Comments Elsewhere

#NoWarOnSyria “The hidden premise, of course, is that the U.S. government necessarily must intervene, bomb, wage war, and inflict mass bloodshed as a remedy to foreign horrors. It is taken for granted that nonintervention is no option, which assumes that U.S. intervention tends to cause more good than bad, or is worth the effort even if it sometimes fails. This premise is steeped in a cold utilitarianism and stands in tension with the actual results of U.S. policy over the last few decades. The utter calamity that has unfolded in Iraq should guide even those who philosophically embrace intervention toward a realistic advocacy of U.S. restraint. Even if humanitarian war were not a total oxymoron, the United States in particular deserves a prolonged time-out. It has in the last fifty years left behind millions of corpses piled under a thousand broken promises, and so a 50-year moratorium on further American wars would seem like a reasonable goal, rather than starting yet another war even as the chaotic and inhumane consequences of interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya continue to unfold.” – Anthony Gregory