Burundi seems to be sliding into chaos. Innocent civilians are being killed in droves. News reports from the capital, Bujumbura, are both sickening and horrifying. Everyone wants the international community to do something. It is human nature to be revolted by such human suffering and desire to do something to save the lives of innocents who become victims of such madness. But this human instinct for kindness is rarely a basis for good policy. On the contrary, contemporary history is replete with examples of interventions to save human lives that make a bad situation worse.
In 2003, the U.S.government and her "coalition of the willing" overthrew Iraq's President Saddam Hussein claiming (among other things) that they wanted to remove a dictator who was killing his own people and establish a democracy. This utopian dream collapsed on the blood-soaked streets of Baghdad in a brutal civil war that the U.S. allies lost. There was another foreign intervention to "save the people of Libya" from Muammar Gadhafi led by the UK and France with the U.S. behind them. Today the state in Libya has collapsed and anarchy rules that land. As I write this article, there is an outcry that the government of Bashar Al Assad in Syria is killing its own people. But foreign intervention to "save lives" has inflicted more death and human suffering.
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