Lopeyland

The United States believes strongly in what you call soft power, the value of democracy, the value of the free economic system, the value of making sure that each citizen is free and free to pursue their own God-given ambitions and to use the talents that they were given by God. And that is what we say to the rest of the world. That is why we participated in establishing a community of democracy within the Western Hemisphere. It’s why we participate in all of these great international organizations.

There is nothing in American experience or in American political life or in our culture that suggests we want to use hard power. But what we have found over the decades is that unless you do have hard power ? and here I think you’re referring to military power ? then sometimes you are faced with situations that you can’t deal with.

I mean, it was not soft power that freed Europe. It was hard power. And what followed immediately after hard power? Did the United States ask for dominion over a single nation in Europe? No. Soft power came in the Marshall Plan. Soft power came with American GIs who put their weapons down once the war was over and helped all those nations rebuild. We did the same thing in Japan.

So our record of living our values and letting our values be an inspiration to others I think is clear. And I don’t think I have anything to be ashamed of or apologize for with respect to what America has done for the world.

We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last hundred years and we?ve done this as recently as the last year in Afghanistan and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in, and otherwise we have returned home to seek our own, you know, to seek our own lives in peace, to live our own lives in peace. But there comes a time when soft power or talking with evil will not work where, unfortunately, hard power is the only thing that works.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110003834

In part:
“I am fully aware in saying this that the present U.S. administration has made itself an obstacle in various ways to the development of a more robust and comprehensive framework of international law. But the thing cuts both ways. The war to depose Saddam Hussein and his criminal regime was not of a piece with that. It didn’t have to be opposed by all the forces that did in fact oppose it. It could, on the contrary, have been supported–by France and Germany and Russia and the U.N., and by a mass democratic movement of global civil society. Just think about that. Just think about the kind of precedent it would have set for other genocidal, or even just lavishly murderous, dictatorships–instead of all those processions of shame across the world’s cities, and whose success would have meant the continued abandonment of the Iraqi people.

It is, in any event, such realities–the brutalizing and murder by the Baathist regime of tens upon tens of thousands of its own nationals–that the recent war has brought to an end. It should have been supported for this reason, irrespective of the reasons (concerning weapons of mass destruction) that George Bush and Tony Blair put up front themselves; though it is disingenuous of the war’s critics to speak now as if the humanitarian case for war formed no part of the public rationale of the Coalition, since it was clearly articulated by both the president and the prime minister more than once.

Here is one approximate measure of the barbarities of the Baathist regime I have just referred to. It comes not from the Pentagon, or anyone in the Bush administration, or from Tony Blair or those around him. It comes from Human Rights Watch. According to Human Rights Watch, during 23 years of Saddam’s rule some 290,000 Iraqis disappeared into the regime’s deadly maw, the majority of these reckoned to be now dead. Rounding this number down by as much as 60,000 to compensate for the “reckoned to be,” that is 230,000. It is 10,000 a year. It is 200 people every week. And I’ll refrain from embellishing with details, which you should all know, as to exactly how a lot of these people died.

Had the opposition to the war succeeded, this is what it would have postponed–and postponed indefinitely–bringing to an end. This is how almost the whole international left expressed its moral solidarity with the Iraqi people. Worse still, some sections of the left seemed none too bothered about making common cause with, marching alongside, fundamentalist religious bigots and known racists; and there were also those who dismissed Iraqi voices in support of the war as coming from American stooges–a disgraceful lie.”