Can We Justify Invading Burma on Humanitarian Grounds?

In my entry yesterday, "Regime Change Myanmar?," I touched on the debate in the 1990s on liberal internationalist support for humanitarian intervention.

Now, via Ann Althouse, check out this early, 1990s-era op-ed piece by Steve Sesser, "Are Invasions Sometimes O.K.?":

Clearly, opposition to military intervention under any circumstances is anachronistic in a world of growing interdependence. Human rights abuses, wherever they might occur, are no longer accepted as business as usual. And new forms of communication - as indicated by the use of fax machines in China during the pro-democracy demonstrations - are turning human rights struggles into movements that cross national boundaries.

Can anyone really argue that we should grant any government - no matter how brutal or how unpopular - the right to terrorize or kill its citizens for as long as it can cling to power? Would it have been morally wrong for France, or the U.S., or the Soviet Union, to intervene in Pol Pot's Cambodia and thereby to have saved at least one million Cambodian lives?

Good question, especially in the era of post-Saddam international politics.

I've almost finished Mattew Yglesias' book, Heads in the Sand, and he directs almost as much criticism at liberal interventionist hawks in the Democratic Party as he does to neoconservatives. I'll have more on this later, but note that Yglesias claims, for example, that "it's clear under George W. Bush hegemonism in action accomplished virtually nothing for the United States and has done so at great cost."

What's bothersome about Yglesias (and his Flophouse-style idological partners) is their complete repudiation of the popular pre-March 2003 humantarian rationale for regime change in Iraq (and their subsequent and complete hostility to any use of American military power):

The United States has an obligation ... to preserve its security by preemptively trumping the sovereignty of a defiant Iraq, making the world safe for democracy in the process.

This is why we're not seeing far left-wing advocates calling for regime change in Myanmar.

For more on hard-left's knee-jerk reaction to the use of force under any circumstances, see The Belmont Club's excellent post, "Invasion Burma."