Don't Mind the Genocide in the Corner

Barack Obama says "Genocide? What genocide? Oh... that genocide. Ah, don't worry about it":

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Thursday the United States cannot use its military to solve humanitarian problems and that preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn't a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there.

"Well, look, if that's the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now — where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife — which we haven't done," Obama said in an interview with The Associated Press.

"We would be deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven't done. Those of us who care about Darfur don't think it would be a good idea," he said.

The big difference, however, is that we would be causing a genocide in Iraq, rather than intervening in one that's already on-going. I don't think that's a subtle distinction. And besides, is he really comfortable saying that the U.S. ought not use its military to prevent genocide? What else should we be using it for? I thought the biggest failures of U.S. foreign policy in the 1990s was that we didn't intervene in Rwanda, and that we intervened too slowly in the former Yugoslavia. I thought that most people, especially on the left, thought that we should have intervened in Darfur.

Is Sen. Obama a closet isolationist?