Thread by @Vinncent

You should always identify when a country is committing serious abuses. But it's much harder to identify an action another state can take that will improve, rather than worsen, the situation. The fatal flaw of US foreign policy ideology is to ignore the difference between the two

It works both ways. If you opposed the invasion of Iraq, you could be (and were) accused of ignoring Saddam's crimes. Inversely, mainstream discourse usually ignores abuses committed around the world until it is time for the US government to Do Something (anything at all will do)

Whereas, the morally and tactically coherent position is that serious crimes are being committed all over the place, all the time, and precisely for that reason we need to careful about choosing which actors and actions will facilitate the reduction of harm

And, spoiler alert! Very often the US military-industrial complex is not the best vehicle for the provision of human rights. You only have to scan wikipedia for a few minutes to figure it out, but somehow the voices pointing this out have to re-explain themselves every 5 years

This automatic leap of faith is intensely USAmerican. No one in Chile or Nigeria picks up the paper to read about abuses somewhere and understands it as drum-beating for war. Communists in Manila have no problem opposing US imperialism and recognizing abuses committed by Beijing

Anyways I don't know how to fix this, but I often feel we need to do something about Do Somethingism