Vice President Joseph Biden argued on Thursday for forceful and early international intervention to prevent governments from committing atrocities, but didn't explicitly make the case for such intervention in Libya.
"I got in trouble when I said, during the Bosnia crisis, coming back from meeting Milosevic... that when a state engages in atrocity, it forfeits its sovereignty," Biden told an audience at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., where he was speaking at an event honoring the late Congressman Tom Lantos.
I'll refrain from wondering if we are all NeoCons working on the Bush freedom agenda, now (and just so you are clear, there's nothing "neo" about me--always been conservative. Not that there's anything wrong with that of course).
But I would like to know--if an atrocity-committing state loses its sovereignty--whose sovereignty replaces it? Because if nobody has sovereignty, don't we get Somalia? Or the Democratic Republic of Congo (former Zaire)?
I only ask this inconvenient question because there are a lot of people who claim to want to do good to stop an evil dictator early on (cougheugenerobinsoncough), but who would abandon the project with an equal amount of self-righteous blather when the cost of imposing a new sovereignty over bloody enemies gets too high for them to bear.
Heck, pretty soon those people are calling for us to split the country in three pieces and bug out.
