Moral Authority
James Taranto, writing for the Wall St. Journal, tried to anticipate an argument by anti-war types:
Here’s what’s going to happen next: Someone will argue that America lacks the "moral standing" to oppose Russian intervention in Georgia, because we intervened in Iraq "without U.N. approval." When the U.S. liberated Iraq, of course, it was acting to enforce the Security Council’s own resolutions. So America’s acting to overcome U.N. fecklessness will be invoked as an excuse for Russia’s unprovoked violation of another country’s sovereignty. U.N. idolatry runs counter to the U.N.’s own purported reason for existing.
As blogger TigerHawk notes, though, they may not ever make that argument because they won’t have much of anything to say. After checking off the many groups that have nothing to say about it (and crediting the one that did), he concludes:
So far, at least, it is safe to conclude that these organizations are not so much anti-war as they are anti-American and anti-Israeli. It is useful to clear that up.
Since that post, two sites have said at least something about it. Democracy Now has conducted an interview with a retired Air Force Colonel about the history in the region. The Stop the War Coalition has an opinion piece that essentially states that Georgia is as much to blame for the conflict. But there is still basically no real outrage. Pretty much all quiet on the anti-war front. And if the only wars that they are against, or even bother to work up a sweat about, are those involving the US or Israel, then I’d say they need to relabel themselves or lose their own moral authority.
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