MCViewPoint

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/09/james-ostrowski/progressive-foreign-policy-fails-again/

By James Ostrowski

Note: This is an excerpt from their book, The Impeachment of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for High Crimes in Syria and Libya.

What happened in Libya and Syria is simply a manifestation of a very dangerous mindset known as progressivism.  Progressivism amounts to a blind faith that government force can improve any given situation.  It is usually associated with domestic policy but progressivism also operates in foreign policy. Progressives ignore costs and consequences.  Progressives plunge into situations they do not understand, heedless of the consequences.  When progressives fail, they invariably attribute the failure to not using enough government force.  Thus, Obama, explaining his failure in Libya, stated, “I think we underestimated . . . the need to come in full force.”[1]

Thus, it is not merely Obama and Clinton who need to be held responsible.  Their underlying ideology also needs to be called to account.  We need to impeach progressivism too lest that dangerous ideology leads us into an endless series of future foreign policy disasters as it has already led us into 100 years filled with them.

It is important to understand that a callous disregard of consequences is intrinsic to progressivism,[2] whether applied to domestic or foreign policy. One consequence of foreign intervention which the progressives utterly ignore is blowback in the form of terrorist attacks in direct retaliation against the intervention.  It is probably a Freudian slip that those who supported overthrowing Gaddafi and Assad were oblivious to the consequences as these men had few ties to terrorism in recent years.

Another consequence of war that is rarely discussed in advance is the legal risk of engaging in war.  When a state is attacked, it has the legal right to respond and defend itself.[4]  Such a response may include attacking any military facility in the attacking state. Obviously, any such attacks in modern war run the risk of civilian casualties.  Since this is rarely if ever mentioned by politicians, they apparently expect us to simply put all of this out of our minds.

What is truly revolting is this.  Obama and Clinton, who are protected by heavy security, have launched the United States into wars against parties likely to retaliate against innocent and vulnerable civilians, when the perpetrators of these illegal wars are utterly incapable of stopping such attacks or protecting such civilians.  The only legal remedy for such moral depravity is impeachment…

To sum up, progressivism fails in foreign policy for a number of important reasons. First, the progressives are pervasively ignorant about the countries they are invading and conquering. Second, such intervention fails to deal with the underlying causes of problems, usually being related to the preexisting culture and character of a people or the arbitrary borders into which disparate ethnic, racial and religious groups have been consigned. Third, such intervention sparks resistance and retaliation among the victims. Finally, such intervention usually results in unforeseen and unintended bad consequences.

Thus, the lesson of this book is not just that Obama and Clinton blundered by intervening into Libya and Syria but that, once again, progressives applied their utopian theory beyond the borders of the United States with the usual disastrous consequences.

Be seeing you

One of the original progressives