An important distinction

Matthew Yglesias makes the important and often-overlooked distinction between intervening militarily to stop ongoing crimes like genocide and intervening for the sake of regime-change toward democracy:

Operations of that sort are clearly different from operations aimed at halting an ongoing genocide or preventing an imminent one. There is a huge amount of space, both practical and conceptual, between a genocidal government and a democratic one. The liberal hawks who’ve been trying to assimilate the Iraq case to Kosovo and Bosnia [are] being willfully obtuse about this. “Morally,” wrote Leon Wieseltier in his article “Against Innocence: A Liberal’s War, Too” (TNR 3/3/03) “there is no significant difference between Halabja and Srebrenica.” And there isn’t. There was, however, a huge difference between them chronologically. The United States did not have the option in March, 2003 of sending a couple hundred thousand troops back in time to prevent Saddam’s genocide of the Kurds.

[…]

At any rate, this is all just to say that I think the way out of this thicket is pretty clear. If you have a good reason to invade and occupy an area, then, sure, you should try to build a good government there (that beats trying to build a bad one). Stopping an actual genocide is a good reason for war, as are genuine national security threats. Beyond that, promoting democracy is good. But there are way more democracies today than there were in 1945, or even 1975, and virtually none of that was achieved through forcible regime-change.

This is good stuff. And, despite my quasi-isolationist leanings, I’m not opposed in principle to the U.S. acting (preferably with allies) to put a stop to genocide or similar crimes. But, as Yglesias rightly points out, this is a far cry from “regime change” as an end in itself. (Though I’m not convinced the U.S. needed to intervene in Kosovo. Moreover, if intervention was called for it should’ve been handled by the Europeans. That, however, is part of the broader argument I’d want to make for the U.S. to pull back from its security commitments to countries that are perfectly capable of defending themselves and/or dealing with regional conflicts if need be.)