In other words: liberals like to say they care about genocide, but they obviously don't, because they want to leave Iraq, which stands poised at the brink of genocide (or maybe doesn't, he isn't sure) thanks to the efforts of Jonah Goldberg et alia.
Goldberg is a little like a hostage-taker who, when seized after a ten-hour standoff, wants everyone to know that the hostage negotiator's arguments were really intellectually inferior to his own.
And I'm sorry, but whatever you think of the Kosovo intervention, Iraq makes Kosovo look like we gave everyone in Serbia ice cream and then flew them to heaven in a private jet.
Now, I recall the "what about Kosovo, you meddling liberals" argument from as far back as fall 2002, so in this instance, aside from his usual intellectual laziness and dishonesty, DoughBob is also guilty of either recycling an old hack argument, or pulling a "new" one out of his cornhole, brushing off the cheez-doodle remnants and claiming it for his own, a good five years after better (if more anonymous) minds had already thoroughly discredited it, either by responding to the obvious logical flaws or simply having the nerve to use it.
For the record, I thought that the Kosovo intervention originated from flawed premises to begin with -- much of the rump Serbian fascism in play in that province specifically was the result of UCK (KLA) instigation. Since then, obviously Milosevic' vile designs have been thwarted, but at the expense of apparently turning the area into a distribution point for heroin and prostitution. Still, the aim of preventing more Srebrenicas, or allowing the situation to devolve into a full-fledged Rwanda was accomplished. Unlike Goldberg and his ilk, I can admit when I'm wrong.
And I can even join with the usual U.N.-bashers to a certain extent, when it comes to the subject of humanitarian interventions. Rwanda, Srebrenica, Kosovo, and now Darfur, all got out of hand because of lack of collective resolution in the matter, which is supposed to be what the U.N. is for. Darfur really picked up steam while Sudan gained infamous entry into the U.N. Human Rights Commission. How'd that work out, anyway?
What Goldberg needs to get through his thick skull is that we're not avoiding Darfur because of Iraq (well, actually it is partly because of Iraq), or even because of U.N. dithering. It's because of China, which now has lucrative oil deals signed with the Sudanese kleptocracy, and are not about to allow anything to adversely affect it. Sudan is also, as one of Roy's commenters points out, the world's largest supplier of gum arabic, which is found in all sorts of commercial goods.
But for Pantload to indulge in this preening, ignorant broad-brush of "liberal" do-gooderism (even though it's been primarily evangelical Christian groups which have had the most direct lobbying access on the issue) tells you everything you need to know about where his head is at. Rather than engage in even a moment of self-reflection, in his show of searching for absolution, it's much easier to set up an army of straw men, and light 'em up.
We don't do humanitarian interventions, and indeed, most conservatarian commenters during Kosovo opined that that was a good thing. Kosovo was the exception to the rule because of its strategic proximity to the rest of Europe, it was doable, and Clinton, feeling guilty about Rwanda, was unwilling to take that chance again. And aside from the heroin and human trafficking, it's worked out well.
But let's cut the bullshit, shall we? Even if we had never invaded Iraq -- indeed, even if Saddam had died in the interim and been replaced by happy elves and ponies who immediately turned Iraq into a desert Switzerland -- there would have always been another excuse not to do anything about Darfur, and the larger measure of it would have revolved around the sort of sneering contempt for humanitarian politics that only a sinecured cubicle rat could conjure up.
Goldberg doesn't want to hear it anymore from libruls, if they're not going to endorse the grand anti-genocide pony plan currently in surge mode, but he didn't want to hear it in the first place. That he seems to think no one realizes this is unintentionally hilarious. He should stick to trying to find yet another snappy subtitle for his upcoming opus.
[Update: I was also recently reminded of how some folks attempt to shallowly conjure rough ratios, to find comparative valuations of American troops versus Iraqi civilians. Apparently the low-ball figure is about 1:1000 these days, possibly more since the Iraqis are evidently not interested enough in rebuilding from what all we've done for them.
But let's run that grotesque moral calculus to its natural corollary. If we use the "low-ball" figure of an American soldier being "worth" 1000 Iraqis, then conversely we can extrapolate the current American casualty count of 3,645 to roughly 13.5% of the pre-war population of Iraq. Small potatoes! Factoring in the wounded (26,558 at last count) to dead or wounded Iraqis would complicate things further by comparing severity of wounds, I suppose. But that's why they put formulas in spreadsheets.
It's a fool's errand to take something so monstrous all the way to its logical extreme, but it's still important to recognize the objective implications here. It seems also to be a necessity, not unlike blaming straw-man libruls for everything, among the would-be brute exterminators, since victory is no longer an option, and anything else is past their level of honesty.
And glib metaphors constructed primarily to highlight librul hypocrisies about the equality of life ("if your child and a stranger were both in a burning house, which would you save") illustrate very little, since they purposefully neglect to mention one's involvement in setting the house on fire, and then sanctimoniously lecturing the neighbors about fire safety with a series of sloppy lies. Even for cheap sophistry it's incompetent.]
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