I am naive. I thought there were limits... places folks wouldn't go.

[ConservativeDemocrat]

62. Because I live in the real world

The real world, unlike the imaginations of extremist ideologues, is not black and white. It is a million shades of grey. While I was against the Iraq war from the start, it was for a purely nationalistic reason: there was no benefit to the U.S. from it, it clearly cost us all the good will built up from the Clinton administration, and the idea of a no-cost war was straight out of the fever-dreams of Rove's "making our own reality" based community. Yet even still, anyone who is even remotely rational about this issue needs to acknowledge that there are Kurds named "George Bush" because their parents named them such after the invasion, Iraq's child-mortality has plummeted since when the Ba'athists were stealing nearly all its resources, and, plagued as it is by both crime and terrorism, Iraq's population is up, and the number of deaths from political and economic violence are down from where it was before the invasion.

Yes, grownups do measure horrible events against each other, and make judgements about which is worse. This is especially true in the matter of international politics. Every single modern U.S. president has to receive visitors from various overseas conflicts, listen carefully as ongoing oppression and atrocities by some tyrant are listed, and then look the representatives straight in the eye and say "I'm sorry, but the U.S. military is not going to get involved saving you from this". North Korea is but only one example.

It's interesting that you bring up Rwanda, as one of President Clinton's greatest regrets is that he didn't use force there earlier. That was a mistake too. Just in the other direction.

- C.D. Proud Member of the Reality Based Community