We now have great enthusiasm on the left for an invasion of Burma. While Burma is a humanitarian disaster, it is of no strategic significance to us. George Bush I was pressed to land troops in Somalia in 1991 to protect food that was being stolen by gangs from UN famine relief efforts. The left was wholeheartedly in favor of that invasion.
Then Bill Clinton decided to do some nation building and got his nose bloodied when sluggish generals got too predictable and the Ranger force was ambushed. Clinton quickly beat a retreat and Osama bin Laden decided we were a paper tiger.
Clinton loudly criticized Bush’s reluctance to intervene in Bosnia, although, when it came his turn to use force, US soldiers were ordered to patrol with empty machine guns on their humvees. When three were captured, Clinton decided to avoid ground troops in any subsequent action against Serbia. The result was civilian casualties that no one complained about and bombs hitting the Chinese embassy. Notice that all these stories use “NATO” as the source of the bombs. Do you think the press would have been so delicate if George W Bush had been president ?
Even Foreign Affairs, no right wing source, called the policy what it was: Foreign Policy as Social Work. Democrats do not care about strategy and national security; they want to “do good works.” Consequently, when George W Bush takes on a foreign policy dilemma like Iraq was in 2001 and makes a decision to “cut the Gordan Knot,” he gets hammered by the Left.
Such is politics in the US in the 21st century. God knows what a president Obama would have in store for us. He would probably invade Canada to stop them from refining oil shale.