In defense of genocide, redux

One kind word should to be said for the foundering US president: George W Bush seems to be the last person in public life to think that genocide is an unacceptable outcome (except, of course, for Pope Benedict XVI, who sadly has no divisions).

Time was that the g-word was unpronounceable by critics on the right or left. It is a measure of how much the world has changed since September 11, 2001, that the prospect of genocide shocks neither. For example, prominent journalist and humanitarian

activist David Rieff believes that if genocide is inevitable in Iraq, we should stand back and watch. He asks (in Rod Dreher's must-read Crunchy Con weblog) why the US should remain in Iraq at all: [1]

The usual answer is that because if we leave [Iraq] there will be a genocide ... The deeper questions are (a) whether short of open-ended colonization, the US has the power to prevent the genocide whose preconditions we ourselves created through our hubris, (b) whether the future of the Iraqi polity should be one of the main foci of our concerns, and (c) whether the cost of preventing genocide is one we as a polity can afford to pay. My answer to all three questions is no.

Rieff penned the above words to defend Democratic Senator Barack Obama's statement that the danger of genocide is not sufficient cause to keep US troops in Iraq. On the conservative side, Father Richard Neuhaus in the September issue of First Things takes President Bush to task for having "pledged America to the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in the world", as Bush said in Prague on September 6. Father Neuhaus writes:

The claim that we are imposing our values, says the president, is refuted by the fact that every time people are given a choice, they choose freedom. It is by no means evident that the people of Iraq, for instance, who bravely turned out in the millions to participate in elections, were choosing freedom. It is more likely they were voting for the dominance of their tribes determined to dominate them. It would seem that freedom, as the liberal-democratic tradition construes freedom, is, in fact, un-Islamic.

He asks whether the United States can "present its purposes to the world in a manner friendly to Muslims seeking to institute governments that, in a believably Muslim way, derive their powers from the consent of the governed", and concludes, "It is possible that the answer to that question is in the negative. If so, it would seem that there is no alternative to bracing ourselves for the escalation of an open-ended clash of civilizations."