Embracing the empire ?

Haaretz: By Ian Buruma

Bernard Kouchner, France's new foreign minister, has a long and distinguished record as an advocate of intervention in countries where human rights are abused. As a co-founder of Doctors Without Borders, he stated that 'we were establishing the moral right to interfere inside someone else's country.' Saddam Hussein's mass murder of Iraqi citizens is why he supported the war in Iraq. One should always be careful about attributing motives to other people's views. But Kouchner himself has often said that the murder of his Russian-Jewish grandparents in Auschwitz inspired his humanitarian interventionism.

One may or may not agree with Kouchner's policies, but his motives are surely impeccable. The fact that many prominent Jewish intellectuals in Europe and the United States - often, like Kouchner, with a leftist past - are sympathetic to the idea of using American armed force to further the cause of human rights and democracy in the world, may derive from the same wellspring. Any force is justified to avoid another Shoah, and those who shirk their duty to support such force are regarded as no better than collaborators with evil. ...

Revolutionary Islamism is undoubtedly dangerous and bloody. Yet analogies with the Third Reich, although highly effective as a way to denounce people with whose views one disagrees, are usually false. No Islamist armies are about to march into Europe - indeed, most victims of Revolutionary Islamism live in the Middle East, not in Europe - and Ahmadinejad, his nasty rhetoric notwithstanding, does not have a fraction of Hitler's power. ...

If it were really true that the fundamental existence of our democratic Western world were about to be destroyed by an Islamist revolution, it would only make sense to seek protection in the full force of the U.S. informal empire. But if one sees our current problems in less apocalyptic terms, then another kind of trahison des clercs (treason of the intellectuals) comes into view: the blind cheering-on of a sometimes foolish military power embarked on unnecessary wars that cost more lives than they were intended to save.