This is one more in a series of excellent articles of George F. Will about Libya ...
This George is very smart ... I can forgive him for being Republican ...
I am a fan of President Obama and I am also extremely sad that he falls in this Libyan Quagmire .... Mr Obama is also very intelligent, so I assume that he can get out of this conundrum and swamp with better intellectual tools than George W. Bush ...
If the American Empire decays, even if the decline is very slow an unnoticeable, then this will harm many people around the World, not only Americans ...
The best recipe that I know to sink America is this one : "Fight wars everywhere, specially where there is or can be a lot of religious motivation and enthusiasm, like Islam" ...
I totally agree with Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich : "mind your own business", "don't go on the hunt for monsters abroad" ( John Quincy Adams 1821 )
Washington Post
The haze of humanitarian imperialism
By George F. Will,
Wednesday, April 6, 8:31 PM
The haze of humanitarian imperialism
Some excerpts :
Several weeks ago, when President Obama reportedly assured congressional leaders that America’s intervention in Libya would involve “days, not weeks,” skeptics mistakenly worried about mission creep. They should have feared mission gallop.
Or perhaps mission meander. At about this point in foreign policy misadventures, the usual question is: What is Plan B? Today’s question is: What was Plan A? When Obama inserted America into what was, and ostensibly still is, a preemptive war to protect Libyan civilians from Libya’s government, he neglected to clarify a few things, such as: Do the armed rebels trying to overthrow that government still count as civilians?
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Have you noticed how many of the U.S. armed services’ recruiting appeals, on television and in advertisements in airports and elsewhere, show this or that service engaged in humanitarian relief operations, distributing food and medicine? These present the U.S. military as the Red Cross with, for reasons that are unclear, weapons. Given that some of the services sometimes seem reluctant to recruit for their primary mission — maintaining a credible capability for war — it is not so odd that the Obama administration flinches from the word “war.”
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Perhaps the CIA operatives should have stayed home and talked to some senators who seem to know what’s what. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) refers to the Libyan rebels as part of a “pro-democracy movement.” Perhaps they are. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) must think so. Serving, as usual, as Sancho Panza to Sen. John McCain’s Don Quixote, Graham said last Sunday (on “Face the Nation”), “We should be taking the fight to Tripoli.”
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Obama’s inability, or reluctance, to say clearly why we are involved in Libya or under what conditions the mission might be said to have been accomplished has occasioned comparisons with Iraq. A more apposite comparison is to Jimmy Carter’s invasion of Iran — a nation twice as large as France — with eight helicopters. This became emblematic of a floundering president out of his depth.
As Calvin Coolidge, who knew his depth, was leaving the presidency in March 1929, he said, “Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business.” Before an administration can do that, it must define its responsibilities and competence with sufficient modesty to acknowledge that some things are not its business.
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