Ezra Klein of Not Geniuses says in this post that criticizing the selectively-applied "humanitarian" rationalization for the Iraq war "fall[s] deeply into one of those 'the perfect is the enemy of the good' pits...." He uses as a starting point this post from Demosthenes, which asked "if we're attacking countries that brutalize their people, invade other countries, have WMDs and are big regional threats, then shouldn't the U.S. be invading China right now?" Ezra replies using a hypothetical of a passerby intervening in a street mugging - when there is a good chance the intervention will help - and choosing not to intervene in an armed robbery - when there is a good chance intervention won't help and the passerby will get killed in the bargain. From this, Ezra concludes that not intervening in China doesn't cast the Iraq war in a morally dubious light.
From one perspective, Ezra is right. Someone who, in good faith, thought it important to liberate the Iraqi people from Saddam's rule might come to the conclusion that an invasion was justified. (I'll leave aside for the moment that the U.S. doesn't seem to have a clue about how to prevent either someone worse from taking over or for chaos to reign. From an intention standpoint, that's irrelevant.)
In reality, though, the people who initiated this war never acted in good faith. They used the humanitarian rationale selectively, in order to disguise their own ends (and after the WMD rationale turned out to be wholly unsupported by the facts.) This is akin to intervening in one street mugging because you expect the victim to give you a reward and refusing to intervene in another because you expect no such benefit to yourself. That's not morally right, it's amoral hypocrisy.
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