The Iraq Defense

At the end of this superb op-ed, Eugene Robinson writes:

How can President Bush preach to the world about democracy, about transparency, about the rule of law, and at the same time disregard national and international law at will? What message can Vladimir Putin be hearing? Or the dictators in Beijing? Or the mullahs in Tehran?

The entire piece is worth reading, but the short paragraph above got me thinking about something I saw on Nightline Monday. In Sudan, ongoing massacres in Darfur have to date drawn some world sympathy--but not much else. A correspondent interviewed Sudan's Interior Minister, i.e., the highest ranking government official directly culpable for the massacres short of the head of government. His response was telling--the kind of bloviating common to Latin America in the 70's and 80's, i.e., "There is a war going on...and, in a war, people die," but he also pulled out a card bound to become a standard defense for any Pipsqueak Pasha or Two-bit Thug: The United States is doing the same thing in Iraq.

And, we are.

I guess you could say at this point that we're a banana republic on steroids. Run by Banana Republicans.