THE DEMOCRATIC DERANGEMENT CONT. CONT.

Liberal Democrats' Perverse Foreign Policy (CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, July 10, 2003, Washington Post)

In terms of brutality, systematic repression, number of killings, relish for torture, sum total of human misery caused, Charles Taylor is a piker next to Saddam Hussein. That is not to say that Charles Taylor is a better man. It is only to say that in his tiny corner of the world with no oil resources and no scientific infrastructure for developing instruments of mass murder, Taylor has neither the reach nor the power to wreak Saddam-class havoc. What is it that makes liberals like Dean, preening their humanitarianism, so antiwar in Iraq and so pro-intervention in Liberia?

The same question could be asked of the Democratic Party, which in the 1990s opposed the Persian Gulf War but overwhelmingly supported humanitarian interventions in places like Haiti and Kosovo.

They all had a claim on the American conscience. What then was the real difference between, say, Haiti and Gulf War I, and between Liberia and Gulf War II? The Persian Gulf has deep strategic significance for the United States; Haiti and Liberia do not. In both Gulf wars, critical American national interests were being defended and advanced. Yet it is precisely these interventions that liberals opposed.

The only conclusion one can draw is that for liberal Democrats, America's strategic interests are not just an irrelevance, but a deterrent to intervention. This is a perversity born of moral vanity. For liberals, foreign policy is social work. National interest - i.e., national selfishness - is a taint. The only justified interventions, therefore, are those which are morally pristine, namely, those which are uncorrupted by any suggestion of national interest.

Hence the central axiom of left-liberal foreign policy: The use of American force is always wrong, unless deployed in a region of no strategic significance to the United States.

There's no reason that there shouldn't be perversion in the foreign as well as their domestic policy. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 12, 2003 9:46 AM