Jonah Goldberg, writing in the Los Angeles Times, points out the "liberal" flip-flop on stopping genocide. He's noted Barack Obama's recent statement to the media that stopping genocide is not a good reason to stay in Iraq. He points out the 180 they have done on this subject since the 1990s.
Barack obama says preventing genocide isn't a good enough reason to stay in Iraq.
"By that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now — where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife — which we haven't done," he told the Associated Press. "We would be deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven't done. Those of us who care about Darfur don't think it would be a good idea."
It's worth at least pointing out a key difference between the potential genocide in Iraq and the heart-wrenching slaughters in Congo and Sudan: The latter aren't our fault. But if genocide unfolds in Iraq after American troops depart, it would be hard to argue that we weren't at least partly to blame. Yes, the mass murder would have more immediate authors than the United States of America, but we would undeniably be responsible, at least in part, for giving a green light to genocide. Obama offers precisely that green light in his proposed Iraq War De-escalation Act.
Of course, some advocates of withdrawal try to maintain the moral high ground by arguing that there won't be genocidal slaughter — though that usually sounds like self-delusion to me. Most close observers of the situation believe that if the U.S. were to sail out of Iraq, it would be on a river of Iraqi blood.
"The only thing standing between Iraq and a descent into a Lebanon- or Bosnia-like maelstrom," a new report from the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution concludes, "is 135,000 American troops." Rapid withdrawal, the report says, could bring "a humanitarian nightmare" in which we should expect "hundreds of thousands (conceivably even millions) of people to die."
Read the whole thing. He's right here. As he puts it later:
Liberals used to be the ones who argued that sending U.S. troops abroad was a small price to pay to stop genocide; now they argue that genocide is a small price to pay to bring U.S. troops home.
I would only quibble with the label "liberal" because the folks who are pushing for a withdrawal are anything but liberal. This is, like it or not, an American problem. The left imagines, falsely, that the world will blame the Republicans for the bloodbath in Iraq if the US pulls out. That America, regardless of party, will be blamed is already being telegraphed in the world press. This is an American problem and an American moral obligation.
And yet only one side of the debate sees this as a national problem. This bodes ill for the country as a whole.