human rights?

[boracay]

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It is merely my opinion... But could you explain why our government is morally obligated to risk the capital of our citizens and the lives of our soldiers to interfere with another countries policy when it has nothing to do with us? You may change my mind. (yes, really)

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It isnt, but i havent seen any instance where our government has done that.

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i'm sure you haven't. i guess that's because there is no human rights for you? democracy? it's just 'their' rights and it is 'our' rights, right?

"From 1945 to 2003, the United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements fighting against intolerable regimes. In the process, the US bombed some 25 countries, caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair."
William Blum

"If they do it it's terrorism, if we do it, it's fighting for freedom. "
a U.S. Ambassador in Central America in the 1980s, asked to explain how such U.S. actions as the mining of Nicaragua's harbors and bombing of airports differed from the acts of terrorism that the U.S. condemned around the world

[AlexM]

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Who pays the bill

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To me, this is the question that matters most. Are we talking about whether the ends justifies the means of the brutal, tyrannical theft we call taxation or are we ignoring that entirely? :P

[Feekee]

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The United States is responsible for the weakening of the authority of world organisations, such as the United Nations or war crimes' courts. The reason is simple and obvious: US power is so great, as things stand, that the country is able to assert its authority over the globe without fear of military retaliation from anyone; accordingly, the U.S. does not want those organisations to be anything more than instruments for legitimizing American actions.

To answer your question, interventionism based on moral principles is indeed a noble idea -- but it must be applied with consistency, i.e. the same principles must be held for one and all. Otherwise, the invocation of those principles is phony and becomes again purely legitimizing. In other words, whatever we must do for Rwanda or Somalia, we must do for Israel or the Palestinians.

Trust me on this, everybody knows what we mean when we talk about human right and civil rights; we won't disagree when it comes to define them.

So the moral course, if the U.S. were to follow one, is to (a) use military power with restraint (look up the statistics of how many times on average per decade the U.S. engages in military actions abroad), and (b) strengthen the authority of world organisations (you can hear from afar the neo-cons' screams about "surrendering national sovereignty to third-wodl bureacrats").

More diplomacy, co-ordination, dialogue, and common sense; less militarism.

Mickey Brausch

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Thanks Mickey, have you read Wilson's Ghost by Robert McNamara? He makes some of the same suggestions.

[Skidoo]

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Obviously there are a lot of details, but genocides don't just happen. Even if the populations hate each other, it's invariably instigated and organized by the government. Therefore, any government that doesn't organize genocides should be a marked improvement. Since there are so few genocides in the world, it stands to reason that any new government will likely be a non-genocide one.

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It is not enough to just pick a form of government at random at hope for the best based on likelihoods. The right kind of government must be deliberately constructed.