Stop blowing other people up #1342

A few month ago, a friend sent a link to this article, The Islamic State Panic by Michael Brenner (Huffington Post). I found this response in my inbox.

tl;dr: Michael Brenner makes the point that the West—especially America—simplifies foreign policy to the detriment of all. He argues that they should stop doing this. I heartily concur and feel that they should, in fact, stop blowing things up entirely.

HuffPo? Really? Ok, fine. Ignore stupid chain of articles littering the right-hand side. Avoid long diatribe about our inevitable slide toward a worldwide Idiocracy. Avoid digression.

Decent article. Well-written. You know I’m a sucker for this kind of thing:

“The ensuing storm of static in our public space is invasive. It destroys the ability to reflect, to assess, to ponder, to imagine. We have come to ‘think’ in sound bites as well as to talk in sound bites.”

He chose a decidedly different conclusion than I would have. The evidence he amassed points to a pile of fools in the West who are not only occasionally wrong, but almost pathologically so.

In that case, I would have argued more strongly that all of these people are exactly not the ones who should be making decisions about what kind of military action to take in foreign countries.

The notion that there is a such a thing as a humanitarian military intervention is still very much accepted, even by Mr. Brenner, who is, at least, possessed of an otherwise laudable skepticism.

Rather than concluding that empty-headed leaders and medal-bespeckled commanders should keep their traps shut for once—ostensibly to let the diplomats do their work—he should have strengthened his argument to conclude that we in the West are perhaps the last ones who should be poking our noses in the affairs of others.

Especially if we continue to fly the flag of the moral high-ground rather than admit that everything we do is in our basest interests that makes us not at all any different from those we claim are the enemy. That we dress it up in a base capitalism that we’ve all but convinced the world is intrinsic to human society doesn’t make it any better.