If the report is accurate, House Foreign Affairs Chairman Tom Lantos offended a delegation of Dutch lawmakers by telling them:

“Europe was not as outraged by Auschwitz as by Guantanamo Bay.”

And:

“You have to help us, because if it was not for us you would now be a province of Nazi Germany.”

Lantos is a Hungarian survivor of the Holocaust. I can understand if he still has lingering bitterness. He might work on his diplomatic skills some, but I don’t really care that he lost his patience. And Lantos is no apologist for Guantanamo Bay…he probably lacks tolerance for sanctimony. I’m more interested in the right-wing cheerleading of Lantos’ comments. Of course, Lantos telling the Dutch that they have to help us because without us they would be a province of Nazi Germany is akin to calling the French ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys.’ It’s a variety of the ‘perpetual debt’ argument. Conservatives love this argument but it is not very compelling. What’s more interesting is the narrative they tell themselves.

Let’s talk about NATO, shall we? After liberating half of Europe in World War II, we set up NATO to protect that half from the Soviets. We did so because we did not want to have to climb through a bunch of sand and barbed wire again to take back the European continent from cheap-ass dictators.

About 10 years ago, the rest of NATO decided to bomb Yugoslavia — using our bombs, of course — to prevent the holocaust of some Islamic people. We went in. Slobodan Milosevic was no world threat, but any time we can liberate a people, we should do it.

The history here is basically accurate. But should we really ‘liberate’ people anywhere we ‘can’? Let’s break this down.

Who is ‘we’?
What is ‘liberation’?
What does ‘can’ mean in this context?

If ‘we’ means America, and America largely alone, that is going to limit the last category. We ‘can’ ‘liberate’ Grenada fairly easily. Can we liberate the Tibetans? For progressives ‘we’ means the international community, especially working through institutions like NATO and the United Nations. For conservatives, ‘we’ means America, and only America.

When we talk about ‘liberating’ people we tend to think of Eastern Europe, where millions were freed from Soviet domination, or of Western Europe from the yoke of Nazi Germany. But, as we have seen in Iraq, taking down a dictator does not automatically produce happier results. The Iraqis may be able to vote, but they can’t walk safely on their own streets. Conservatives tend not to think too deeply about such complexities. ‘We’ (in the conservative sense) ‘liberated’ the Iraqis from Saddam’s rule. That was something that ‘we’ ‘could’ do. But it didn’t amount to real liberation. That was something we could not do.

America likes to think of itself as THE GREAT LIBERATOR, and given our enormous sacrifices in the first half of the 20th-Century, with some justification. But there is no reason why we should shoulder the costs and risks of ‘liberating’ people alone. Too often, as in Panama, our imperial motives are clothed in an humanitarian guise. The liberal insight, after both World Wars, was that collective security was the best way to secure the peace and manage the costs of war. And collective security is not something ‘we’ can do alone. It’s also not about ‘liberating’ people, but protecting each other from expansionist empires.

When it comes to decisions on intervention, the most important question is whether we ‘can’ do what we want to accomplish. If ‘we’ can’t do it then can a larger, international ‘we’ do it? And, if even the international community can’t do it, or won’t do it, then it should not be attempted.

Whenever people bring up the tragedy in Darfur, for example, I ask myself these questions. And, so far, I have not been satisfied that the international community can or will do what it takes to bring peace and security to that region. Therefore, I currently oppose sending American troops to Darfur.

These are the same questions that conservatives should have asked themselves before invading Iraq. Would the Iraqis benefit from Saddam’s downfall, or would they turn on each other? Could we accomplish our goals without the support and manpower of the international community? Insofar as there was a humanitarian component to the invasion of Iraq, was it something that America alone had some moral obligation to tackle?

But the conservatives don’t ask such questions. To them, America is supposed to intervene anytime, anywhere people are being oppressed. To them, this is what makes, and has made, our country great.

It’s an odd fact that this position used to be entirely contrary to the conservative mindset. Sometimes I think we will never stop paying for winning World War Two. It gave a false sense of moral superiority and capability. ‘Hubris’ is the best word to describe it.

Tom Lantos and the conservative interventionists need to check their hubris.