THE COST OF LIBERAL INTERNATIONALISM

The airwaves are filled with accusations and counter accusations regarding the Benghazi affair.   Obviously, letting the local fanatics kill an American Ambassador is a failure on the Obama administrations part.  But one thing hardly gets mentioned.

The ambassador was deeply involved in the regime change that ended with Gaddafi being violated and murdered in the street like a dog. Regime change is a dirty and bloody business. Yet the administration seems to think that only the “Bad guys” were subject to the violence we and the Europeans set in motion. I can’t help remember Hillary’s cackling over Gaddafi’s demise. Now perhaps she and the other liberal internationalist war nerds know the feeling of losing one of their own.

The Obama administration is home to many liberal internationalists who, in this age of electronic communication and remote-control war, have given in to the very temptations they excoriate in the previous generation of foreign policy managers.  It is noticeable how many of these new warriors come from elite universities where Political Correctness is ruthlessly enforced.  These hatcheries of future foreign policy adventurers wield power by soft means, exclusion, funding discretion,  promotional intimidation along with peer pressure are the arsenal du jure.   When these people emerge into the world of actual power they are largely insulated from the effects of power exercised on the ground.  The toppling of governments, the prolongation of civil wars and the death of protesters are mere things to be factored into scenarios propelled by attitudes formed in the dysfunctional mono-culture of left academia.  It needs hardly be said that policy directed by academics turned courtiers with little or no understanding of the realities of conflict is bound to end in tears.  But this time it was their tears.

It strikes me as bizarre that if one were to ask Hillary Clinton what she thought of the over-through of the Mossedegh regime by the CIA and Mi6 in 1953, she would denounce it,  Yet this is what she and like minded people just did in Libya.