The road to hell is paved with good intentions
The driving forces behind the push in United States and other western nations in support for "Humanitarian Intervention" --- human rights/foreign aid/NGO's, the media, Hollywood, Christian activists -- have played a crucial role in the events that led to the independence of East Timor and are having a major impact on shaping public and governmental attitudes over the crisis in Darfur. In both cases, the rationale for diplomatic and militatry intervention was framed in humanitarian terms as opposed to strategic considerations (which seemed to have applied in the case of the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia notwithstanding the humanitarian issues involved in the conflicts there). It was interesting to read an op-ed in the New York Times this week Strategic Victimhood in Sudan in which the author Alan J. Kuperman deconstructs Darfour-as-a-Morality-Play and explains what we libertarians have known for quite a long time, that when it comes to most of these civil war in Th...