Another War

We're in one, and the WSJ's Bret Stephens is giddy.  Every time we promise to reduce our role in the world to something affordable and in our interests, another cause comes along that absolutely demands our championing it.  Bret Stephens gloats about the revival of neoconservatism, his metric of success apparently being how many humanitarian wars we can get involved in.  He explains how it happened:

"The moment the Libyans revolted, the U.S. could not have remained silent without doing violence to bedrock American values. And so President Obama said Gadhafi must go.  The moment Mr. Obama said that, the administration could not be indifferent to the outcome...The moment Gadhafi turned the tide and threatened to massacre his opponents, the administration was bound to try to stop him for purely humanitaryian reasons.  And so Mr. Obama pressed for international action, even as he hoped the U.S. would not have to be directly involved.  The moment it became clear that there would be no such intervention without U.S. involvement, the U.S. became involved...Sooner or later [the administration] will figure out that any road that doesn't lead to Gadhafi's death, imprisonment or exile...can only mean the de facto partition of Libya, or Gadhafi's survival, or a long civil war from which the West cannot easily disentangle itself....Put simply, regime change is the only viable option..."

Doing violence to bedrock American values is kind of a vague phrase- Gadhafi has been a tyrant decades, and for the last several years he has been a guy we've tolerated; and people are slaughtered all the time all over the world without us bothering about it.  Bill Clinton won re-election after the Rwanda genocide happened, "violence to bedrock American values" or not.  Specifically what would happen if Obama didn't speak out about Libya is a bunch of people would harrangue him to do so, as was the case with Iran.  But if you give the humanitarians an inch, as Stephens indicates, they'll take a mile.  And no amount of failure or cost or loss of life resulting from our wars is enough to prevent them from dragging us in the next time, as Stephens also suggests.