I'm gonna take the liberty of doing these slightly out of order.
You decided to believe that I was advocating some sort of explicitly religious military or imposition of Christianity as a policy. That's actually in contravention of what Christian religious doctrine is, so it's such a patently absurd assertion that I didn't think you were serious about accusing me of holding it. Since you are, I can sigh deeply and say that state religion and Christianity (a religion about love and tolerance) don't go together. Can we move on now? Cool.
There have never been Christian states or Christian military organizations before? News to me!
Anyway, now, was that really so hard to do? Why have I had to browbeat you into doing it over the course of four days? Why has it taken you so long to articulate an actual rejection of a position when you were literally able to clarify it in all of about 7 minutes instead of throwing up deflections and insults? Also, here's a tip if you're actually sincere: maybe don't joke around about that kind of thing like you supposedly did when you first engaged in discussion of it. It's almost like people might get the wrong impression!
Honestly, it's just a traditional narrative. America is the defender of the free world. Nobody else can perform this role or demonstrates an ability to (except France, in a very limited sense). We need to have an active global military presence in order to keep anti-democratic forces from eventually dominating the world because of their natural recourse to brutality.
A narrative with only marginal basis in fact, but I'll grant that it is a narrative that exists. How big of a security risk do you suppose that ISIS presents to the Middle East at large considering with the possible exception of Saudi Arabia literally everyone hates it and wants it dead? How about to Europe? And to America? Let me put it another way: how likely do you think it is that ISIS conquers the world, as opposed to Iran or perhaps, Tannu Tuva?
(as defined as ongoing mass killing)
Nobody cares what your definition is. You don't get to move goalposts relative to the United Nations.
We should ALWAYS oppose genocide. You're defining it much more widely than I am, but basically, in the 21st century, industrial murder of civilians by the thousands is never permissible. There's a distinction to be made between genocide and "mere" mass killing, but for the sake of the argument we'll ignore it. That's what I define as genocide, and I'm pretty sure that it doesn't happen very often.
We can take North Korea in a fight for sure, even setting aside our 1900 or whatever active nuclear weapons. If we dedicated most (read: all, thanks GOP) of our attention to them, we could even do it fairly cleanly. They demonstrably engage in genocide—of Christians especially I might add—and have for 60 years. North Korea is demonstrably worse than ISIS or in fact any actor in the Middle East, full stop. We are in and have been in a position to take North Korea out at essentially any time since at least 1994 when Bill Clinton got within a month or so of declaring war on them, other than when we went and invaded Iraq for some damn fool reason.
So why the focus on the Middle East if we've got this R2P for everybody whenever and wherever we can? Because we could and can in North Korea and they are legitimately
the most reprehensible regime to have disgraced the planet since Nazi Germany in terms of malice. (PRC wins on bodycount.)
Can you actually quote 24 genocides (that being 2 dozen, or dozens) genocides that we failed to prevent in 2013? I'd be interested to see that list. If not, you'd have to admit that you're being a little hyperbolic.
Let's try 2012. I direct you to
the quick reference table, wherein currently engaged in genocide are listed the DRC, Sudan, East Congo/Sudan/Uganda, Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Korea, Burma, and Ethiopia. That's 10. Throw in the "prep and potential" category and you've got 12 more, and as was determined, most of those qualify by the actual UN definition. That's 22. Pretty close to 24, isn't it? Now break up what are identified by whole countries into discrete campaigns and/or incidents. For example, the various ethnicities in Burma really should be treated individually. Gonna be a lot more than 22.
Of course being the world's largest economy, we have a number of levers we can use beyond military might to punish countries pursuing genocide, even though many of them are failed or pariah states, and we scarcely employ those either.
