Thursday, February 28, 2008

A system to enforce imperial power will only be resisted

Far from rehabilitating liberal interventionism, the Kosovo experience has exposed the fatal flaws that lie at its heart

Seumas Milne
The Guardian, Thursday February 28 2008

"It might have been expected that the catastrophe of Iraq and the bloody failure of Afghanistan would have at least dampened the enthusiasm among western politicians for invading other people's countries in the name of democracy and human rights. But the signs are instead of a determined drive to rehabilitate the idea of liberal interventionism so comprehensively discredited in the killing fields of Fallujah and Samarra. First there was the appointment of the committed interventionist Bernard Kouchner as French foreign minister. Then, late last year, the supposedly reluctant warrior Gordon Brown used the lord mayor's banquet to reassert the west's right to intervene across state borders.....

The interventionists, it seems, are back in business. And now Kosovo's declaration of independence has given them a banner to rally the disillusioned to a cause that gripped the imagination of many western liberals in the 90s....."

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