Who Is My Neighbor?

To analogize intervening in the internal affairs of other nations, even for such liberal-tugging reasons as genocide, an old and favorite shibboleth whose mere utterance seems to excuse, in the liberal imagination, any sort of foolishness, not to mention to obviate the laws of physics and all the lessons of history, to something like stopping a mugging is to engage in the lousiest sort of casuistry. The Sudan is not a person.

To interventionists seeking a case for so-called humanitarian intervention--often proposed and never practiced--the Darfur presents a possibility to deploy the troops free of any moral taint. It is good and evil, refugees and marauders, displaced people versus government-backed militias. Right? Right?

Clearly not. The Sudan is embroiled--and has been embroiled--in a complex civil conflict for many years. Would we plunge in, oblivious to language, culture, and indigenous folkways, which differ from tribe to tribe, village to village, region to region, and cordon off the refugee camps, putting Hummers in the way of horses. For how long? And then how do we send the displaced home? Who returns expropriated property? What is the legitimate government? What does intervention mean.

And on this point the proponents of intervention are no more capable of explaining the purpose and end-game of their wished-for police action than George W. Bush is of defining victory in Iraq. The interventionist sees a Bad Thing, and he conisders himself a Good Person, and for all its depredations and in spite of its history, he sees the United States as a Force For Good In The World, if only it wanted to be, and it is his utmost desire that the moral standing of his society be proven to him through its generous application of ordnance to Bad Guys.

The interventionist is apt to make improbable comparisons. If you see a crime in the street, is it not your duty to do something? Irrelevant. A mugging, a rape, or a murder is a discrete act; it does or does not take place. It is or isn't arrested. But a civil conflict, no matter what clarity distant observers believe they can discern between its moral and immoral actors, is not a discrete act. It is thousands and thousands of individual acts occuring over time and geography. Each act has a history; each actor has a past. There are questions of language and of culture, of full and partial loyalties, as well as of full and partial enmities. There are circumstances that will remain opaque to outsiders. A civil war is a web that doesn't easily come untangled simply because the Western conscience wishes to salve itself through international vigilantism. If we wish to incrementally improve lives around the world, we can buy and sell with them on fair and equitable terms, and we can reopen our borders. All else is folly. With guns.