Foreign aid: Anti-malaria bed nets v F-35s
source: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/03/foreign_aid
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WHEN you argue for humanitarian military intervention, my colleague rightly says, you should be able to show how your military intervention serves humanitarian goals. In the case of the decision to intervene in Libya, though, I think this low bar is pretty easy to clear. When you have a column of armoured forces loyal to a ruthless dictator advancing on a city full of weakly-armed rebels (initially non-violent protestors who took up arms in self-defence) upon whom he has openly promised to wreak bloody vengeance, you pretty much have the paradigmatic case for military intervention. We know how that picture ends; in Srebrenica in 1992 it ended with the bodies of 7,000 able-bodied males in unmarked graves, in Hama in 1982 it ended with 20,000 civilian dead in flattened apartment blocks, in Basra in 1991 it ended in mass graves and in the dungeons of Abu Ghraib, and so forth. It's true, as my colleague says, that people are clumsy with counterfactual scenarios, and have a patriotic wish to see their state as a force for good. But I don't think that these are the main reasons why we think things would have been worse if we hadn't intervened in Libya. At least for that initial intervention, I think you'd have to make some heroically naive assumptions to believe that things wouldn't have been worse once Mr Qaddafi retook Benghazi.
My colleague's chief concern, however, is why we seem to be so often faced with calls for military humanitarian interventions, rather than peaceful ones.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/03/foreign_aid
My colleague's chief concern, however, is why we seem to be so often faced with calls for military humanitarian interventions, rather than peaceful ones.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/03/foreign_aid
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- groups:
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artemis6
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It seems to me many people believe violence solves problems . It CAN . Is it the first best choice ? Not letting it get so bad can solve them too . I am not always good at telling when to modify and salvage , or destroy the whole system . I lean heavily on the first one .
- 1 year ago
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artemis6
