This seems worthy of note, given the current American foreign policy regime:
‘And yet Libya—so far the most aggressive humanitarian intervention of the 21st century—depended not on any broad public movement nor any urgent security threat. There was instead a chain of private conversations: Hillary Clinton moving Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy moving Dmitri Medvedev, and at the chain’s inception this romantic propagandist, Bernard-Henri Lévy. “I think this war was probably launched by two statesmen,” Lévy told me. “Hillary Clinton and Sarkozy. More modestly, me.”*
and:
“No, no, no, no,” Lévy says. “My country, our country, for the first time since the American Revolution, has come to a foreign country to help a revolution, to help a war of liberation, and this is good, this is beautiful, this is noble …”
and:
“Pascal Bruckner, another French philosopher and often an ally of Lévy’s, notes that this is Lévy’s natural mode. “Elections, discussions with the unions, economic problems—all these problems do not interest him,” he says. What Lévy has instead is “a will to turn politics into an epic, and to abandon everything that is prosaic.”
Well, I’ve heard the approach unaffectionately termed “neo-neo-colonialism.” Is it working?
Is victory defined as freedom from the injustices of the tyrant? Was this the “wise” course as opposed to the invasion of Iraq (which is flaring into sectarian violence after withdrawal)…by properly distancing ourselves and by respecting the will of the Libyan people (or leaving them to their mess and alligning with Europe)? Or is that just because some folks agree with the principles and the less violent outcome is a bonus?
Are the architects of any war responsible for those outcomes?
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Here’s a Leo Strauss quote on Edmund Burke posted earlier. It’s a strange place to find ourselves with a Frenchman (of the Left) potentially at the helm of our foreign policy:
“What ever might have to be said about the propriety of Burke’s usage, it is here sufficient to note that, in judging the political leaders whom he opposed in the two most important actions of his life, he [sic Burke] traced their lack of prudence less to passion than to the intrusion of the spirit of theory into the field of politics.”
Addition: Of course, if he is actually at the helm of our foreign policy…
Related On This Site:…Bernhard Henri-Levy At The Daily Beast: ‘A Moral Tipping Point’…Charlie Rose Episode On Libya Featuring Bernhard Henri-Levy, Les Gelb And Others…From The New Yorker: ‘How Qaddafi Lost Libya’
From Foreign Affairs: ‘The Problem With Obama’s Decision To Leave Iraq’…Walter Russell Mead At The American Interest Online: ‘Obama’s War’
Yes, Edmund Burke opposed the French Revolution: Sunday Quotation: Edmund Burke On The French Revolution…