Feeding the Beast

Leaving his digs at TPM, Josh Marshall has a post today at The Washington Monthly that is worth reading.

But I take issue with this:

When Baghdad finally fell, reaction in the Arab world took many forms, each intense and ambiguous. But one unmistakable variety was a sort of chagrin over the fact that it had taken the tanks of a Western power to rid Iraq of what was an unmistakably hideous regime. Antiwar liberals, if they were frank with themselves, couldn't help but feel a parallel moral unease. As much as President Bush had acted as a bully on the international stage, as much as the lead-up to war had been destructive, clumsy, and dishonest, by early April the war he started had brought down a regime of death squads and secret police, foreign aggression, and internal oppression. Those are things liberals are supposed to oppose, and usually do. Yet those who opposed Bush's war--even with good reason--had to concede that their preferred course would have left the torture chambers running indefinitely.

There is nothing stated here to argue with, except the logical consequences of the position!

Shall we invade Darfur? Genocide is happening there every day while the entire world stands by silently.

How about Zimbabwe? Certainly Mugabe’s brutality towards his own people is no less heinous than Sadam’s was.

So why Iraq? If the United States is going to set itself up as the moral police in the world, why make Iraq our first example? The Republicans had hissy fits when Clinton finally – belatedly – decided to act in Yugoslavia…. So why the sudden urge to become the world’s primary defender of human rights?

Oh, that’s right, the oil.

Every time a liberal writer “admits” that if leftists had their way Saddam Hussein would still be in power they feed the distortion machine of the right – leaving us all in peril.

Either the US is taking on the role of the world’s policeman – fighting war after war in countries that most American citizens can’t find on the map – or we join the world of realpolitic and intervene only when we must.

None of the abuses of the Hussein regime in Iraq ever rose to the level we have all read about in our newspapers happening every day in Darfur. If the US was going to play policeman of the world’s morality – why not there?

Oh, that’s right, they had no oil.