United Liberty

Back in 2006, George Clooney went on Real Time with Bill Maher in order to make the case for intervening in Darfur. Clooney compared his vision of intervention to the NATO bombing in Kosovo under then President Bill Clinton. Clooney is and was then a fierce opponent of President Bush’s Iraq policy.

The logical inconsistency there flabbergasted me then, and I still hold that view. Like Iraq, Sudan is ruled by an Arab regime empowered by oil money. Like Iraq, Sudan has been known to be more than a little hospitable to terrorists. And like the 2003 intervention in Iraq, and like various other troublespots throughout the globe, intervention in Sudan has serious potential of degenerating into a military quagmire.

For years, the Left has talked again and again about a coming war in Iran. Seymor Hersh has written a dozen or so pieces about it for the New Yorker over the years. Nothing has really come of it. The Ayatollahs are still in power, and Ahmadinejad is still talking about throwing the Jews into the bathtub.

That doesn’t mean that we have nothing to fear of another war after Iraq. There’s another oil-rich Arab regime that hawks and doves alike would like to see overthrown, the Khartoum regime in Sudan. As long as Hersh has been warning about an impending invasion of Iran, lefties like George Clooney have been clamoring for military action to stop the genocide in Darfur.