Assad's massacres in Syria make one wish for a benign world government that could prevent the horrors, or even for divine intervention.
But neither will happen. Some on the left respond to the omission by "demanding" that the USA and other big powers act like a benign world government, or deity.
They are smoking the "liberal-interventionist" opium pipe. Many of them, including Nick Cohen of the Observer, did that over Iraq.
Reality trips them up. Aghast, Cohen in his Observer column of 28 May 2012 quoted an un-named kindred spirit: "If you want to know what price a great man will sell his legacy for, it's $13 million".
$13 million is the sum Nursultan Nazarbayev has paid Tony Blair for doing PR for Nazarbayev's brutal dictatorship in Kazakhstan.
Cohen is aghast because he thought that "when set against his enemies, Tony Blair was an admirable man".
He was admirable, says Cohen, because of his "liberal interventionism" in Sierra Leone, Kosova, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
"Blair replied [to critics] in admirably plain language. His commitment to democracy and human rights was absolute". Not so absolute, evidently!
It was always only apologetics or fantasy to claim that in Sierra Leone, and in tagging along with the USA in Kosova, Afghanistan, and Iraq, Blair was providing a workable approximation to a democratic world government, policing the world's criminals.
As we wrote in 2006, the Cohen line "was a cross between Peter Cook's A L Wisty and H G Wells, with his fantasies on world government... The world doesn't work like that...
The US intervention in Indo-China was never a piece of crude old-style imperialism. Those responsible for American involvement had all sorts of good liberal objectives, like establishing democracy, keeping the totalitarians at bay, etc. They were, almost certainly, more genuinely well-intentioned and purer in their motives than those responsible for the invasion of Iraq...
The US wound up committing crimes against the Vietnamese and others for which in a well-ordered H G Wells-ideal world, Kissinger would have been hanged as a war criminal and not awarded a Nobel Prize...
Take the First World War. Even people on the right now say harsh things about that. In fact, a good case could be and was made out for seeing that war on the Allied side as a necessary international police operation against the "Prussianism" of Germany and Austro-Hungary...
The Fabian socialist Wells accepted that case. He, I believe, coined the slogan, 'The War To End War'...
In fact, those playing world policemen with Germany were themselves imperialists... When Germany was overcome, they carved up its colonies to their own advantage. They imposed a predatory peace on the defeated...
The US and Britain do what they will do for their own reasons, in their own way, with their own methods. Look at the bloody mess they have made in Iraq!... Look at the large-scale economic looting, for instance...
If [the US and Britain] do something useful, humanitarian, etc, socialists... will note it, not denounce it, and be pleased at it. We won't surrender our overview, either of them or of ourselves and our responsibilities as socialists. We will not fall into the witch-doctor-dressing-in-green-to-make-the-Spring-come-back delusion that we can propound a "progressive" programme of action for them to carry out. We will not give them political credence or credit in advance, still less attempt to merge our political identity with theirs..."
[Sean Matgamna, www.workersliberty.org/node/6477]
