Thanks for your opinions. I don't share them.
You don't share them because you have spent too long shaping reality to fit the opinions you need to have. Look at the world for what it is and not how you want it to be and you would find that your opinions contradict. Your self-appointed chair of conscience has tied the idea of good morality to international law, which serves to protect "stability" at all costs. The idea that genocide and civilian slaughter, contained within a soveriegn border, is acceptable because international law allows for the apathy of greater nations who pick and choose when to apply morality. The truth is that our morality is tied up in our interests.
This is why preserving Europe's stability by addressing "Yugoslavia" mattered and the "stability" of the African region (concerning Rwanda or Sudan) did not. And do you know why Bosnia was labeled a genocide by the UN and Rwanda was not? It's because international law commands that Western nations, especially the U.S., must act. How did you define your morality here? And how much of our trades/economic interests would have been threatened if Hitler had kept the Holocaust merely behind soveriegn German borders?
And how quick are you to flog America for supporting dictators during the Cold War even though it served the UN international mission of "stability?" Today, you preach about how instable the region is without those dictators. How are you reconciling your idea of morality and international law evenly from one era to another?
It is a myth that law equals morality. Laws serve to organize people. The Rule of Law offers guidance. In the end it allows people to shelve good morality. It allows people to be lazy. Ask any judge how much work goes into his job. He merely relies on the efforts of the past (precedence) and he lazily makes decisions to close dockets. Justice and good morality often doesn't even come in to play. International law offers the same thing to governments. This is why powerful governments of goodwill can point at "white" Bosnia and not at "black" Rwanda. The law allows it. So where's the morality?
Martial Law inside Iraq for the first six months would have saved lives. But the stigma of martial law makes people uncomfortable so they tie the topic to a false sense of morality as the streets run with blood. The streets run with blood in Syria right now, but powerful nations of goodwill have allowed Russia and China (through international law) to dictate morality just to preserve the "stability" of their Syrian business partners.
And the greatest contradiction of all is how we overlook (or forgive victory) the attocities of the past and have set the bar with the Greatest Generation. The Greatest Generation dropped two atomic bombs on civilian cities. They fire bombed Dressdan on the way to Berlin. Marines in the Pacific followed the lessons they learned from the Japanese at Guadel Canal and rarely took prisoners. Despite the mass slaughter of civilians this generation is awarded the title of "Greatness." Today, we chose to villify and demonize ourselves for three watreboarding cases and a frat party incident at Abu Ghraib. Certainly something to concern ourselves with, but hardly worth the depraved illogical criticisms that tidal waved into this generation. Perhaps we should have just dropped a couple nuclear bombs on a couple cities instead or rounded up Muslim citizens into containment camps.
We have become a people that greatly attach our morality to the opinions of the world. The same world that needed saving three times in the 21st century because of their knack for genocide, devisation, and Leftist ideologies. The reason we were the ones that did the saving is not simply because we have two oceans separating us from the old world. It is because our greater sense of right and wrong went against the grain of the world. We stood on the outside of their world and injected it with what we used to be. Today, we have lost our way. Today, we choose to preserve the monarchies (dictators) instead of overthrowing them. Today, we enslave ourselves to outdated international laws to satisfy our own selfish apathies with the guise of morality as our guide. We think simply and criticize all measures to focus of long term tactics in order to deal with the world because short term temporary tactics are easier to understand. We have a media that focuses on criticism (not truth) to satisfy people's cynism who follow mindlessly behind the politician that say's "Hey stupid, follow me."
I find that most of today's problem (for the American people) is that they are clueless to their history and of the big picture missions that have been undertaken for the last two hundred years. We have trained ourselves through improper academics to focus on Germany, not Europe - to focus on Japan, not the Pacific - to focus on Korea and Vietnam not the Cold War. And the Gulf War had everything to do with only Kuwait, right? We proved that America can play in the global gutter, come home, and carry on with our high values and morality. But we lost our way over the last few decades. Today, we prove that we can't play in the global gutter properly because we apply a haphazard idea of morality to the world that the world rejects. We wind up making our efforts more difficult because we are afraid of our image, despite not dropping a nuclear bomb since the "Greatest Generation" saved our loudest critics and keeping the world from another catastrophe ever since.
We are a confused people because we assume to be able to have morality while following international law. This is fine for the rest of the world who needs a League of nations or a United Nations to force them behave. But it is not fine for us and this is why we struggle with words like "soveriegn," "stability," "morality." We truly are a nation of goodwill that may have the capability of recognizing past mistakes and the ability to shift society to erase repeat, but we screw up everytime we try to push that morality across the oceans.
History is clear. Base your opinions on truth, not the Leftist fantasy of humanity and reality.