Idea of the Week: Planning Humanitarian Interventions

Tonight, President Trump ordered airstrikes against targets in Syria suspected of being used to launch chemical attacks on the Syrian People. On the surface, this action would appear to warrant applause and support. No government should employ tools of mass murder on their citizens or people in other nations. Whenever it occurs, the world, under the doctrine of collective security, should band together and stamp this malignancy out. Governments that authorize such barbarity should be overthrown and its leaders prosecuted in the World Court. Other countries that support such regimes should be condemned, ridiculed and if necessary punished as well.

Unfortunately, while we all want such acts against humanity to be thwarted, our leaders (in this country and around the world) over the last decades has either ignored or mostly failed to adequately plan for all contingencies after the atrocities have stopped and properly fund those plans. We saw this when Congress did not give President Obama the authority to end the Syrian behavior in 2014-15.  We saw this poor planning in Afghanistan. We saw this poor planning in Iraq. We saw this poor planning in Libya. We took years to react to the civil strife in Bosnia in 1990's before intervening. We did not do anything in Rwanda and Sudan and we did not plan well in Somalia. Even today, there are Rohingya Muslims fleeing genocidal behavior in Myanmar and the world is doing NOTHING. There are of course other historical examples in the early to middle parts of the last century such as the world being indifferent to the plight of Chinese at the hands of the Japanese, the actions against Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals, and the disabled by the Nazi's and their allies, and the measures against the Armenians by the Ottoman Turks.

Planning Humanitarian Interventions in the wake of horrific acts against humanity should be pursued. However, in doing so, we should prudently plan for all possible outcomes and fully fund for these situations. We can not do it "on the fly" and "on the cheap." The only time in history when the world did get it mostly right was the United States leading the way in rebuilding the world after World War Two. There has been nothing like that before or since.


In a post yesterday, it was revealed that many young students lacked awareness of attempted genocidal acts like the Holocaust. In order to achieve the ideal of NEVER AGAIN, we need to not ignore these acts when they are occurring around the world and we need to execute plans that stop these acts for all the right reasons and do it in a way that does not come back to "bite us" in the next 20 to 30 years.

God Bless our troops in the Middle East and keep them safe.


https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/13/politics/trump-us-syria/index.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/04/syria-is-not-a-humanitarian-war/557897/

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/04/obama-rohingya-genocide-myanmar-burma-muslim-syu-kii-217214