The Neo-cons had a dream, to recreate the world as a liberal democracy, where everyone lived happily ever after, had a trust fund and went to an elite private school. It was nice, but a little unrealistic. The real tragedy of Iraq isn’t the BusHitler, HoWARd murder of 73 million Iragi babies to fund the profits of Haliburton, it’s that no-one will try it again any time soon, with a set of more modest, achievable objectives.

What they should have done is grab the top twenty regieme leaders, hung them from the top of whatever prominent public buildings were available, and installed some slightly less tainted general to run things, with a committee of advisors, and a warning that if we didn’t see a steady improvement in freedom and human rights that he’d be swinging up on the building. There are always more generals willing to become president. Maybe bring in democratic local governments and a long term timetable for regional and national democracy, with a bit of symbolic stuff so people were getting the idea.

And they could then repeat as necessary in Burma, Zimb, N. Korea… I bet they would only have had to roll two or three regiemes (say one every 6 months), and leak a list of their top twenty targets, and all that reform would start to happen by itself.

None of that is new. But I’m just not going to take people who condemmed the Iraq war as immoral calling for armed intervention somewhere else. Especially not in the same post. Iraq was stupid, incompetent even, but not immoral. Except obviously in the way of Governments using money stolen from the people to fund gigantic government programmes that inevitably go wrong and fail to provide value. But that’s a different argument.

And Kosovo? Go tell all the ethnically cleansed serbs and the now “liberated” general population what a shining sucess that war was. If we really wanted to help the people who live in those crappy mountain parts of the Balkans, we’d offer immigration to anyone who wanted to leave, then let the rest fight it out in there centuries long pointless feuds. Oh, wait, I think that already happened.

“Either there is a right to interfere in nations we dont agree with or there isnt. If there is, shut up about Americas stupid, empire derailing war in Iraq.”

You’re not one for nuance I take it. Obviously each case has to be assessed on its own merits. As to Iraq, you can agree that intervention was desirable while believing the execution of the intervention was abysmal.

Unfortunately both Zimbabwe and Burma are ethnically divided and any intervention could result in messy intercommunal strife like that between Kurds, Arab Sunni and Shia in Iraq. Mugabe bumped off up to 60,000 Ndebeles in the 1980s, for example, so revenge might be on the minds of those affected. http://www.slate.com/id/81386/

There is no point in intervening unless you have contingency plans for worst case scenarios like intercommunal “ethnic cleansing”. In short, intervention can be horrendously complicated but that doesn’t mean you should never do it.

Now, I’m not arguing in favour of the Iraq war, but surely you’re in bad faith with this whole post. You could see the problem – call for intervention, perhaps justify Iraq, – but couldn’t negotiate around it. That’s because it can’t be avoided.

Either there is a right to interfere in nations we don’t agree with or there isn’t. If there is, shut up about America’s stupid, empire derailing war in Iraq. If there isn’t, forget about the hellholes perpetrating atrocities – we don’t have a right to intervene. And for fuck sake, don’t quote Kosovo in favour of anything. Or at least not so unambiguously.

Really, this is the lowest watt post I’ve ever seen from you.

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Therein lies another topic, why we choose to entertain ourselves with news 24/7. Once rare occurrences, like baby snatching, become everyday occurrences via constant media attention.

Let’s get a few things straight

- despite all the cheating, etc, it’s clear that Mugabe still got 40% of the vote in Zimbabwe. What gives you the right to so high-handedly declare that a military intervention by the west has even a skerrick of legitimite argument in favour of
it? To what purpose? Do you think an interventionist force would be greeted with joy by grateful negroes? Or might they encounter just a smidgeon of opposition to another western invasion of Africa?

- Bosnia and Kosovo, yeah what a great success. In Kosovo, 3,000 deaths in the five years before bombing, and 10,000 in the weeks following the bombing. Same in Bosnia. Western game playing and positioning produced these crises.

- You sad intevention junkies staggering around, looking for the next place to project your virtues. Why not accept that people have to liberate themselves and that ‘intervention’ is more about your own superiority, rather than any genuine humanitarian concern