kzt wrote:JohnRoth wrote:In case you forgot, Imperial Japan attacked us at this apparently not very well known incident called Pearl Harbor. That wasn't a "regime change" operation like, oh, say Afghanistan, Iraq or, if rumors floating around have any credence, the current unpleasantness in Georgia (the country, not the state). Or any number of other incidents that I'm sure any acquaintances from Latin America can reel off at a moment's notice.
I will point out that end the end of that little unpleasantness (which incidently lasted less time than we have been in Afghanistan -and perhaps you do remember why we went into Afghanistan?) the existing government was in fact replaced with one that we preferred. And has given us significantly less trouble than the orginal government.
The question is one of morality. You started by making a moral argument: the Mesan government is killing its own people. I countered on the moral issue. The terminology I used, goody-two-shoes, may have been a bit over the top, but it puts my moral stance front and center. It was still a moral question, not a question of national survival --- which was the question during WW II.
We didn't go to war with Germany because of a national revulsion with the Nazi regime; if you read history you'll discover that there was significant national sentiment that we should ally ourselves with Germany before Japan started the conflict by the Pearl Harbor attack. There was a significant amount of opposition to Roosevelt's ramp-up of military capability and support of England prior to that event.
"Regime Change" has a specific meaning: it's an essentially
covert operation to topple an existing government and replace it with one that's more aligned with our interests. Covert in this case means that there's some measure of
plausible deniability as to why it's being done; these things are seldom as secret as the advocates would like to think.
That wasn't the case post WW II. We deliberately went in to prop up a pair of flattened economies and reshape them to our taste: the usual privilege of the victor in a military contest.
As far as the Mesan situation goes, there's no strategic or tactical situation that intervening in internal Mesan politics would serve that simply interdicting the system against any traffic that isn't squeaky-clean wouldn't serve as well. It's a moral question, and my personal morality is: let them deal with their own messes.
Interdiction doesn't have to be horribly difficult: just say: no hyper-capable ships beyond the hyper limit that haven't been inspected and approved. Anything else will be destroyed without warning.