[....]
> The most obvious question that we need to ask
> ourselves is whether the mission of America
> should really be to save other nations from their
> own, homegrown calamities? John Adams's stern
> admonition to the nation, more than two centuries
> ago -- that it was not the job of the U.S. to go out
> and fight monsters -- cannot and should not be
> dismissed lightly. It is one thing to protect the vital
> interests of the republic, whether economic or
> strategic, and quite another to commit ourselves
> to endless wars of altruism.
>
> For wars they will certainly be. Anyone who falls
> for the idea that deploying in Liberia is
> fundamentally risk-free or constitutes more an
> exercise in police work than an exercise in
> war-making has not understood the lessons of
> the 1990s in such supposed "peacekeeping"
> deployments as Somalia, Bosnia or Kosovo.
> Somalia went badly wrong and Bosnia and Kosovo
> went right, but the chastening lesson is the
> same: to intervene on humanitarian grounds is
> to go to war and, more important still, to conquer
> or -- to put the matter yet more starkly -- to
> colonize.
"We must be aware of the dangers which lie in our most generous wishes. Some paradox of our nature leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion."
-- Lionel Trilling
> Humanitarian missions take place when there has
> been an earthquake or a flood. But modern famines
> like the one that impelled President Bush to act in
> 1992 in Somalia are not natural disasters. Rather,
> they are the byproduct of civil wars and massive
> state failure. To deploy U.S. forces to mitigate them
> is, whether we like it or not, to take sides in the
> political struggle that caused them in the first place.
Sounds like Zizek.
-- Shane
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