MBD

In addition to not plunging needlessly into another country’s civil war, the Obama administration’s restraint on Libya so far has had another positive effect: it has revealed just how unhinged and fanatical many of the advocates of intervention are. Do these people really believe that every event in the world is the responsibility of the President of the United States, or is it just hyperbole to get the war they want? It seems that some of them really believe it. Laurent Gbagbo hasn’t given up his hold on power in Ivory Coast. Is the violence by Gbagbo supporters in Abidjan Obama’s responsibility, too?

None of the causes of WWII can be found in the Spanish Civil War. What is striking about the Spanish Civil War with the advantage of seventy-five years of hindsight is how significant some contemporaries thought it was and how largely unimportant (for everyone outside Spain) it proved to be.

we also withstood the tide in both the US and Europe for elevating experts to positions of authority in the political realm, where campaigners now argue that everything from drugs policy to social welfare should be entrusted to know-it-alls over apparently compromised elected politicians. The new expert caste is as great a threat to people’s democratic control over politics as aristocrats were in the past.