Saturday, January 28, 2017

Not A Humane Country

Nothing in the last 15 years of glorious humanitarian interventions has suggested that we are much into the "humanitarian" part of the intervention. As I've long said, if we can't even take in anything more than a trivial number of refugees from the conflicts we directly or indirectly have participated in, then the whole concept is a farce.

I know it's considered to be bad form to acknowledge anything from the wikileaks dump, but when this is what our "liberal" Think Tankies are coming up with...


One remarkable email exchange in particular reveals the critical role played by Tanden in that positioning. In October 2011, a CAP national security writer, Benjamin Armbruster, circulated a discussion on CNN about whether Libya should be forced to turn over its oil revenue to the U.S. as compensation and gratitude for the U.S. having “liberated” Libya.
After one CAP official, Faiz Shakir, noted how perverse it is to first bomb a poor country and then make it turn over its revenues to you for doing so, Tanden argued that this made a great deal of sense:

Tanden’s argument is quite similar to Donald Trump’s long-time stance about Iraqi oil: “I say we should take it and pay ourselves back.” But Tanden’s twist on the argument — that Americans will continue to support foreign wars only if they see the invaded countries forced to turn over assets that the U.S. can use to fund its own programs — is singularly perverse, as it turns the U.S. military into some sort of explicit for-profit imperial force. As Shakir put it in a subsequent email, that suggestion would “make people start to think that our military is just for-hire to carry out the agendas of other people.”

..apologies, this wasn't even from the wikileaks dump.