human rights?

[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.

[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