OK, you put brackets on your opinion, which I appreciate. But, let me
explore it further. Was our intervention in Bosnia acceptable? Should we
have stopped the genocide in Rwanda? Our hands are full, but should
somebody stop what's going on in Sudan? What about my position. If
Hussein was sill killing people by the tens of thousands per year after we had a success in Afghanistan, and the sanctions were working no better,
would it have been justified?
The lack of preparation by the Bush administration clearly was a factor in my believing the war in Iraq was unwise. But, I don't think there is
anything inherently wrong with overturning a genocidal dictator.
I think the world needs a mechanism to deal with these crisis. This would obviously require the cooperation of many disparate nations and after the current debacle is more of a pipe dream than ever. What Bush has tried to do is to tell the world how things are going to be and I think that the lesson we are learning is that no matter how powerful we are, we're not going to get the Middle East or any other region of the world to tow the line based on our say so.
Our action in Bosnia was the culmination of a problem that had festered in eastern Europe for a decade or so. It wasn't just the 'cleansing' that was taking place at the time that prompted the action, but the fact that a series of atrocities had occurred over the years and it became obvious that the cycle of violence had to be ended.
Rwanda is probably the most persuasive argument for a policing mechanism. There is very little political interest in these poor African nations and just as importantly there is little interest in the press. The AIDS epidemic is a festering wound and our lack of decisiveness to combat it is going to come back to bite us. Big time. So yes, we should have taken action in Rwanda and I think that if Clinton had tried to he could have made a huge difference there. Its a black mark on his record, and no one knows it more than he does.
Iraq was (and remains) a much more difficult problem. In basing our economy around oil we have accorded an importance to the nations of the Middle East that they would never have achieved otherwise. One of Bush's big mistakes, IMO, was to reverse the trend towards trying to develop alternatives to the oil that fuels this exaggerated importance. You might recall a post that JDG made about how we are much less vulnerable to inflation as the result of a fuel shortage than we were in the late '70s, reason being we are _less_ dependant on that fuel. But with the emergence of China as a consumer nation and the maturing of other populous nations such as India, the demand for fossil fuels is rising quickly, and the importance of the Middle East - the relevance of the Middle East is rapidly rising.
What does this have to do with the invasion of Iraq? Everything. No matter how desperate the condition of the people in Iraq, any intervention there had to be approached with the utmost delicacy. Our motivations, even with the best of intentions, are automatically suspect by the Iraqis, by all Arab/Middle East nations and indeed by the entire world community. That's why it was even more important to line up an air-tight coalition prior to intervention for humanitarian purposes.
Of course, despite the smoke and mirrors thrown up by the supporters of the invasion after the fact, the stated reason for the invasion was not humanitarian in nature. So the question really goes back to did Iraq pose a threat to us and in retrospect, they did not.
-- Doug
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