Listen to us, we're oh-so Smart and Moral
I've got better things to do than comment on Roger Cohen's whining over rhetorical accuracy in an effort to paper over his--that is, liberal hawks, interventionists, or whatever it is they want to call themselves--role in enabling the invasion of Iraq. But via Yglesias, another blogger makes a good point:
One of the most infuriating tics of neocons and liberal hawks is to chide the anti-war left for its supposed contradictory positions of favoring some limited humanitarian intervention in, say, Darfur, but opposing the Iraq war. In today's Times, Roger Cohen offers a slight variation of this argument, saying that, basically, if we don't like the Iraq war then we also can't have supported the Kosovo intervention.
So here's a question in response: why don't the liberal hawks want to invade Burma? It's a country ruled by bad-guys. It's a country that pines for freedom, though it seems to have little chance of deposing its rulers. The junta just disappeared thousands of people. If the Hitchens and Cohen's and Bermans of the world are so concerned with liberating the oppressed through American force, how come the long-suffering Burmese don't make the cut?
Sounds about right to me. By the logic of the liberal intervetionist, we ought to be kicking bad guy ass from Beijing to Burma. Only problem is, we can't, so maybe we ought to be bit more discriminating about which foreign lands we invade.