>They are our enemies, comrades. They must go.
> DP
-Hear, hear. But does anyone seriously disagree with this? If the U.S. were -simply seeking to rid the world of Al Qaeda, rather than preparing to -overthrow whole governments with no proven ties to AQ, and to slaughter -thousands more innocents, I'd like to think no leftists would seriously -object. Am I overestimating us?
But here is the problem-- too much of leftist argument is based on a slippery slope argument; if we support intervention to protect the slaughter of Kosovar Albanians or to intervene in Afghanistan, then that means we have allied with the base motives of the military-industrial complex that supports intervention for their own purposes.
But here's the rub-- imperial power is not always and inevitably seeking evil, for the basic reason that misery and chaos are occasionally bad for business. So while the thrust of intervention may, unchecked and in toto, support global oppression, that doesn't mean that each intervention will be for bad purposes. And it doesn't mean that supporting one intervention commits us to support the next.
I hold to the analogy of troops at Little Rock-- police and military intervention in our neighborhoods is usually a bad thing, and motives even at Little Rock had as much to do with Cold War competition with Russia as seeking any racial justice in the abstract. But intervene they did and for the right side.
So the Left (other than the principled pacifists) should be able to analyze the morality of individual interventions and act accordingly. My personal analysis came down with Kosovo as almost completely justified and having overwhelmingly positive results, Afghanistan as problematic for putting in power the Northern Alliance goons as a maybe improvement in short-term but possibly another disaster in the long-term, and intervention in Iraq as likely a debacle of extraordinary proportions. But all of those can and should be debated; but the knee-jerk dismissal of anyone who supports intervention on moral grounds should be ended.
-- Nathan Newman