Lone Wolf Reviews Webzine Editorial

America the Two-Faced

In the thirties, we ignored Hitler until it was too late. We waited too long to take action in Bosnia. There have been situations all over the world that we have conveniently ignored.

The Americans were interested in saving money, the Belgians were interested in saving face, and the French were interested in saving their ally, the genocidal government.
-- Alison Des Forges, expert on Rwanda

Let's be real about something here. America is still a basicly white, Christian nation. The Bosnians were Moslems and we were very slow to come to their aid. The Tutsis and Hutus were black and their plight largely ignored; not in our "national interest." How convenient.

There is an unanswerable question of history that bears on these situations. Assume the Allies took a different approach to the Second World War: Roosevelt kept his promise to MacArthur to reinforce the Phillipines and Japan was defeated before Germany. Would we have been as fast to drop the atomic bomb on Caucasian, Christian Dresden as we were on Hiroshima? I don't think it would have happened.

Bottom line, we are doing the right thing in trying to stop Milosevic. But let's not beat the drums of self-righteousness too loudly for too often out decisions of whom to help seems to weigh on how much the oppressed have in common with us.

As an aside, I strongly recommend you read Michael Barone's columns at the US News Web site. In last week's issue(dated April 5), he makes the case that that there may be less stability in Europe if we succeed in our aims in Kosovo. In tomorrow's issue (available now online), he draws chilling comparisons between the bombing in Vietnam and Kosovo; we all know the bombing in Vietnam led to a huge US ground force buildup.

There are no easy answers in the post-Cold War era of foreign policy. In many ways, we are looking at the same powder kegs that existed at the turn of the last millenium and this century saw two world wars with a global depression in between. If religious intolerance and racism are factors in foreign policy decisions, let's eliminate those factors.