I want the American people to know that the use of force is not our first choice, and it’s not a choice that I make lightly. But we can’t stand idly by when a tyrant tells his people that there will be no mercy.
I have never been more disappointed for the Harvard Law School in my life, than to read this binary clap-trap from an alumnus who went on to teach the discipline in Chicago. How unutterably like the boy's cultiv-ation of the heroic scowl against inquiries into his nakedness, is this false, belligerent rectitude. What on earth do they feed the Presidents of that nation, that every single one of them feels honour-bound to launch at least an air strike of his own? They feed him self-love, Mr Murdoch, the revolting meal of America's divine right of violence. We sympathise with the boy's menacing discomfiture, but of a statesman we have the right to expect greater ease.
President of the United States
Brazil, 19 March 2011
and there's the rub.
ReplyDeleteI am deeply ashamed of this Administration for enunciating a prodigally loose, porous, and self-incriminating doctrine on foreign "intervention," whether or not calculated to appeal to our culture; and I mean that. From the point of view of a fundamental purpose of this page, it is not unfair to the insecurity of adolescence to lay our horrible habit of war alongside it, when it is plain that this is exactly the mechanism this policy destroys without blinking, and which is the most vulnerable to simplifying seductions of "honour."
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