US global micromanagement

It’s hard at this distance to figure out just who did what and how bad it was, but that’s the point: Albanian terrorists armed by the West to fight in Kosovo are destroying Macedonia. We bombed Serbia for 78 days and nights because we were outraged by a civil war in which more than a thousand had died and Northern union forces were systematically torching homes in the secessionist South. We’re offering rewards of up to $5 million for the capture of those guilty in the Rwandan massacres. We’re announcing who should be head of the PLO.

Some or all those decisions may have merit, but why at this distance are we getting involved in every brutal and intractible conflict at that level of detail unless we think we have the general responsibility to rule the world? Most of the world thinks our reluctance to participate in the International Criminal Court is simply unprincipled—we just want everything to go our way and think we can get away with it. It’s much harder than it should be to argue they’re wrong.
Posted by Jim Kalb at June 26, 2002 06:42 PM | Send