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Barry’s BlueSky- Untitled May 18, 2024The Biggest Crisis A #PoliCartoon by me and Becky Hawkins.
- Untitled May 17, 2024#PoliCartoon: Fat Patients, Fat Patience #FatAcceptance
- Untitled May 17, 2024Thinking of that time that Degas painted the actress Ellen Andree sitting and looking pensive in a cafe, and Monet saw Degas' painting and decided to find the same actress and get her to pose in the same cafe so he could do his own version.
- Untitled May 17, 2024Copyright claims often go too far, crushing free speech and not allowing for the way artists are influenced by, repurpose, and even coincidentally echo, other art. Not this time, though! Jeff Dieschburg is a straight-up tracer who adds NOTHING original when he paints his copies of photos. [contains quote post or other embedded content]
- Untitled May 17, 2024#PoliCartoon: Defending Free Speech
- Untitled May 16, 2024The Existence of Trains Debate #PoliCartoon #Climate #ClimateChange #GlobalWarming
- Untitled May 18, 2024
Oh, I’d missed that one. Very cute.
Sure, there’s some lack of candor regarding when the US (or NATO, or…) opts to intervene. But the fact that the US does not opt to intervene in every problem does not lead me to conclude that interventions are bad. After all, I don’t choose to give to every worthy cause; that does not lead me to conclude that charity is a sham.
As we discussed the last time this issue arose, the larger problems were these:
1. Is it government’s role to engage in charity (unrelated to national interest)?
2. If government is going to engage in this kind of charity, does government have a duty to articulate principled reasons for distinguishing among objects of charity?
3. What is the most efficient use of charitable resources?
Yep – the US only looks out for its own interests. It’s a selfish nation, like any other.
However, I do get the feeling that they didn’t want to get involved in this. The UK and France did for some reason, but from what I understand the US is reluctantly involved, and for weeks dithered and tried to avoid a military solution, before bad PR and pressure from its allies made it intervene temporarily (see how quickly they’re trying to dump this on NATO and get the hell out of there).
For you see, the situation in Libya BEFORE the uprisings benefited the US and its companies. Gaddafi was a former enemy, but ever since 2003, when he agreed to stop his WMD program (which might not have even existed in reality), the UK and the US was his friend. He traded oil to US companies. It’s a bit much to say that the US is bombing him because he’s their enemy – he wasn’t for over 7 years.
France got in on this because Sarkozy is facing a humiliating defeat and what better what to stir up nationalist feelings than bombing people, eh!? And the UK Coalition government is getting involved because it wants to show the UK public that it isn’t like Labor, who helped turn over that “dying” terrorist (who is alive and well, strange how terminal pancreatic cancer can suddenly disappear, eh?). Also, the UK wants to distance itself from the fact that it sold them a boat-load of weapons.
So, in my opinion, the US didn’t want to get involved, and the UK and France are doing so for selfish reasons. Yep, all countries and nations and peoples are bastards. Not just the West – China and Russia gave a lot of weapons to Libya. Venezuela and many Latin American countries with important economic ties to Libya are clamouring over themselves to denounce the West’s action against their friend (a murderous, tyrannical friend, but the supposedly loveable, cuddly, pro-human rights Hugo Chavez isn’t picky about that sort of stuff now is he?). Germany tried like hell to have NOTHING to do with this. Other Arab leaders (who are despots themselves) are crying foul (no doubt thinking “what if it’s us next?”)
So no matter what side of the fence you stand on (anti-intervention, pro-intervention), you’ll find yourself in the company of world leaders who take up that decision purely based on selfish interests.
My intention is not defend the US (who “strangely” do nothing about Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the corrupt Afghan President, North Korea, China or any other freedom-deprived areas), but to point out that EVERY country is selfish, and that those who cry against intervention might have just as much blood on their hands.
In real life, things are complicated. There are arguments for both sides, and there is no “black/white” way of looking at this. Intervention might result in a bloody-stalemate and a long, protracted civil war in which Libya’s infrastructure (previously among the best of all African nation states) slowly degrades and the whole thing ends up like Somalia. But without Intervention – well, I wouldn’t want to be a young girl in Benghazi when Gaddafi’s forces overrun the poorly trained resistance (that was on the verge of collapse before the west intervened).
Any ideas about what a good foreign policy would look like?
Oh, that’s an easy one: no.
Peter Beinart:
“There are plenty of smart objections to America’s Libya intervention. But when President Obama addresses the nation on Monday night, he should rebut the stupidest one: that America shouldn’t wage humanitarian war in Libya because we’re not doing so in Congo, Zimbabwe and every other nasty dictatorship on earth.
“The consistency argument, it’s important to understand, has nothing to do with Congo and Zimbabwe. Most of the people who invoke those ill-fated countries showed no interest in them before the Libya debate and will go back to ignoring them once Libya is off the front page. Ask someone who demands moral consistency in humanitarian war how exactly they propose to intervene in Congo and you will quickly realize that the call for moral consistency is actually a call for immoral consistency. The point of invoking the horrors of Congo is not to convince the US to act to stop the horrors of Congo; it is to ensure that, out of respect for the raped, murdered and maimed in Central Africa, we allow innocents to be raped, murdered and maimed in North Africa as well. The Congolese, presumably, will find it comforting to know that the great powers are as just as indifferent to savagery in other lands as they are to the savagery in theirs.
“There is a serious argument against humanitarian intervention. It starts with the belief that international affairs is by nature tragic. Terrible things happen in distant societies but we do not really understand them, and so our efforts at amelioration either prove futile or actually make things worse. We think that because our motives are pure we can violate the norms of sovereignty that we guard jealously when it comes to our own affairs, but in so doing we open—or reopen—the door to a predatory imperialism that can do even greater harm. And finally, by spending money on distant lands we bankrupt our own.
“What unites these arguments is a belief that foreign policy must be Hippocratic: First, do no harm. But the advocates of moral consistency cannot stomach this moral minimalism so they cloak it in moral maximalism: Rather than arguing against humanitarian war anywhere, they argue for it everywhere, which is a less honest way of saying the same thing.”
Wrong.
31-42 in particular.
Holy crap, was that guy president or Chairman of the Federal Reserve?
Maybe he has good ideas, but it’s damned hard to tell – and I have the benefit of having the printed text. Did people really speak like that? It must have been a leisurely age, if people had the time to draft every public pronouncement in code, and then to decipher everyone else’s pronouncements.
“The period for a giving notice of topics of utmost urgency now being upon us, that time having now arrived, I pray your thoughts be employed toward that common endeavor that concerns us all. I speak *cough* as you will no doubt know *cough* of the current conflagration that does now, even as I address you*cough, cough* consume the very structure in which we now discourse. I beg you to do me the justice to be assured that this is no trifling matter. [Wipe sweat from brow] Pray bend your thoughts toward the project of securing an egress from the said structure ere its collapse, lest the cascading beams*cough* excessive temperature *cough, gasp, cough* and oxygen-depleted air deprive us of *gasp* even the barest of necessities required for the sustenance of life itself….”
It was truly a florid age, wasn’t it?
Although in practice if he had been making a speech to the common folk he would have adjusted his language use. Despite the name, Washington’s Farewell Address was never delivered verbally; it was intended to be read (and primarily by an educated elite) and was distributed via the newspapers of the day.