The US flag flies over Camp VI, a prison used to house detainees at the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, in March. Bob Strong/Reuters/File
The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy -- Robert D. Kaplan, National Interest
For over two years, the civil war in Syria has been synonymous with cries of moral urgency. Do Something! shout those who demand the United States intervene militarily to set the situation there to rights, even as the battle lines now comprise hundreds of regime and rebel groupings and the rebels have started fighting each other. Well, then, shout the moral interventionists, if only we had intervened earlier!
Syria is not unique. Before Syria, humanitarians in 2011 demanded military intervention in Libya, even though the regime of Muammar Qaddafi had given up its nuclear program and had been cooperating for years with Western intelligence agencies. In fact, the United States and France did lead an intervention, and Libya today is barely a state, with Tripoli less a capital than the weak point of imperial-like arbitration for far-flung militias, tribes, and clans, while nearby Saharan entities are in greater disarray because of weapons flooding out of Libya.
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My Comment: Robert D. Kaplan's comments on former Chinese Deng Xiaoping are spot on .... Deng Xiaoping approved the brutal suppression of students at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, but this permitted his economic reforms to continue for one more generation .... and as a result ..... never before in recorded economic history have so many people seen such a dramatic rise in living standards, with an attendant rise in personal (if not political) freedoms in so short a time frame.
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