Nothing good will come of this.

[frazzled]

52. Please don't pretend this is about "the children"

That's cheap.

There are always two choices: don't act, and children will die; or act, and some children may die. It seems everyone's suggestion is that we should just avert our eyes, as we did in Bosnia while children were raped and murdered en masse—often in front of their parents, who were forced to watch—and where among the 8000 marched into the woods murdered in cold blood at Srebrenica were significant numbers of young boys.

We should be proud we stayed out of that one, because if we had involved ourselves, some children undoubtedly would have died. Oops, thousands of children died anyway. (We could talk about Rwanda here, but let's not stray; we didn't see it, so it didn't happen.)

I'm not pretending that this is a fully humanitarian mission rather than a geo-political one. I'm not pretending that I don't think this mission isn't fraught with peril of escalating into something dangerous. (Or it could rather end up like the air-strike mission we finally conducted in Kosovo, which was actually pretty successful.) I'm not pretending that there aren't other pockets of deep concern in the world that we haven't or can't do anything about, either because it's strategically unwise or because there is simply no will.

But one thing I'll never do is to pretend like my positions on any of these things are based on "the children." I care about children too much to use them in this way for cheap political argument's sake.