A Muffled Trumpet.

• Position: Humanitarian intervention

When Bill Clinton went before the United Nations on September 21, he sounded a muffled trumpet. Two days before, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan had urged the Security Council to act more swiftly to stop civil wars and prevent slaughters around the globe. When Clinton got to the podium, he tried to have it two ways. He made pains to downplay the power of the world community: "Promising too much can be as cruel as caring too little." But he also sought out the moral high ground: "When we are faced with deliberate organized campaigns to murder whole peoples, or expel them from their land, the care of victims is important, but not enough. We should work to end the violence." He added: "Simply because we have different interests in different parts of the world does not mean we can be indifferent to the destruction of innocents in any part of the world."

Clinton's comments, along with the varied interventions by the United States in Kosovo and East Timor, raise serious questions not only about the hypocrisy of U.S. policy but also about the advisability of humanitarian interventions in general. When, if ever, should progressives support such interventions?

For any informed citizen of the world, Clinton's claim not to be "indifferent to the destruction of innocents" should sound obscene. U.S. policy toward Iraq, for instance, cannot possibly be any more callous. The Clinton Administration insists that the Security Council keep imposing economic sanctions that have killed more than 500,000 Iraqi children and continue to take a toll of several thousand more per month. And, as Zachary Fink reported last month in these pages, U.S. planes continue to bomb Iraqi civilians with the utmost indifference.

U.S. policy toward the Kurds is also suffused with indifference. The Turkish government--a NATO member and big U.S. ally--has waged a nasty war against the Kurds over the last fifteen years that has cost 30,000 lives and created more than a million refugees. Yet the United States has not attempted to stop this war, nor has it called on the United Nations to intervene. Instead, the United States has sent billions of dollars in aid, training, and military equipment to Ankara.

"Indifference" is too gentle a word to describe U.S. policy toward Colombia. The Colombian government has been at war with guerrillas for thirty years, and that fighting has cost the lives of tens of thousands of civilians. Finally a Colombian president, Andres Pastrana, sits down to...