Interventionists Target Libya

It's their only hope of salvaging our Middle East empire

AN IMPORTANT PIECE
by Justin Raimondo, February 23, 2011

"Outside of an asylum, is there anybody nuttier than Moammar Qadaffy? Well, yes: Marc Lynch, associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University – and non-resident smarty-pants at the Center for a New American Hegemony Security – who blogs at ForeignPolicy.com, where he writes:

“The unfolding situation in Libya has been horrible to behold. No matter how many times we warn that dictators will do what they must to stay in power, it is still shocking to see the images of brutalized civilians which have been flooding al-Jazeera and circulating on the internet. We should not be fooled by Libya’s geographic proximity to Egypt and Tunisia, or guided by the debates over how the United States could best help a peaceful protest movement achieve democratic change. The appropriate comparison is Bosnia or Kosovo, or even Rwanda where a massacre is unfolding on live television and the world is challenged to act. It is time for the United States, NATO, the United Nations and the Arab League to act forcefully to try to prevent the already bloody situation from degenerating into something much worse.”

This may seem like a crazy idea, an off-the-wall suggestion made in the heat of the moment. But when you think about it – and witness how widespread such sentiment is amongst our assembled “experts” and professional know-it-alls – you realize such a call to intervene was inevitable. It was only a matter of time before the War Party would find an excuse to intervene in the Middle Eastern upsurge, and make it all about us. We are, after all, a nation – nay, an empire – of narcissists, and so the pertinent question is: what can we do? What must we do? Benghazi is burning – don’t we have a moral obligation to preen on the world stage as we put the fire out?......

King Hamad and Hosni Mubarak – good: Qadaffy (and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad) – bad. This kind of moral calculus is determined by the degree of the dictator’s complicity with American (and Israeli) plans for the region.

The War Party hopes to make lemonade out of the enormous lemon handed to them by the youthful revolutionaries of the Middle East – and an alliance of neocons and liberal “humanitarian” interventionists will make it happen if and when it does.

US intervention in Libya would short-circuit the Libyan revolution, prolong Qadaffy’s inglorious career, and lead to more and not less anti-Americanism even in the short run. It would, in brief, be a disaster – just the sort of blunder that could suck us into yet another quagmire from which there is no early release. "