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Originally Posted by
Seraph
No I do not agree it is possible to be in favour of intervention by anti-parallel reasoning, or the converse, or reductio ad absurdum or any of those kinds of things.
Wait, let me get this clear. You don't believe it's possible for humanitarian concerns to be a motivation for supporting intervention? Is that really what you're saying?
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No, it is not essentially what I’m doing.
That's exactly what your doing, as your quote above so ably demonsrates.
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I am against intervention because of the real death, injury, damage and destruction caused by Nato.
Right, but by your own simplistic logic that means you are in favour of the real death, injury, damage and destruction that would have been caused by Gadaffi putting down the uprising in the absence of an intervention.
Of course you're not really in favour those things, we both know that, but that is the mirror image of the accusation you keep making against your opponents.
I tell you what I think. I think you don't really give a hoot for the poor Libyans. I think you're crying crocodile tears for them as a justification for opposing something you would have opposed anyway, no matter the circumstances, simply because you hate NATO. I think your opposition to the intervention is cynical, opportunistic and immoral.
How do you like them apples?
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Intervention has been argued about for a long time in many other cases. One of the problems is something like the idea of turn-about is fair play. Every one objects to intervention being done to them in their own country.
No, everyone doesn't object. Those who lose something from intervention object, those who gain something rather like it. The South Ossetians didn't object to Russian intervention in Georgia. The Kosovan Albanians didn't object to NATO intervention in Serbia. The American revolutionaries didn't object to French intervention in the War of Independence. The anti-Gadaffi Libyans don't object to the current intervention.
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It is hypocrisy to assert acceptability for intervention in other’s conflicts, but deny it’s applicability to one’s own country in parallel circumstances. I’m not hysterical, nor febrile. Intervention is an extremely dangerous precedent.
I totally agree that it's dangerous. But so is civil war.