My pal Pete...

[Nathan Newman]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Justin Schwartz" <jkschw at hotmail.com>
>Nothing terribly sophisticated about it. My point is just that you can't
>trust the US to do right in international affairs. Even if you grant, as I
>do not, Nathan's idea that the US liberated Kosova instead of creating the
>conditions for a massacre, and grant, as I do not, that the US attack on
>Afghanistan led to overall positive results, the fact is that the rest of
>the US records of foreign intervention since 1898 has been, with the
>exception of WWII, unrelievedly bleak for the rest of the world. The US is
>an imperialist power that acts in its own narrow interestsa nd against
those
>of (mainly) the world's poor. So even if you think we could use a
benevolent
>world government, as Singer does, the US can't provide it. Even if it would
>be just for nonimperialist power to go around setting things rights, the US
>is not a nonimperialist power. It doesn't take Einstein to figure this out.

Which is a good reason to demand multilateral agreement on US interventions,
something that was true in Kosovo and largely in Afghanistan.

But the act remains-- re: my harping troops in Little Rock analogy -- that
government is inevitably based on elements or repression, by the nature of
the Leviathan compact that is government.   I don't buy the anarchist
utopianism of dispensing with it, so I prefer the checks and balances
structure to restrain its excesses to get its advantages.

For that reason, I oppose both mindless peaens to "self-determination" and
mindless hopes for US unilateralism.  Iraq is a good example of the latter
that needs to be opposed for that reason.

-- Nathan Newman