War On Libya - Here We Are Again

Two things. Oil and logistics. Given that we pretty much always have a carrier battle group nearby, the only real expenses involved in instituting the no-fly zone are munitions and fuel. No need to activate reservists, few extra expenses, no messy occupations, and little risk to our troops. The benefits of intervention in this instance far outweigh the costs.

We can't afford to go to China or North Korea because the cost in both the green stuff and lives would be too great -- then again, neither regime is indiscriminately slaughtering its citizens in the streets. There's a certain degree of despotism that the international community needs to tolerate, but when a government starts slaughtering its own citizens indiscriminately and its citizens are revolting, it is reasonable to challenge the nation's sovereignty. When the people are slaughtering each other, things get much more complicated.

 

One of the reasons the US is so hated in the middle east is the lousy track record of supporting democratical movements and instead show much love to evil dictators.

Like when the US promised support for the people in Iraq that they would get support if they rose up after desert storm. They rose, got no support and Saddam slaughtered them. It is such a situation we are in now. If the international community allows Khaddafi to beat down a popular uprising with overwhelming firepower it would send all the wrong signals. Already Syria is crumbling.

As for Lockerbie, it was 23 years and unless you have a relative that died there I dont think anyone gives a frik. It may be that Khaddafi has supported al-qaida but according to the crazy man himself the uprising against him is a mix of al-qaida and drug addicts so, dunno about that.

 

Obama will never be impeached. He can do no wrong. He may get some criticism from his own supporters, but lets be realistic -- no one is going to seriously pursue that sort of action.

In a broad sense, though, what I see is that according to some leftists, Everything Bush did was Bad, by virtue of Bush doing it, because Bush is by his very nature, well, BAD! But when Obama does it, it's sorta bad, but not near as bad, because Obama is by nature GOOD!

I think that both men are, well, men, and their motivations for military intervention were and are political and economic in nature. I think there's good reasons to NOT get involved, and I've laid those out before, but there are also compelling reasons TO get involved. Time will tell if the intervention in Libya ends up being good for the workaday Libyan, or if it ends up merely helping oil consumers worldwide at the expense of Libyan freedom.

 

Many of us still give a "firk," espeically after the release of the bomber. Justice helps to provide some degree of closure. I still feel it was the English government and corporate interests that got him out. The whole "ball of wax" is really about oil.

It's all really a type of government welfare scheme, since it is a rather sly way of keeping the cost of energy "cheap." If people who bought gas in the US had to actually pay directly for the cost of our involvment in the ME, [the true hand of the "free market"], including everything from payouts to ME governments, to the cost of the military, gas would be somewhere in the range of 15.00 per gallon. Instead the US government floats the cost and debt for our involvement, to keep gas prices at 3.50, or whatever it is, and bills the cost as "defense." What a scam, far more worthy of the "welfare queens" that conservatives are always crying over.

 

Strangely enough, the things that were posted were the very reasons the war on Iraq was so heavily criticized. Those were the things that were brought up time and time again when people argued against the war. So when the situation with Libya is different on those counts - in other words, the Libya operation can't be argued against with the same arguments that Iraq was - bringing up this fact is "all smoke and mirrors?"

The mind boggles.

 

That is where I disagree with you. The situation with Libya isn't different at all. I'll spell it out.

1. Both situations had "evil" dictators
2. Both situations had nations that didn't directly attack the U.S. (and I'm not counting an airplane bombing in Scotland 23 years ago).
3. Both situations had UN resolutions authorizing action If anything Iraq had more resolutions supporting action.
4. Both situations had international participation. If anything Iraq had more nations involved.

Show me the differences other than one had a Republican President and the other has a Democrat President.

I agree with you it is boggling that people can't see this.

 

You could just read what Drew, Chandos, and Morgoroth have already posted in this thread.

 

OK, let's go back and start at post #30

Post 30- Pan Am 103- I'm not counting that as a direct attack on the US. Discussion about WMDs which may have had American parts in them- Irrelevant, but in both Iraq and Libya there are no WMDs. If anything that is even a better reason for us not to be involved with Libya.

Post 31- Your post. Both Iraq and Libya had UN resolutions and multiple nations involved. If anything I think your post is incorrect.

Post 32- Discussing Afghanistan

Post 33- Me, if you haven't watched the Youtube video I embedded I highly recommend it.

Post 34- Commentary on video

Post 35- More on PanAm 103- Once again a reason or justification for war 23 years later. More discussion about WMDs which we know don't exist in either situation and if anything the fear of them would make going into Iraq more prudent. MSNBC post showing a Dem against Libya (good for him)

Post 36- Me again

Post 37- A post not recognizing that going into Iraq had more nations involved then going into Libya has. If the media and Democrat's are basing their lack of protest on a request from the Arab League, I'll eat my hat. I'm sure 95% of them don't know that or have never even heard of the Arab League. Confirmation that Libya supports Al Queda which was another reason we went into Iraq.

Post 38- A claim that my posts are an attack on Obama. Couldn't be further from the truth. All I'm pointing out is where are the marches, where are the protests, where are the nightly news teams?

Post 39- A great post. Kosovo was Clinton's dirty little war that nobody has ever heard of or cared about. There weren't any marches on Washington, and no groups gettting organized against Clinton because of this. Remind me again about what party he is with?

Post 40- Praising Drew

Post 41- Another great post, this one asking since when do we jump when the Arab League asks us to.

Post 42- I guess the rational is that this should be a "clean" war so that is a major difference. I see this as a credible response. Although, I am not quite sure that all of the Bush protestors had that in mind.

Post 43- Why the US is hated.

Post 44- A lot of truth in this post

Post 45- Finally an oil post. Although with Iraq there was a lot of "No blood for oil", this time, not so much.

I guess I'm just obtuse as I don't see how anyone has given any reasons that us attacking Libya is any different then attacking Iraq was.

For the record I support both and I also supported Clinton when he went into Kosovo.

 

It was, since it was payback for Reagan's bombing of Libya.

Not really. We sell him the weapons and then attack him for buying them from us? Sounds like some strange setup to me....

NOt really, since the bomber was released from prison just a year ago. It was an outrage and it was a scam and you know it.

Yeah, "a Dem." Right. Leave out the rest of the Dems who are opposing it, the most liberal in Congress. You are really killing your own credibility with your "cherry picking."

Which turned out to be a complete lie, remember?

While the Dems supported Kosovo, actually, there were Republicans who opposed it.

Trent Lott quoting John Lennon from the Vietnam War days of yore -- How funny is that?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/daily/may99/whips4.htm

However, this time around there is strong opposition from the Left to Libya, as I have demostrated, and of course you try to downplay, since it stands your entire argument you have crafted on this thread completely on its head. But by all means, keep &%#$# that chicken, Snook.

 

Isnt the main difference that there is an active rebellion in Libya in need of support. Iraq had no active uprisings during the invasions. Nor can we forget that it is air strikes only in Libya, quite a difference.

I understand why you are crying Snook but there are actually some critical points of difference between Iraq and Libya.

 

The difference was, too, that Saddam, despite the Shiite majority, was in firm control of the country that, until the US smashed it, had some sort of post-sectarian Iraqi national identity in the western sense (which is now a thing of the past). Through their brute force efforts Saddam and the Baathists had almost succeeded in creating the Iraqi man.

Almost unbelievable when one looks at today sharp sectarian divisions in Iraq, for instance a majority of Shiites fought, loyally, on the Iraqi side against the Shiite Iranians. It is unpopular in America to say that, but the Saddam regime didn't rest on terror alone but had popular support; in particular Saddam didn't need to rely on mercenaries. The last times there were uprisings in Iraq it was the Kurdish minority in the north, and the US inspired (and abandoned) uprising by the Shiites in the South.

The situation in Iraq and Libya is very different. Also, I am not persuaded that the Libyan population indeed does have a coherent national identity. Qathafi can be deposed with limited effort, by aiding the rebels, and an occupation of the country is neither necessary nor desirable.

In the case of Iraq the occupation was the very point in the original concept. The all New Iraq™ was to be the staging ground and the starting point on the long march to Damascus and Beirut, and then to Tehran, to kick off revolutionary change across the region. It was to replace Saudi Arabia as the country of a US armed presence in the region (Wolfowitz famously said that Iraq, over Saudi Arabia, had the advantage of having no holy sites. Yeah, except for Najaf and so forth. Shiites? What's a Shiite?). People easily tend to forget the hubristic and rather harebrained Grand Strategic™ concepts pursued by the neo-cons in the first term of Bush 43, when the US went into Iraq. That goes for the Bush apologists as much as for those for whom it was all about money and oil. They're both wrong. It was first of all about grand strategy and ideology.

Ambitions in Libya are far more modest. It appears that the Brits are already preparing a successor government, since they have just presented the recently defected Libyan foreign minister to the press.

​

As far as revolutionary change is concerned, Wikileaks appears to have done more to achieve that than all US invasions put together. The Iraq invasion was at its core a war to make the region safe for Israel, and to cement Israel's position of regional pre-eminence. It is somewhat amusing to see the neo-cons split on all that change - the neo-Jacobin wing is all excited (Alors! Vive La Revolution!), while the pro-Israel wing sees these changes as a threat to Israel's status quo.

The revolutionary change of the brand we see now is not what they are or ever have been interested in. The revolution they tried to kick off was about change to improve Israel's position, by crushing all regimes that still resist it. Their idea of revolutionary change was limited to installing pro-US and pro-Israeli governments (as far as the realistic prospects to implement such a policy democratically, just look how well that turned out in Iraq). These folks were happy with Mubarak and Qathafi as long as they were reliably friendly to Israel. As strongmen they were in a position to completely disregard public opinion vis a vis Israel (the 'Arab Street'), an eminent advantage from a pro-Israeli point of view. A more democratic government won't be able to do that. Any government in Egypt that is responsive to popular opinion will be unable to support another Gaza. A breaking away of Egypt as an accomplice in the suppression of Palestinian aspirations will force the Israelis into concessions. From the perspective of Netanyahu/ Liebermann that must amount to yet another 'existential threat'.

And as for the popular uprisings themselves? Something like that happening in Palestine is Israel's worst nightmare. The Palestinians certainly don't lack grievances.

 

A very valid point and a major difference, yet not a reason for US intervention. The American public doesn't give a rat's ass about Libya (or Egypt) or who is running it. If it was there would be many other placese we should be bombing too.

@Chandos, While your retorts may be witty, you still don't have a single reason to show why Libya and Iraq are different in any significant way. Where is the Pearl Harbor, or the national interest that would justify military interest? What was such a crisis to the American people that the President had to go to war (although he won't use that word) without Congressional approval (which Bush had)?

@Ragusa, As expected you posted nothing but your paranoid neocon conspiracy theories.

 

Snook,
making the Middle East safe for Israel has been a dominant element in US foreign policy under Bush 43. There is a lot of literature out there on that. What I write is not controversial. Your (probably wilful) ignorance doesn't make what I write a conspiracy theory. Not any more than me calling you a dumbass makes you one. Lamentable that I have to tell you that.

 

I think it all boils down to cheap energy, as far as national, strategic interests are concerned. We can argue the strategic value of that if you desire. I think this is more like the First Gulf War, rather than the second. But I don't think you will admit to that, because you want to paint Obama to be like GWB. Don't worry, there are some on the Left who are busy doing that for you.

Obama still has to define the end game. In the first Gulf War, Saddam was supposedly so weakened that an uprising would topple him. However, Bush I left the rebels hanging out to dry in that instance. I'm curious to see how far NATO will go to defend the rebels, or if we will join them, at least by supplying them with weapons and supplies.

 

Isn't the most obvious difference between Libya and Iraq that in Libya we don't have a couple of hundred thousand US servicemen (and women) with boots on the ground? Sure, there have been points and counterpoints made by both sides here, but isn't that the most self-evident difference? In Iraq, we had an occupying force in the nation. AFAIK, there are currently well... no US troops in Libya right now. (Except maybe that one fighter pilot that bailed out - but he's probably out by now.)

The other self-evident difference is duration. The conflict in Iraq lasted about 8 years. (It's actually eight years this month, but since I haven't heard a peep about a recent military operation there in a while, I'm considering the Iraq mostly over at this point. There are still thousands of US troops there, but the numbers are a fraction of what they were a few years ago.) The war in Libya has been going on for... two weeks? And already NATO is taking over a chunk of the operations in enforcing the no-fly zone. (And yes, the US is part of NATO, but we're not doing it exclusively.) In Iraq, while there was a "coalition of the willing", it basically was the US (90%) and Britain (10%). If this conflict is still going on a few years from now - say the rebels don't topple the regime for years - my stance on this may be different.

Finally, as to the lack of protesters with "No blood for oil" signs, the reason for that, IMO, is also self-evident. Namely, the US does not buy any Libyan oil. Zero. Nada. Zilch. Who does buy Libyan oil you ask? Most of it is purchased by Britain, France, and Italy. Don't get me wrong - it's high quality oil - light crude, which requires a lot less refinement that a lot of the stuff the US buys from Saudi Arabia. But Libya accounts for less than 2% of world wide oil production. And unlike Britain, France, and Italy, the US has the refineries necessary to work with the heavier crude we buy from elsewhere. So from an economic interest, it makes sense that there is involvement from other NATO countries.

I'm sure I missed some points Snook - but does this at least to some degree answer your question?

 

To build on Aldeth's point: the main difference I see (again, self-evident) as to why we aren't seeing mass protests is one of duration and of legitimacy. First - we've been involved in Libya for what, all of 2 weeks now? Street protests of the size you seem to be expecting tend to take a little more time than that.

But in order to generate protest, a war / military action must be seen as illegitimate by a sizable chunk of the public (which, so far, seems not to be the case with Libya). If you'll recall, there was very little protestation of the Iraq war in the first 1-2 months (aside from scattered pockets of hippies and greenpeace activists, which is to be expected even when we AREN'T at war). This is because by this time, we were still operating under the assumption that the administration's cassus belli of "Saddam has stockpiles of WMD's" wasn't the complete load of bullsh*t it turned out to be. It wasn't until the WMD hunters started coming up empty-handed that the real protestations of the Iraq war began. The only way the two situations would begin to be similar is if it turns out that, no, Qadaffi wasn't really slaughtering his own people in the streets (verifiable fact) and that no, we didn't actually save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people by getting involved when we did (which is impossible to prove, but few could credibly argue isn't the case).

The differences between the two situations are numerous and considerable.

 

I'm normally not a reader of Ann Coulter but this time I agree with her. She is saying what I've been trying to say in this thread, she is much better at it then I am.

Spoiler

"Humanitarian" seems to be the Democrats' new word for "absolutely no national interest."

The Democrats were not so interested in a "humanitarian" intervention against a much more brutal dictator in Iraq. But, of course, taking out Saddam Hussein, a state sponsor of terrorism who harbored one of the perpetrators of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, would make Americans safer.

Democrats are furious whenever American boys (girls and gays) are put in harm's way -- unless the troops are on a mission that has nothing whatsoever to do with defending the United States.

Obama ignored the murder, imprisonment and torture of peaceful Iranian protesters demonstrating against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's theft of an election in 2009. But he was hopping mad about Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak getting rough with a mob in Tahrir Square with less distinct objectives.

We knew what the Iranian students wanted: a stolen election overturned.

What did the Egyptians want? At the time, liberals angrily cited the high unemployment rate in Egypt as proof that Mubarak was a beast who must step down.

Have they, by any chance, seen the recent employment numbers for the U.S.? The only employment sectors showing any growth are Hollywood sober-living coaches and medical marijuana dispensaries. Are we one jobs report away from liberals rioting in the streets?

As The New York Times recently reported, since Mubarak stepped down, the driving force in the new government is the Muslim Brotherhood. America is worse off because Mubarak stepped down, which was Obama's exact foreign policy objective.

On Monday night, Obama gave a speech intended to explain America's mission and purpose in our new Libyan adventure. He said: "Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different."

He forgot to add: "However, the United States of America will be turning a blind eye to atrocities in Syria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Jordan, the Ivory Coast and Bahrain."

One searches in vain for a description of some American interest in supporting the rebels in Libya.

True, Gadhafi was responsible for numerous terrorist acts against Americans in the 1980s, including blowing up Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing 270 people, including 189 Americans.

Soon after President Bush's 9/11 speech vowing to go to war not only with terrorists, but those who supported them, Gadhafi accepted responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing and paid the victims' families $8 million apiece.

After Bush invaded Iraq, Gadhafi suspended Libya's nuclear and chemical weapons program, inviting international inspectors to verify that the programs had been halted.

A few years after that, Gadhafi paid millions of dollars to the victims of other Libyan-sponsored terrorist attacks from the '80s. In return, President Bush granted Libya immunity from terror-related lawsuits.

Only Fox News' Bill O'Reilly thinks Obama is intervening in Libya to avenge the Lockerbie bombing.

However far off the mark Gadhafi is from being the Libyan George Washington, he poses no threat to the U.S. -- whereas the rebels we are supporting might.

But Democrats couldn't care less about the interests of their own country. Indeed, if there were the slightest possibility that our intervention in Libya would somehow benefit the United States, they would hysterically oppose it.

When it came to the Iraq War -- which actually served America's security interests -- Democrats demanded proof that Saddam Hussein was 10 minutes away from launching a first strike against the U.S. They denounced the Iraq War nonstop, wailing that Saddam hadn't hit us on 9/11 and that he posed no "imminent threat" to America.

What imminent threat does Libya pose to the U.S.? How will our interests be served by putting the rebels in charge?

Obama didn't even suggest the possibility that our Libyan intervention serves the nation's interest. Last weekend, his defense secretary, Robert Gates, said the uprising in Libya "was not a vital national interest to the United States, but it was an interest." So, not a vital interest, but an interest. Like scrapbooking, surfing or Justin Bieber.

When it came to Iraq, liberals proclaimed that invading a country "only" to produce a regime change was unjustifiable, contrary to international law, and a grievous affront to the peace-loving Europeans.

But they like regime change in Egypt, Libya -- and the Balkans. The last military incursion supported by liberals was Clinton's misadventure in the Balkans -- precisely because Slobodan Milosevic posed no conceivable threat to the United States.

Indeed, President Clinton bragged: "This is America at its best. We seek no territorial gain; we seek no political advantage." Democrats see our voluntary military supported by taxpayer dollars as their personal Salvation Army.

Self-interested behavior, such as deploying troops to serve the nation, is considered boorish in Manhattan salons.

The only just wars, liberals believe, are those in which the United States has no stake. Liberals warm to the idea of deploying expensive, taxpayer-funded military machinery and putting American troops in harm's way, but only for military incursions that serve absolutely no American interest.

 

Now I'm confused. Coulter seems to be arguing that Iraq and Libya are quite different. i.e., that there was an American interest in Iraq, and that Hussain posed a legitimate threat to the US, but apparently not in Libya (according to her at least). So now I don't even know what point you're trying to make. I thought you were arguing the two were similar, and Coulter's article does not seem to back your point.

 

I don't think we invaded Iraq in the First Gulf War either. If I remember correctly American soldiers were only in Kuwait. But I could be wrong.

Regarding oil: It is not about from whom we import our oil, but the price of the world market for oil. Anytime there is any kind of shortage, or supposed shortage, there is a price spike. You didn't notice that you are currently paying more for gas because of Libya, Aldeth? It is a world market. If Libya didn't have oil nobody would be there.