In a piece in today’s Slate, Christopher Hitchens makes the case that America is cowardly and unprincipled to avoid military intervention in the Libyan insurrection. He points to Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kurdistan as examples of how non-intervention in an ongoing mass-murder is tantamount to siding with those who choose to commit these crimes, and that the ongoing lesson of the twentieth century is that evil triumphs when the good stand idly by. While I normally agree with nearly everything that comes out of this man’s mouth, I have to question his assumption that U.S. power would save Libyan lives, or that such an action would be in the long-term interests of the U.S. and the region as a whole.
