{"id":1930,"date":"2004-05-04T13:30:29","date_gmt":"2004-05-04T20:30:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mossback.org\/archives\/2004\/05\/its-not-baseball-but-still\/"},"modified":"2004-05-04T13:30:29","modified_gmt":"2004-05-04T20:30:29","slug":"its-not-baseball-but-still","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2004\/05\/04\/its-not-baseball-but-still\/","title":{"rendered":"It&#8217;s not baseball, but still&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\t\tMatt Welch explores the subtle moral distinctions that led prominent leftists to support the liberation of Kosovo and oppose similar action in Iraq in <a title=\"Reason: Temporary Doves: Why are the architects of Kosovo so down on Gulf War II?\" href=\"http:\/\/www.reason.com\/0405\/cr.mw.temporary.shtml\">this piece for Reason:<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Since Clark was one of the top four Democratic candidates for president, and Soros has redirected his considerable energy and at least $15 million to effect &#8220;regime change&#8221; in the United States, their distinction between Kosovo and Iraq arguably looms as the defining foreign policy difference between Democrats and Republicans in 2004. And for those of us who supported Clinton&#8217;s Wilsonianism but not Bush&#8217;s, these books should help answer two questions we really ought to be asking ourselves: Is our support for America&#8217;s activist role dependent on high moral principle, or is it tethered to partisan politics? And did we lower the bar for military intervention?\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Seems to me that it&#8217;s a matter of trust. Bob Dylan said: &#8220;if you&#8217;re gonna live outside the law, you better be honest.&#8221; Partisan Democrats trust Democratic presidents to engage in technically illegal foreign wars in the service of high moral principles, but not Republican presidents; and vice versa.<\/p>\n<p>Which shows us that the system of international law that made the interventions in Kosovo and Iraq (and the non-intervention in Rwanda) technically illegal needs to change, but how? Certainly, we can&#8217;t trust the UN to sanction the removal of despots from power; but who can we trust to authorize and direct the use of American and British military power?<\/p>\n<p>Only the elected representatives in each country, unfortunately.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Matt Welch explores the subtle moral distinctions that led prominent leftists to support the liberation of Kosovo and oppose similar action in Iraq in this piece for Reason: Since Clark was one of the top four Democratic candidates for president, and Soros has redirected his considerable energy and at least $15 million to effect &#8220;regime &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2004\/05\/04\/its-not-baseball-but-still\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;It&#8217;s not baseball, but still&#8230;&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbifyw-v8","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1930"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1930\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}