In authorizing limited strikes on Syria, Congress may inadvertently give its stamp of approval to an ideological revolution in the use of U.S. power. Our military can’t and shouldn’t be a global genocide watchdog.

So an Investor’s Business Daily editorial plausibly warns.  It goes on, in part:

Obama’s pointless intervention in Syria could be a blueprint for a new leftist foreign policy, long championed by his new U.N. ambassador, Samantha Power, in which America intervenes not to defend its strategic interests but to avenge victims of bloodthirsty thugs.

This comic-book internationalism would keep the world’s lone superpower busier than Superman.

Where do America’s armed forces go first to “change the course of mighty rivers and bend steel with their bare hands”? Zimbabwe, where Mugabe has tortured thousands? Nuclear-armed North Korea, the slave state where, under Kim Jong-un, over 40% of young children are seriously malnourished?

Or how about the mass murderers you’ve never heard of? Under Isaias Afewerki, in power for over two decades in Eritrea in northeast coastal Africa, thousands of young refugees have fled slavery-like indefinite national service — enforced by a shoot-to-kill policy — and government-tolerated human trafficking for sex and even organ extraction.

Over his quarter century in power, Sudan’s Omar Bashir has killed hundreds of thousands; thousands are being tortured today in Islam Karimov’s Uzbekistan, as tens of millions starve in Thein Sein’s Burma. …

We could add most other countries to the list. Only a minority of the world’s nation states are genuinely free democracies. (According to Freedom House’s 1973 through 2013 reports: Free, 90; Partly Free 58; Not Free 47.)

[Samantha] Power complains of “America’s toleration of unspeakable atrocities, often committed in clear view”, of Hutus slaughtering Tutsis, for instance. But America can no more save each of the world’s billions than it can give each of them green cards.

It is an extraordinarily ill thought-out idea, even for the ignorant and foolish people who now form the executive branch of the US government.

If it becomes policy for America to barge into every country that acts in a way a US administration dislikes, and if such a policy is implemented, it will mean that America will be engaged in perpetual war. Nation states will not allow invasion by self-appointed policemen or nannies in US military uniform to march in and take over. Or to subdue them with drones or missiles and then issue orders in conformity with American notions of human rights. They will defend themselves. There will be blood. There will be “collateral damage”.

It would take a Nobel Peace Prize winner to cause such global chaos.

Max Boot writes:

The Sydney Morning Herald reports, based on “evidence from key defectors,” that “Burma’s isolated military junta is building a secret nuclear reactor and plutonium extraction facilities with North Korean help, with the aim of acquiring its first nuclear bomb in five years.”

Just what the world needs to go along with the North Korean bomb and the (soon to come) Iranian bomb — the Burmese bomb.

I wonder what would lead the Burmese junta to think it could get away with such a dangerous and destabilizing move? Gee, perhaps Iran and North Korea suffering absolutely no serious repercussions may have had something to do with it?

This development shows just how dangerous the Iranian and North Korean programs are — not just in and of themselves but also for how they encourage nuclear proliferation in other rogue states.