Notwithstanding my concerns about Yusuf Qaradawi, I think Barack Obama has finally gotten around to doing the right thing in Libya. Sure, it might very well be that he’s doing the right thing for entirely the wrong reasons, but since when has a little thing like irony stood in the way of foreign policy?
As to what the Ron Paul wing of the Tea Party will do, I don’t know. (Ron Paul is decidedly unhappy). I might be wrong, but I doubt Libya will cause the Tea Party movement to rupture into pro-war and anti-war wings.
However, it has really messed with the minds of the demonstrators in Madison, who have had to do a sudden anti-war shuffle as they turn to confront the dual forces of evil in the form of Governor Walker and now President Obama.
What’s even more disturbing is that the president’s Libya operation seems to have caused a fairly major schism within Andrew Sullivan. Not long after Glenn Reynolds cited Sullivan’s long buried but once legendary enthusiasm for the Iraq War, Andy erupted, and complained that Glenn was being “stingingly smug“:
…the president we supported is not, it is now clear, the president that we have. In the stingingly smug words of uber-partisan Glenn Reynolds:
They told me if I voted for John McCain, we’d be bombing Arab countries while the supporters of the bombing promised that we’d be greeted as liberators. And they were right!
It’s just brutal to have supported Obama’s foreign policy for so long, only to see it morph into a multilateral version of McCain’s so swiftly. The whiplash is jarring.
It must be jarring for a political contortionist like Sullivan, and I can’t blame Glenn for brutally rubbing it in.
I realize that I am not allowed to mention Andy lest he take over this blog, but I cannot ignore brutality on the Internet — especially when the people involved are victims of the brutality they inflicted on themselves by voting for a warmonger who went out of his way during his campaign to express enthusiasm for invading Pakistan.
The victims of self-inflicted brutality I feel most sorry for, though, are the lefties driving around with contradictory bumperstickers. (The War-Is-Not-The-Answer-But-Obama-Is! people.)
They’re going to be scraping.
It’s going to be hard not to be smug about their pain.
MORE: From Jose Guardia, I learned how Ghadaffi plans to garner the sympathy of the anti-war left:
…an intelligence operative infiltrated in Ghadaffi’s entourage had sent exclusively to Barcepundit the method that the Libyan dictator is planning to use to gather the sympathy of the world’s public opinion….
Hey, that’s perfect.
Nothing like a familar old friend’s face to go with the familiar old bumperstickers.
Hell, it might even put a happy face on Andrew Sullivan….
Comments
7 responses to “Scraping is the answer!”
As Ghadaffi arms a million people in Tripoli, is history repeating itself?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Carthage_%28c._149_BC%29
Definitely not.
No, after being suckered into this by the faded powers of Europe, we will destroy the Libyan military, then occupy the damn place for decades with our troops wearing U.N. hats, and then spend billions in reconstruction money (mostly borrowed) rebuilding the bombed airports and destroyed refineries, so that the new gang of militant Islamists can screw everyone by selling oil to China with the help of their spiritual benefactors in Iran.
Or did I miss something about Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan?
I’ve been a little worried about Obama and our enemies and future enemies.
He voluntarily looks weak so they take heart and act on that weakness.
The problem with that is that they might force him to have to look all bellicose because he reads polls.
If he needs kick ass to look strong to win an election, he’ll do that.
And since neither he nor any one of his advisors, except Gates if he listens to Gates, know anything about anything military, they can over-react or get stuck in situations where they haven’t thought out the results.
Like Libya. I was expecting it to be Georgia or maybe Korea actually, but it looks like Libya is where we see.
What the hell are we doing? If we’re protecting rebel-held areas, well, we’ll be there a long time. Until he’s gone and possibly his successor(s?).
If we’re going to take him out, what’s next? It’s a former Italian colony, will they take it back? (no)
It used to be in the Ottoman Empire, will Turkey take it back? (heh).
Will the EUnuchs do there what we did/are doing in Iraq?
NATO? (Of course, that means us).
The African Union?
The Arab League? A Coalition of the Murderous Despots (China, Russia, Cuba)?
We don’t know anything about what the hell is going on or the plan, the military briefings today all said, “We’re enforcing a no fly zone, what’s next is for us to know and you to find out (maybe).”
It is kind of cool watching France have to act like an adult though. Their usual strategery of sniping from the sidelines doesn’t work when we’re not providing the sidelines.
GB is too busy to lead either and Italy isn’t going to do crap for its former colonies. They didn’t want any colonies and they’re glad to be rid of them.
This reminds me of Kosovo except at least we really need to kick Gheadeeghffy’s ass.
What we have is Obama saying “Days not weeks”, which echoes Clinton saying we’d be in Kosovo for 6 months.
How long did we stay there? 11 years?
If all we do is protect some towns we’re there until there’s no brutal dictator in Tripoli who wants to kill them or until we/somebody replaces him with a non-murderous ruler or we run away and let him finish murdering “his” people or rely on others to do it.
Eh, in cases like this I always think of FrnakJ’s Nuke the Moon: A Realistic Plan for World Peace essay.
http://www.imao.us/index.php/a-realistic-plan-for-world-peaceakanuke-the-moon/
If only we could make the rest of the world leave us and each other alone.
What the hell are we doing?
That is it. There doesn’t appear to be any kind of thought out strategy, no congressional hearings, nothing. What is our national interest? Why are we there?
Perhaps we should look to an early predecessor of Obama, another graduate of Harvard, for an answer.
Cotton Mather, from his sermon “What Must I Do To Be Saved” —
Something must be done; For we are sure, All men are not saved. There are some, who are Children of Perdition, There are some, who are Vessels of wrath; there are some who go away into everlasting punishment, Something must be done, to distinguish you from that crooked Generation.
Obama doesn’t know exactly what must be done, but something must be done. Why NOT start with bombing Libya?
Kudos to Obama for eventually caving to reality and doing the right thing.
The best part of this is that we’ve established a precedent for not allowing a government to crush pro-democracy protests. That should help counter-balance the lesson learned from Egypt and Tunisia that moderation and compunction can lead to successful revolt.
“A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.”
Thomas Jefferson
From a Politico article just linked by Drudge, about Obama not getting congressional support before committing to Libyan air strikes:
Boehner (Speaker of House – #3 in line to replace Obama) was phoned into a meeting with administration officials Friday (that’s right, Obama was on his way to Rio for vacation) an aide said, but Speaker Boehner did not speak, nor did the White House ask anything of him.
And from another Politico article about Liberal Democrats being in an uproar:
“They consulted the Arab League. They consulted the United Nations. They did not consult the United States Congress,” one Democrat lawmaker said of the White House.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0311/51595.html#ixzz1HBwBoCW3
Obama didn’t invoke the War Powers Act, didn’t seek congressional approval, but just acted on his own like the autocrats in the Middle East that some people are so upset about.
This isn’t about the morality of standing by while innocents are slaughtered. It’s about taking sides in a budding civil war, in a tribal setting. It is of absolutely no threat to this country, or even to our allies in Europe, or to Israel. Why here, and not Bahrain, or Rwanda, or Iran?
Why? And on what authority?
UN PRESIDENT TIM KALEMKARIAN, US PRESIDENT TIM KALEMKARIAN, US SENATE TIM KALEMKARIAN, US HOUSE TIM KALEMKARIAN: BEST MAJOR CANDIDATE.