> I just don't get it. If last year (or the year before) the Iranian
> government, say, had decided to take out the Taliban and replace it
> with a less... extreme... government, everyone (or almost everyone)
> including me would have cheered, just as we cheered when the North
> Vietnamese took out Pol Pot and the rest of the Khmer Rouge.
.
If your point is that military interventions should be judged by their
merits and not by who is undertaking them, then your point is true and
should be obvious to everyone, including leftists.
But you seem to assume this is also the attitude of the US government. Take your example of the Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia. When you say "we" cheered it, you surely don't include the Carter Administration. Here's Chomsky on that episode:
"perhaps the most compelling example of [humanitarian intervention] is the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in December 1978, terminating Pol Pot's atrocities, which were then peaking. Vietnam pleaded the right of self-defense against armed attack, one of the few post-Charter examples when the plea is plausible: the Khmer Rouge regime (Democratic Kampuchea, DK) was carrying out murderous attacks against Vietnam in border areas. The U.S. reaction is instructive. The press condemned the "Prussians" of Asia for their outrageous violation of international law. They were harshly punished for the crime of having ended Pol Pot's slaughters, first by a (U.S.-backed) Chinese invasion, then by U.S. imposition of extremely harsh sanctions. The U.S. recognized the expelled DK as the official government of Cambodia, because of its "continuity" with the Pol Pot regime, the State Department explained. Not too subtly, the U.S. supported the Khmer Rouge in its continuing attacks in Cambodia. The example tells us more about the "custom and practice" that underlies "the emerging legal norms of humanitarian intervention."
Seth