I Don't Get It

[Brad DeLong]

>Brad DeLong wrote:
>
>>  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.

Yep. I think Zbigniew Brzezinski is a malevolent fuck too. So?


>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...

Isn't there something totally wacka-wacka about calling the Chinese 
attack on Vietnam part of the "U.S. reaction"?