders (like in Iran in the 1950s) and installed autocratic rulers, just because someone was too far left and was about to nationalize some industry. Or we found ourselves in a war without really understanding why we were there (Vietnam). And of course we just love being bi-polar and buddying up with a country one day, then invading them the next (Panama, Iraq). We should’ve kept our noses to ourselves.

 

 

I am also a critic of 1930s era isolationism. Americans didn’t know they were or didn’t want to be a major world power with events happening overseas impacting them daily. We thought the problems of Europe and Asia were none of our business. No matter how much we wanted to avoid the wars, we were still forced into them. I can't believe that the same people who boast how powerful America is can't see that we have a lot of power in the world and that we should use it for good. We can't isolate ourselves from an interconnected community and still expect to be dominate in the world (ask China how well that worked out from 1450 to 1830).

 

 

So, what is the happy medium?

 

 

The US needs to pick and choose the right time to intervene. It should not be an all-or-nothing game in which we either never intervene or always intervene. Afghanistan was harboring/run by Al Qaeda/the Taliban. We needed to directly invade and remove them from the nation and disrupt their terrorist operations. All but the most non-violent pacifists supported intervening in Afghanistan (I’ll get to pacifists in a minute).

 

 

Then we thought Iraq was a threat and needed to go. They weren’t directly threatening us, and they had no weapons of mass destruction (as we can see in hindsight). It divided us to say the least. All that unity after 9/11 and world sympathy for the US…gone. (Iran denounced the attacks, probably because they thought the attacks were done by the Jews…)

 

 

Compared to the last two interventions, Libya was very small. Even not compared to Iraq and Afghanistan it was small. There were more boots on the ground in Pakistan taking out Bin Laden than there are in Libya. This was a NATO led air mission in which we contributed very little.

 

 

And who are we supporting? People who are trying to get rid of a dictator and set up a more democratic government. These aren’t the Contras in Nicaragua. They are like the people in Egypt and Tunisia who were able to peacefully overthrow their undemocratic leaders. Mark Twain supported the war in Cuba in 1898 because he thought fighting for the independence of another nation was a noble cause. He was bitterly opposed to the Philippine-American War in 1899-1902 as it was suppressing the independence movement of the country.

 

 

I think Libya was a noble cause. We are helping people overthrow a dictator and (hopefully) establish a democratic government. It was easily done with International support and NATO that allowed the US to have a very small role, thus minimizing the risks to our nation. If only supporting these movements could always be this easy.

 

Now on to the pacifists. You would think it would be hard to detest someone who hates war and only wants peace. It isn’t. These people are so far out of reality it’s mind boggling. I think we can agree that almost everyone wants peace and that war should be avoided. But there is that group of people who do not want peace, and they will always create wars.

 

 

What disgusts me the most about pacifists is that they are so anti-war/violence that they will allow someone like Gadhafi to kill and injure his own people protesting peacefully. They come to the defense of a butcher and act is if he wasn’t so bad and that the west is the REAL criminal. The west and specifically the US love killing innocent people because it gives us a hard-on. Accidentally killing five people in a missile strike is MUCH worse than a dictator killing 10,000 of his own people when they asked for basic human rights.

 

 

War is a necessary evil. Violence and Revolution are the last means for a group of people trying to resist oppression. I can’t believe “pacifists” could side with a dictator and slander the rebels.

 

 

I’m wondering if these are real “pacifists” or they are just anti-westerners/Gadhafi supporters. Maybe my anger is misdirected. Probably.

On to the real pacifists. I guess part of my criticisms in the second paragraph hold up; using violence to stop a man using violence to suppress peaceful protestors is wrong. Being non-violent means allowing the violent person to keep committing violence unfettered. But it always bothered me to hear protestors ask “how is killing innocent children going to solve this” as if the whole reason we are going to fight is to kill children. We’re not, but unfortunately that happens in war. I don’t like seeing innocent people die either and I wish that never has to happen, but it will happen (maybe if those people didn’t intentionally put a bomb factory or anti-air guns next to a school or hospital…). As long as we try to minimize it, I can sleep at night. Sometimes a war is necessary and we take no pleasure having to take innocent life. But violence was the only way to get Hitler to stop.