Great summing up of the lessons some of the left have learnt and some of them haven’t from Johann Hari which ends like this:
“The final lesson, I think, is that America can act for good as well as bad. Some of the generation of left-wingers formed intellectually during the Vietnam War have never reconsidered their then justified belief that the US is simply evil. America has not had a Damascene revelation since then: it is still doing obscene things in, for example, Colombia. But there are other American instincts and foreign-policy traditions, and some of them are good; the good US acted in Kosovo to prevent ethnic cleansing on the European continent, and it acted in Iraq this month.
Our job on the left is not to try to stop America from ever acting; one of the great tragedies of the 1990s, the Rwandan genocide, wasn’t caused by too much America but by its failure to act. No, our job is to try to steer this colossus towards spreading the values of its own American revolution: the overthrow of tyranny and the birth of democracy.”
