I feel like I should go on record as saying: I am deeply, deeply skeptical that sending US troops of any kind or number to assist Haiti now in the wake of their governmental collapse and the assassination of their ruler would improve anything for anyone. Deeply, deeply skeptical. Like, I can't even imagine what could possibly persuade me that it's a good idea.\r\n
Gentle Readers may remember that YHB was once a bit of an interventionist\u2014in theory, I\u2019m not against the idea that US intervention overseas, even military intervention, can be a Good Thing. In fact, I oppose the idea that the US has no responsibility to intervene in overseas crises, or that our responsibility ends with food aid and cash. I am an internationalist, if not an outright globalist, and I don\u2019t really believe in the nation-state as such, or in the unalienable sovereignty of the nation-state anyway. On the other hand, there haven\u2019t been a lot of US military actions that I\u2019ve actually supported recently. Or that have turned out well. But my point is that I\u2019m not a principled pacifist. I am not automatically opposed to it; I am opposed to it in this instance.\r\n
Admittedly, it\u2019s easy to imagine myself opposed to any<\/i> such instance in the near future. The US needs to have some humility for a while, on the global stage, I think, and while it could usefully supply troops to some sort of international effort, it would be more effective public-relations if they were not under US leadership, and the US wouldn\u2019t allow that. Still, whatever the general case, this is a specific case: we don\u2019t know who planned or paid for the assassination (unless it was us) and nobody knows who will be the most influential leaders in a month or two, and we don\u2019t know how the populace will jump, either. I assume that a chunk of them will believe that the US was behind the assassination, and another chunk will believe that the US is murdering the righteous tyrannicides. How big are those chunks? I don\u2019t know. And how should I know, obviously, I\u2019m not an expert. But\u2014I don\u2019t believe that the experts know, either.\r\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I>
-Vardibidian.\r\n \r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger hopes that the moment where we might have sent troops passed during the days this note was half-finished.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[202],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-item"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20568"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20568\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20569,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20568\/revisions\/20569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}