Pro-This, Anti-That

Got this from The Atlantic Monthly.

He has a good point and one that I tried to make during the protests a couple of years ago -- it was misleading for anti-war protesters to argue that the war was wrong because other countries didn't want to participate and the US just went ahead and invaded. What they really meant was this war is wrong because all war is wrong. But, that was a much harder argument to sell to people. You had to say "I know Saddam is a bad guy and all, and he shouldn't be the guy running Iraq, but we shouldn't go to war to remove him." The qualifiers in the beginning lessened the impact of the anti-war statement. But that statement would have been a little more straightforward; I really doubt the Stop the War Coalition was really against the war just because a handful of Security Council nations.

Same thing with Kyoto and the International War Crimes Tribunal. A country shouldn't enter a treaty just because lots of other countries have. But that is what the criticism of the US's non-ratification normally amounted to. A treaty is supposed to give all sides a justified payoff for a justified expense. Now, perhaps the US should have signed up to both of those things but it is misguided to argue that a country should sign a treaty just because everyone else on the block did.

This goes both ways. Sometime I get the feeling that the US doesn't go along with the program simply because other nations are. That is just as bad.