PBS – Joshua Foust: Double standards of intervention
In his column for PBS Need to Know, Joshua Foust discusses the ongoing situation in Syria and the double standards of intervention.
The current debate over sovereignty and interventionism also brings up a more disturbing realization: Pushed to the extremes, neo-conservatism and liberalism meet up again to create a remarkably similar set of policies. Accusing a regime of violating international law, threatening its neighbors, risking regional conflict, and engaging in heinous crimes against its own citizens are just as applicable to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as they are to Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. The justifications neocons and liberals use to justify their flagrant disregard of international norms, institutions, governing frameworks, and behavior are different, but the result is almost the same: relatively powerful western countries meddling in regimes they dislike.
The blatant hypocrisy of those same western countries not intervening in their own abusive client regimes — while angrily condemning the Russians and Chinese for identical policies — is, one supposes, to be ignored. After all, there is a massacre going on in Syria. Who are you to say we shouldn’t try to stop it?
Read the whole article here.
