I'm sure you've witnessed (and probably endured) this exchange more than once:
Credulous Liberal: Isn't it great that we're bombing <country A> because of our deep commitment to human rights?
Attractive Skeptic: Look, if the US is committed to human rights, why is it backing similar hideous crimes in <countries B, C, D…>?
Credulous Liberal: So you're saying just because we can't fix every problem we shouldn't do anything at all? What kind of moral cretin are you!!?!
Seems like such a straightforward argument, doesn't it? And yet whoosh, over and over again. For a real life example, here's Juan Cole missing this point (as he's done regularly since his American Idol first considered attacking Libya) with his trademark soporofic banality:
But here I agree with President Obama and his citation of Reinhold Niebuhr. You can’t protect all victims of mass murder everywhere all the time. But where you can do some good, you should do it, even if you cannot do all good.
So for the Juan Coles of the world, this is the seemingly obvious syllogism that's nonetheless somehow eluding you: if the United States claims to be bombing country A to prevent crimes similar to ones it's actively enabling, supporting or financing in countries B/C/D/et al, that means that the United States is not actually bombing country A to prevent those crimes. And any analysis that ignores that simple logic and instead takes the US's benevolent intentions as a core premise is fatally flawed from the outset, and will be fortunate if it's merely naively misguided rather than morally grotesque.
Maybe an analogy would help:
Credulous Liberal: Isn't it great that the Russian mafia is killing all the pimps in Las Vegas because of its deep commitment to women's rights?
Dapper Realist: You mean the same Russian mafia that kidnaps young women, addicts them to heroin and then sells them as sex slaves?
Credulous Liberal: So you're saying just because they can't help every woman they shouldn't help any at all? Why do you hate America so much!!?!
Ok, I may have mixed my messages there. But you get the idea.
The Distant Ocean 
That’s funny.
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Credulous Liberal: I have wrapped my identity up in a neat little package of popular ideology, and I take great offense to any information to the contrary.
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Shouldn’t that be “Why do you hate the Russian mafia so much?”
Another good response, depending on which case you’re dealing with and implicit in what John wrote here, is to point out that the US needn’t necessarily drop bombs on a country to stop its violation of human rights. It can just stop actively supporting those violations. Indonesia’s long invasion of East Timor, for example, would have been severely hampered if the US had stopped supplying them with weapons and training their troops. Very likely it would have had to stop if the US had ordered it to, especially if the order wasn’t a pro forma protest but was backed up with a real withdrawal of support.
I believe Obama himself used that trope while doing nothing about the coup in Honduras a couple of years ago.
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Shouldn’t that be “Why do you hate the Russian mafia so much?”
You found the mixed message!
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What’s even more amazing is that Credulous Liberal is staking out a position far more hawklike than Ron Paul (or even Pat Buchanan), but regards those people to be Evil, whereas the lethal Obama and HRC and that crowd are God’s Own Cherubs on Earth.
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I like that the realist gets to be dapper. Are you the realist?
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Well, now the residents of Sirte are being massacred by NATO air strikes because of their genuine support for Gaddafi. Attempts to defend themselves are a death sentence. Allowing the “rebels” to move in is also a death sentence. More “protecting the civilians.” This is mass murder.
It occurs to me that we need some body bags being shipped back full to the UK and elsewhere before any of the cruise missile “liberals” will recognize any cost at all to this illegal imperial war of aggression. Most of the commentary on “liberal” and mainstream sites is praising Obama for Grand Theft Country because “not a single American life” has been lost.
The “liberals” have internalized the racist and imperialist assumptions of mass murder more completely than I recall neo-cons doing during the Bush years in Iraq, in which case at least some small amount empty lip service was given to the supposed limiting of Iraqi casualties (a lie, of course). In the case of Obama supporters they actively hate their drone victims and the deaths are literally not worth mention.
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Ah yes, and I saw some video today of Jeremey Scahill talking to Howard Dean about are Middle Eastern murder.
Dean REPEATEDLY and stupidly – the man is a dim bulb who speaks less well than the average KFC manager – praises murder in the form of drone strikes and missile attacks. I can’t say I’ve ever seen even the likes of Dick Cheney cheerfully and calmly endorse a blank check for murder on TV as we see here. This is “liberalsim”, is it? Include me out.
People on this site and elsewhere who claimed that Dean was some sort of peace candidate would do well to watch and cringe.
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2011/08/24/jeremy-scahill-trashes-juvenile-howard-dean-on-obama-successes/
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“People on this site and elsewhere who claimed that Dean was some sort of peace candidate would do well to watch and cringe.”
Indeed, not least because of Scahill’s own slow metamorphosis into namby-pamby tool. I respect what the guy’s trying to do – keep a place inside the belly of the beast – but increasingly he talks in their amoral language. He only hinted at why, exactly, Obama gets away with things that Bush couldn’t and anyone not already won over to the idea that Obama is a standard issue sociopath president, would do what Dean did at one point, which is misinterpret Scahill’s remarks about Obama as praise. Arguing against killing civilians ENTIRELY on the grounds of blowback was particularly sick-making. I liked the line about ‘raining on your drone love parade’ but the rest was very tepid, I thought.
This is what happens when you work for The Nation and buddy up to the more nihilistic participants in the secret government to get scoops. I found the whole discussion pretty sickening. Dean and Brown particularly so, of course.
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Yeah, I also thought that was a tepid performance for Jeremy Scahill, but I think “slow metamorphosis into namby-pamby tool” is too harsh and also premature (unless you have other examples I haven’t seen). I’ve been watching him cautiously as well–since as you say he seems to be pursuing a belly-of-the-beast strategy–but I’ve never seen him abandon his core principles, and based on the years of acuity and moral clarity that earned him so much of my respect in the first place I can’t imagine him falling to that level. We’ll see.
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You’re right, I was too harsh considering his whole career, but on reflection I think tepid is too kind a word for this particular performance, which was more deeply inside the corral of permissible opinion than it needed to be. He didn’t address moral or legal considerations. His overall point was that Obama has been far more aggressive and effective than Bush in pursuing US interests in North Africa. For someone who considers US interests benign, that’s really not helpful, and so picture Dean’s stupid nod of agreement multiplied a million times. Addressing civilian casualties as solely as a problem for potential American victims of blowback is shameful as is rolling turds for mediocre journalists who simply do their job for once.
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Oh, and it was clear Dean wasn’t any kind of lefty back in 2003–even he mocked the notion that he was the progressive in the race. But nothing stops the lesser-evil left from panning for gold in each election’s brackish pond of Democrats.
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Here’s a question that occured to me this morning: where did thousands or tens of thousands of factory-made old Libyan royalist flags come from and who brought them into Libya? What is the time frame for doing that alone and how long ago did these flags start popping up? How much did that alone cost and who paid for it? All by itself that smacks of an external plan to topple the Libyan government coordinated some time ago.
Ominously I read in the Philadelphia Inquirer this morning that a group of Democratic politicians including Ed Rendell (former PA governor, Philadelphia mayor and fan of Reaganomics) appeared at a protest (! – surely the first such of his life) at State Department offices to get the MEK Iranian-American group removed from the terror list so that funding can be poured into them to assist toppling the Iranian government.
Slick Ed doesn’t do these things unless someone is paying him pretty well which is I imagine his direct motivation, but he’s fairly high up in the national Dem food chain and this strongly suggests to me that Iran could be the next neo-lib target. One wonders how many countries Obama can attack at once and still count on blind support from “liberals.”
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