In the wake of the flawlessly executed rescue operation that liberated fifteen hostages (including three Americans and the cause celebre Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt), who had been held in the jungle, in chains around their necks, by the Colombian terrorist group FARC for more than five years, Charles Krauthammer describes the hard problems facing the world that have only hard-power solutions:
Everyone knows it will take the hardest of hard power to remove the oppressors in Zimbabwe, Burma, Sudan and other godforsaken places where the bad guys have the guns and use them. Indeed, as the Zimbabwean opposition leader suggested (before quickly retracting) from his hideout in the Dutch embassy — Europe specializes in providing haven for those fleeing the evil that Europe does nothing about — the only solution is foreign intervention.
And who’s going to intervene? The only country that could is the country that in the last two decades led coalitions that liberated Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. Having sacrificed much blood and treasure in its latest endeavor — the liberation of 25 million Iraqis from the most barbarous tyranny of all, and its replacement with what is beginning to emerge as the Arab world’s first democracy — and having earned near-universal condemnation for its pains, America has absolutely no appetite for such missions.
And so the innocent languish, as did Betancourt, until some local power, inexplicably under the sway of the Bush notion of hard power, gets it done — often with the support of the American military. “Behind the rescue in a jungle clearing stood years of clandestine American work,” explained The Washington Post. “It included the deployment of elite U.S. Special Forces … a vast intelligence-gathering operation … and training programs for Colombian troops.”
Upon her liberation, Betancourt offered profuse thanks to God and the Virgin Mary, to her supporters and the media, to France and Colombia and just about everybody else. As of this writing, none to the United States.
The United States will get no thanks. Nor should the United States expect any thanks in this political and geopolitical climate.
Nevertheless, the United States should continue to do this kind of job.
Anybody disagree?
Everybody’s doing it. I’m not really interested in playing, but what the hell.
I think Cho was a certifiable crazy who was allowed to roam loose in a society that is loath to stigmatize the mentally ill and that has no policy for helping them or for keeping the rest of us safe from their erratic, or much worse, behavior. A law that allows a crazy person to buy a gun without the gun-shop owner being aware of the mental-health problem of the potential buyer is definitely a problem. At the same time, I have seen many, many guns for sale in rural flea markets in which there is no need to show a license before the transaction is made, so I know that gun laws do nothing to prevent people from obtaining guns.
Also: I wonder about the value of the tradeoff. We may have stopped stigmatizing the mentally ill (I don’t think so, but that was the idea of emptying out psychiatric hospitals and ensuring mental patients’ rights to privacy), but by failing to guide and manage the mentally ill, we seem to facilitate their out-of-control behavior, at a big cost to society at large. That someone as troubled as Cho was allowed to live among the other students at Virginia Tech—that professors who complained about him were rebuffed by administrators, who were afraid to get involved for fear of being sued—is a massive, unaddressed problem.
That’s rather a lot to say for someone who claimed to have nothing to say on the subject. Oh well.
Here’s a round-up of more outraged thinking on the subject:
At Pajamas Media, Oleg Atbashian asks:
Good question! Then he goes and writes an extremely tendentious piece about the mindless blame-rich-white-privileged-America-first drivel that’s spewed out by idiots and partisans on the left. [Not helpful at all. --ed.]
Adam Gopnik, writing in the New Yorker, writes the representative pious liberal’s plea—how long must we wait?—for gun control. [Spare me. --ed.]
That great forensic psychiatrist and bazillion-selling crime fiction novelist Jonathan Kellerman says, Forget about gun control and start locking up the crazies! They shouldn’t be walking the streets! If they’re crazy, we should say so and keep them from hurting the rest of us. [He's got a point---a minor one. --ed.]
Last—in a category all her own—is Katty Kay a BBC “presenter” and a caricature of a journalist, who was a guest on the Chris Matthews show yesterday.
Unfortunately, the transcript isn’t available yet, so I’ll have to paraphrase. After she (and the rest of the panel) endorsed NBC’s airing and releasing to other outlets Cho’s “manifesto,”—a position I continue to disagree with,*** despite the compelling points that Jeff Jarvis made on his site and on Reliable Sources yesterday—Kay took it one step further.
Using the lunatic, scripted rantings and ravings of this sick guy at face value (let me underscore this point: she accepted the word of a paranoid schizophrenic as the basis for the “truth” about him and his actions) and proceeded to critique American society, so full of bullies, dontcha know, from a class struggle point of view. Did I mention that Ms. Kay is British? (A weak week ago, she was even more unbearable and overbearing on a different subject; Matthews’s site sucks, though, so I can’t even copy and paste from it—lucky you.)
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*** To clarify: Since NBC has numerous media platforms on which it can release its “content,” I think it would have shown good editorial judgment to talk liberally about the “manifesto” on air, perhaps show pictures in which Cho is not pointing a gun at viewers, and make it available for viewing on the Web. But then I’m just a viewer (though not anymore!)
I am the mother of two young adults. This picture made me cry:
Students console one another in front of campus War Memorial.
