Thursday, May 8, 2014

I Don't Have a Charitable Light for This, Glenn Greenwald.

When I consult even my most cynical side, and I have a very cynical side, there is still no part of me that thinks wanting to intervene on the behalf of a couple hundred adolescent women who might otherwise be sold into the very worst of slavery (because what, after all, does anyone suppose the market is for adolescent girls?) could be anything but appropriately intentioned.

I think a lot of non-interventionism is founded in the sense that nations can and should be responsible to settle their own shit as a kind of test of whether they've earned the stripes of their sovereignty, but it is also true that in the absence of law, atrocities occur. I can't buy an argument that what happens to these young ladies, because it isn't happening in my country, doesn't affect me at all. Those girls palpably affect me. They could be my own daughters, and were they, I would scour the earth and burn the obstacles between myself and my blood. That is not some idealistic sterile "Next Western Intervention". That is a human convention at work under the assertion that the selling of flesh and blood young women into a life of rape is disgusting. We might not be able to recover all the girls ever sold into bondage by barbarous straits, but we can do something, maybe, I hope, about these.

Although as an aside, I am not keen on the allegation that that our US State Dept had a duty to preempt anything of this sort. That, I think, is the real invitation to get things wrong. But now that we have this group of terrorists and kidnappers in an admitted wide scale plot, I am greatly in favor of sparing them in no regard in the hopes of recovering these lost girls.

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