If war wasn’t so serious. If the Iraq invasion and occupation had not been such a tragedy, and if the ongoing Georgia-Russia “conflict” had not already cost so many lives and did not have the potential of exploding into an unmitigated disaster, the following quote could almost be funny. For now, let’s say it is a most clever, imprecise, and incomplete statement
Our U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad, is reported to have said during a lively exchange with Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin on whether the Russians had “regime change” in mind for Georgia:
“The days of overthrowing leaders by military means in Europe — those days are gone.”
It is clever, because Khalilzad slipped in the words “in Europe,” thereby excluding from the debate–by geography–the U.S. overthrow of Iraq’s leader by military means, in 2003.
It is imprecise and incomplete, because if one does take into account–despite Khalilzad’s parsing–the overthrow of Iraq’s leader by military means, “those days are gone” should be: “We declare those five years, four months, and 20 days to be gone….until the next time we deem it necessary to install democracy anywhere in the world.”
If only it wasn’t so serious. And, how much more moral, diplomatic and “honest broker” authority we could have in helping to resolve this grave conflict over South Ossetia, if only “those days” were really gone.
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.