by JASmius
(I searched youtube for the scene from X-Men First Class after Xavier wiped Moira McTaggert's mind and all she can tell her CIA superiors is about trees, sunlight, and a kiss, which prompts CIA Director John McCone to snort and grouse, "Gentlemen, this is why the CIA is no place for a woman," but regrettably, 20th Century Fox's intellectual property vigilance is as legendary as always.)
I would simply remind Ms. Amanpour - by shouting her down, from the looks of it, but what else are booming radio announcer voices for? - that there are upwards of two hundred nations on this planet, and even in this supposed "age of democracy," most of them are still under the control of authoritarian and/or totalitarian governments (including America), and an unhealthy percentage of those regimes have committed and/or are committing atrocities against their own people (particularly against Christians, about which CA is a great deal less emotional). If deployment of the meager, tattered remnants of America's denuded, disemboweled military resources were to be determined solely on Powers-esque "humanitarian" criteria - which is to say, where US national and national security interests are by definition not involved or at stake - then we would be intervening all over the planet all the f'ing time. Which is to say, it couldn't be done, even if CA decided that the martyring of Christians en masse in horrible, writhing agony was A-OK - which it is to her, BTW.
This is why Bill Clinton didn't send the tanks rolling into Rwanda in the '90s and why O chickened out on throwing dirt clods at Assad: humanitarianism sounds good, nice, flowery, virtuous, as opposed to the dirty, rotten, selfish, capitalist notion of (ugh) "national interest," but national interest is what governs how the rest of the world works, and the American people still have a vestigial instinct for it as well, which is why the more Generalissimo Red Lines pushed for Operation "Don't Mock Me," the more unpopular the idea became.
In other words, Ms. Amanpour, man up and acknowledge that the only way you're going to get what you want - America as Global My Little Pony Cop - is to convince your lord and savior to reverse his catastrophic war against Pentagon spending. Heck, it's the only way you'll be able to bamboozle the GOP into rescinding the sequester, if they can stomach the sight of fleets of Raptor interceptors, Lightning fighter/bombers, and Abrams battle tanks all repainted in lavender.
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