The Immorality of the Left 2

Ralph Peters writes about Hotel Rwanda, a new movie about the massacres that took place there during the Clinton Administration.

Only one thing troubles me about "Hotel Rwanda": Those on the left will see this film, shake their heads . . . and conclude they've done their duty by spending a couple of bucks at the multiplex. The one thing the left won't take from the film is a sense of its moral bankruptcy.

The left is blind to the suffering it condones. But every ranking member of the Clinton administration should live in shame not only at Clinton's reluctance to intervene in Rwanda, but at his outright obstruction of efforts to address the problem in the U.N. Security Council (you know you've hit a moral bottom when the United Nations looks more virtuous).

And yet, the same people who are "shaking their heads" from this are the same ones who are now protesting US involvement in Iraq. Saddam killed more people than were killed in Rwanda, yet the Left insists that we should have left Saddam alone; that it was none of our business.

It's a wonderful thing to be an idealist, but to be one successfully requires embracing practical means, not slogans. The leftist catechism that military intervention is always bad (less bad, though, when initiated by a Democrat) means turning away from the pleas of those marked for death.

The left had a grand time with the abuses in Abu Ghraib prison. But I didn't meet a single anti-war activist in Iraq last year, when I toured a network of torture chambers Saddam's regime had used to butcher the Kurds.

Leftists are always happy to weep over corpses, but they find it an inconvenience to save the living.