> Of course the one crucial thing we will not be able to verify is what
> might have happened without the UNSC intervention. So maybe this
> exercise won’t really help…
Indeed. All these instrumental arguments turn on hypotheticals: how many people will be killed if "we" do X or not. But of course we have no way of knowing these numbers. What we *do* know is what the Empire does whenever it gets a foot in the door.
It's amazing how many political arguments turn on confident statements about what "would" happen in such-and-such a scenario. You'd think we all had crystal balls.
Then of course there's the laughable conceit of imagining that we Lefties have any responsibility to carefully calibrate the degree of our anti-imperialism based on the precise details of the situation in whatever hapless land is currently in the humanitarian crosshairs. Our carefully-calibrated policy recommendations to NATO and the White House will have absolutely no effect at all. But a resolute and uncompromised anti-imperial stance might actually stand a chance of changing a few peoples' minds.
Sorry to restate what I take to have been Ravi's Swiftian point at such humorless and pedantic length.
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Michael J. Smith mjs at smithbowen.net
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