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Let the Europeans fight if it concerns them so much. Besides a bunch of humanitarian hooey, why should it be our fight?
http://www.frumforum.com/the-real-li...ama-wont-admit[T]he U.S. mission is aimed at the overthrow of Qaddafi. The U.S. is engaged in sophisticated propaganda operations urging Qaddafi’s troops to turn on him. And it’s reported that the U.S. is negotiating with Qaddafi about a secure exit from Libya.
In fact, the U.S. mission is as deeply concerned with European energy security as with the humanitarian crisis. Critics correctly point out that the US has managed to ignore many other humanitarian crises – and is in fact ignoring one right now in the Ivory Coast. This particular crisis is occurring in a country from which NATO ally Italy buys more than one-fifth of all its net oil imports and in which Britain has a very large investment. We are not going to war for oil. But we very rarely go to war without oil.
Let the Europeans fight if it concerns them so much. Besides a bunch of humanitarian hooey, why should it be our fight?
Frum gives a decent gloss of what the US strategy is, but no vital US interest is at stake.
Obviously it shouldn't. Our military is basically a mercenary outfit at the moment. We have the largest and most capable so we've been called upon to lead this action even if we have no ing direct interest. I just have to wonder what we're getting out of it, don't you?
lol Derrida.
Agreed that we are only in it because we have the capability. If we're a mercenary outfit, we're the least profitable mercenary outfit in the history of the world.
http://shadow.foreignpolicy.com/post..._is_not_rwandaThis gives credence to the reports that Hilary Clinton, the secretary of state, Susan Rice, the U.S. permanent representative to the U.N., and Samantha Power, N.S.C. senior director for multilateral affairs, led the charge to war specifically to avoid "another Rwanda." The latter two especially have been outspoken in their belief that the United States was wrong not to intervene to stop the 1994 genocide in Rwanda in which the ethnic Hutu Interahamwe militia slaughtered some 800,000 fellow Rwandans in a few weeks while the world watched. One diplomat told Power she shouldn't let Libya become "Obama's Rwanda," according to the New York Times. Rwanda looms darkly in the liberal conscience as a powerful prod of guilt, whispering "Next time, do something. Do anything. Anything is better than nothing."
Liberals have a point about Rwanda. It was grotesque that troop-contributing countries actually withdrew their forces from the U.N. Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR), rather than beef it up with more resources and authority, as the genocide unfolded. (However, Power betrays her ignorance of military realities when she argued in her book, A Problem From , that the U.N. could have stopped the genocide with the assets it had on the ground at the time).
But Libya is not Rwanda. Rwanda was genocide. Libya is a civil war. The Rwandan genocide was a premeditated, orchestrated campaign. The Libyan civil war is a sudden, unplanned outburst of fighting. The Rwandan genocide was targeted against an entire, clearly defined ethnic group. The Libyan civil war is between a tyrant and his cronies on one side, and a collection of tribes, movements, and ideologists (including Islamists) on the other. The Rwandan genocidiers aimed to wipe out a people. The Libyan dictator aims to cling to power. The first is murder, the second is war. The failure to act in Rwanda does not saddle us with a responsibility to intervene in Libya. The two situations are different.
I wonder too. What are we getting out of our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq?
I never said we were a profitable mercenary outfit, LnG.
With all due respect to you and those who serve, I do think the military is an extremely bloated tool that is misused to an extreme extent. I think the term mercenary outfit was a poor choice of words in retrospect, but I choose it because I could think of no other way to effectively hammer home just how ridiculous it is to use OUR military to protect the energy interests of Europe. I really makes you wonder WHY Obama is doing this. If we're in this because we were just sweet talked I'm even more upset and disappointed in our government but I do seem to think there is something in it outside of that.
Would our president trade our military services for something or was he just a gullible fool? I guess either is just as likely.
Afghanistan was an obvious response that for political reasons we just won't leave. Iraq was due to having the wrong people in charge of our government at the worst possible time and another place we won't leave for political reasons.
Perhaps Libya is more of the same of Iraq: The wrong person in charge at the wrong time, but I would think that Obama was smart enough to learn from the other two.
Its probably as simple as the fact that he didn't learn.
This post is a bit late, but: another factor is debating online; one can't pick up the body language, inflection, etc etc.
No offense taken. I agree that the military can be bloated, especially at the higher levels, where there's rarely accountability. There's tons of moral hazard in the military as well. (For instance, budget money: squadrons are allocated a certain amount of money in their budget. Near the end of the fiscal year, there's always a rush to spend the extra money leftover. Why? Because if squadron DON'T spend that money, then the powers-that-be will assume they can get by with less, and will budget accordingly. Always bothers me, and I try to realize cost savings where/when I can over my limited area of responsbility.)I never said we were a profitable mercenary outfit, LnG.
With all due respect to you and those who serve, I do think the military is an extremely bloated tool that is misused to an extreme extent. I think the term mercenary outfit was a poor choice of words in retrospect, but I choose it because I could think of no other way to effectively hammer home just how ridiculous it is to use OUR military to protect the energy interests of Europe. I really makes you wonder WHY Obama is doing this. If we're in this because we were just sweet talked I'm even more upset and disappointed in our government but I do seem to think there is something in it outside of that.
Not to mention the very real fact that cutting off funding to some areas can absolutely threaten the lives of soldiers downrange.
I think the term "mercenary" has a (deserved) negative connotation, that one is just out for the money. That's pretty much the opposite of what our military does. I liken us much more to "world police" than mercenary.
I don't think it's a "trade" for anything; I just think the idea of possible genocide weighs heavily on Obama, and he wants to do what he can to prevent that. Whether it's misguided or not is certainly up to debate. It's hard to say what one would do, given the power/resources, to have to decide whether to engage or not. I think most of us in this thread (myself, you and WH) are mostly isolationist, or at best, very dubious of world policing. That said, I don't think it can be easy at times, knowing that by not intervening you might possibly condemn people across the world to death.
Its quite possible Obama has a huge Rwanda button considering his personal history and I know Clinton has one given it happened on her husbands watch so she probably slammed down on Obama's after hers was pushed.
I guess it really is easy to see how it happened given the personal history of those two. Probably some dots I never really connected until now.
Last night was a liberal expression of the same impulse that drives some people to insist that America is the greatest country in history. Where many mainstream conservative enthusiasts of American exceptionalism define that exceptionalism in terms of being the freest, most prosperous country or the one with the greatest social mobility, some liberals want to define it in terms of superior idealism or morality. It doesn’t make it any better if Obama conceives of this as a struggle to make America more idealistic and moral. In fact, it makes it worse in some ways. It’s one thing to recognize past American mistakes and crimes and vow never to do such things again, but it’s something else entirely to see the use of military force as an appropriate means to expiate past national sins.http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2011...etter-america/Right now, if you’re a Libyan and you’re not on the side of the rebels, you have some good reasons to fear American planes overhead. Even anti-Gaddafi civilians in cities controlled by Gaddafi’s forces are going to have reason to be afraid of the gunships and tank-killers buzzing overhead. Restrictive rules of engagement, precision weapons, and training notwithstanding, all of the people living in Sirte and Tripoli have good reasons to be afraid. The ease with which humanitarian interventionists seem to forget that they are cheering on the deliberate killing of people who have done nothing to them and theirs is bad enough, but the notion that America is making great moral progress if it uses force to kill the right sorts of people for the right reasons, and especially when the conflict has nothing to do with us, is simply evil.
Hesitancy to intervene is seen as either American weakness (the popular conservatism view) or American amorality (the popular liberal view). Despite all the drawbacks made clear by the Iraq invasion, Imperial America remains the reality and any desire to reduce or eliminate American interventionism is seen as either a throwback to traditional conservatism or, of course, the dreaded "isolationist" tag.
The problem with Iraq was not that it involved intervention, but rather that success was not quick and it quickly became a cluster. Or, the target and result rather than the act itself. From this perspective, quick success in Libya will only set the stage for future interventions, much like the memory of Gulf War I set the stage for Gulf War II.
One hopes, of course, for not another quagmire in Libya, but one should be concerned about the precedent it sets beyond.
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