I fucking can't believe John Kerry

[mythology]

155. And how many will die because we won't enter?

It's easy to sit back and say that war is always bad, and pretend that by not intervening we therefore bear no responsibility for those dead due to our inaction. But it just doesn't work that way. We didn't interfere in Rwanda and how many innocents were slaughtered? Clinton has repeatedly said not getting involved in Rwanda is one of his biggest regrets. Internationally, the world half stepped in to the war over Bosnia and when the effort was half-assed, there was the Srebenica massacre among other massacres. Would those have occurred if the international community had fully committed to stopping the violence with enough troops to make a difference? I suspect the answer is yes, but we know what happened when we weren't willing to intervene with a useful number of troops. Thousands were killed in massacres and rape was so prevalent that for the first time the International Criminal Court brought charges of using rape as a systematic weapon of war forward.

One of the reasons that Germany attacked U.S. ships prior to our entry into World War I, was because the German leaders thought that we were weak militarily and so that if they could attack U.S. ships since we couldn't muster an army or ships fast enough to matter. It turns out they were wrong, but it's a case where having a powerful military may have kept the Germans from attacking us in the first place.