My fellow columnist Clay Rogers wrote a column that sought to prophesize the ultimate decline of the Democratic Party on Feb. 9. Mr. Rogers’ arguments were a shot in the dark, resonating, yet much less puncturing.

Accordingly, the argument leaped from one claim to another, beginning with a vast denigration of the baby boomer generation — the “birth of a litter of selfish creatures” — in an attempt to splice this caricature with the “old guard Democrats” and their physical dismantling of our “Christian nation” — it’s high time for us to review the letters and journals of the Founding Fathers, who were unequivocally Deists.

Indeed, droning on about the rising stars of the Republican Party and the contrasting dull candidates of the Democratic Party — I can agree with that assertion — leaves the writing suspect to tripe and idle talk. New politicians will rise to fill the void left by old withered candidates and the process will recycle to begin anew.

It isn’t the passing of the old guard that will trouble the Democratic Party, but substantively something else entirely. The Democratic Party has been generally correct in regards to its domestic policy approach, though one could make a quip here and there. What the Democrats cannot get right is their foreign policy and I believe conservatives like Rogers will perhaps agree with me here.

With the rise of the Islamic State, the traditionally non-interventionist Left — as Rogers points out, since the Vietnam era — immediately fails to recognize the greatest threat to democracy in the Middle East when it drums up the same old “anti-United States imperialism.”

Yes, empire building is wrong and the United States has been guilty of this crime before. But too many times have I heard people of millennial stock agreeing in chorused resentment that our involvement in Iraq was a failure and any effort to keep alive the hope of freedom for the Iraqi people is currently futile. This was unnecessary, bland and idle protest, which regretfully found traction while our armed forces were busy guaranteeing the welfare of a group of people newly freed from dictatorship, genocide, terrorism and gangsterism.

Outcry against the Iraq War was partly justified and partly unfair, and the whimsical and outdated arguments regarding our involvement in Iraq have been too often perpetuated by my allies on the Left. A brief analysis of the evidence will, I hope, breathe new life into the supporters of humanitarian interventionism — now a small minority of the Democratic Party.

In 1989, for instance, Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist government orchestrated genocide against the Kurdish people. One is quickly reminded of the attack on Halabja, which bears recognition as the largest chemical weapons attack against a civilian population in history. Hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were slaughtered under Hussein’s reign.

There are four ways in which a country loses its sovereignty, according to international law: violating the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in act and spirit; repeated invasion and/or aggression against neighboring states; committing genocide; or hosting known international terrorists. Saddam Hussein’s regime repeatedly violated all four criteria.

Wasn’t the overthrow of Hussein’s regime, then, a deliverance? Disregarding the “possession of weapons of mass destruction” argument, Hussein repeatedly committed crimes against humanity — not crimes against country “x” or people “y,” but against ALL of us — and it was right of the United States to take him down.

In 1998, the United States Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act, which called for regime change in Iraq and the support of a democratic movement there. It is a testament of our values and a guarantee of the most basic human freedoms to all inhabitants of this world.

Those who think the United States couldn’t possibly be a moral arbiter — as it is colloquially phrased, “policing the world” — are severely mistaken. After all, if the U.S. did not have the authority and the moral obligation to intervene in, say, the Rwandan genocide — in which we shamefully stood by and watched — then when and where would such an action be permitted? The Islamic State seems an equal manifestation of tyranny and barbarism.

Are we really as callous, capricious and careless as the world perceives us to be?

The Democratic Party has a long way to go before it can even begin to adopt these interventionist principles. Even the closest ones simply shrug and say, “Violence is everywhere” or “You don’t know what war is like.”

How insulting to the Iraqi people. How insulting to anyone who cringes at the mention of Adolf Hitler.

It is my hope that the Democrats will soon realize the United States has a moral duty to act in concert with other nations to purge the world of monsters like Slobodan Milosevic, the Hutu extremists, and Bashar al-Assad. Or are we to give some practitioners of genocide a free pass and others not?