You mean per the “John Mace Dictionary” definition of “unnecessary”, of course.
Honestly, I’m astonished at what sort of a short-sighted piece of shit someone would have to be to come to that conclusion.
You’ve never seen that posted here in any of the “how’s Obama doing?” threads? I can look some up for you if you want.
Shayna: “Necessary” being in the national security interests of the US. If you want to use the humanitarian argument, the Iraq war was necessary.
No need. I was more snippy there than I meant to be. Sorry.
Is Libya a threat to the US? Probably not. Are we doing it for nothing, I don’t think so. The international community is behind protecting the rebels, they are, for whatever reason not as upset about Bahrain. So without a UN mandate I don’t see the hypocricy in this.
I do think it’s in our interest for democratic Muslim countries to start spreading across the greater Middle East.
Yes…but then we have to deal not only with Iran in that regard, but the Saudis too. Two very repressive regimes, and one an ally and bigtime oil supplier. Tough nuts to crack.
Hey, it’s the Pit. Apologies don’t belong here. If you must apologize, take it to GD! 
Maybe, and maybe not. I don’t know anything about what democracy will bring to Libya and how a democratic Libya will view the US. I don’t even know if what we’re doing is going to result in democracy. Adm. Mullins was on every Sunday talk show today saying regime change is not the goal of this operation. We’re just making the world safe for civil war.
Obama can not win. He did not start the war in Libya . Obama was dragged into this war with rightys claiming he was dithering.
The Arab League gave cover to this war. It is not a Western Country blasting into a middle east country. We are not going to put in ground troops. That is a big deal. If the ground war is only fought by the Libyan rebels, then it won’t be so bad.
There is no push by middle easterners to have Democratic governments. It is not their history. I doubt it is their future. They just want a bit of freedom from dictatorships. They may go back to local warlords . Who knows?
Obama has made it abundantly clear, if it wasn’t already, that there will be no American boots on the ground. Wouldn’t have been very likely anyway, since we have none to spare. But that was made clear. Our allies apparently pressed for our participation largely because of our air and tech capabilities. If they are going to apply air power, the Libyan air defense has to be neutralized, and nobody is better equipped for that than the US.
So, if America refused this level of cooperation, French and British pilots are much more at risk than they might have been. That would be bad. If they lose pilots, they wouldn’t be human if they didn’t blame us.
As well, we are participating in a broadly based consensus for action, rather than a more or less unilateral assault. In short, this is the war the Bush claimed Iraq was, this is a coalition of the willing, with UN consent, and bears no resembalance to the counterfeit coin that Bush offered. Obama is doing what Bush pretended he was doing.
I have long been and remain deeply averse to military action, so there’s no way I can cheer for this thing. I can understand it, even somewhat accept it, since the bulk of our involvement is protecting our allies pilots. As skeptical as I am, I don’t think we can honorably turn that aside, given the circumstances.
So nobody thinks Khaddafi’s direct involvement with Pan Am flight 103 is a big deal anymore? That ship has sailed? Much like 9/11?
Gaddafi’s involvement in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 isn’t justification to enforce a NFZ nearly 23 years after-the-fact. Whatever recourse we might have for that, it’s not bombing his country. That’s not what this is about, nor should it be, any more than Iraq should have been about retaliation against Saddam for attempting to assassinate W’s pappy 10 years prior, even though we all knew it actually was.
Obama = take the proper military action for the right reasons.
W = take the wrong military action for all the wrong reasons.
I’ll take Option A, thanks. Leave the past out of it.
The only reason we are now bombing Libya is that the Arab League and the UN asked us to.
But… it’s not going to work out well. The Republicans will begin to attack Obama as the lapdog of the UN, and by extension because he is a One World Government pawn.
It is already clear we are going beyond the mandate of a No Fly Zone. As some in the media have put it, we’ve created a No Drive Zone for the Libyan military. If they leave their barracks, they will be attacked. So we have picked sides in a civil war… again. We have already lost the support of the Arab League, and we won’t get it back.
I think we (and I’m no sure who all ‘we’ encompasses) realized that the No Fly Zone would have very little effect on a government that has armored divisions, and so decided to interpret “protecting Libyan civilians” as including the right to attack any and all Libyan military forces. But it’s the same kind of weasel logic that escalated the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution into the Vietnam War that we all knew and loved.
So, yesterday, I didn’t agree with the OP. Today, I do.
(bolding mine)
Apologies for the sidenote, but did you actually mean to imply that no one was asking those questions before the Iraq invasion? Are you serious? I and many others on this very message board repeatedly asked those exact questions over and over and over again. Yet the pro-war side somehow didn’t find them very relevant or interesting, because none of you ever answered them. It was…frustrating.
(Quick search on my posts from back then turns up a couple of examples. There were many, many more.)
Mind you, I fully agree with your point about military action not being taken lightly or without realistic, tangible goals. But let’s not rewrite the history books and pretend no one was asking the questions you all were ignoring back in 2003.
Won’t somebody please think of the children?
nm
Is it really a civil war when a populace rises up against a dictator?
By every definition I know of, “civil war” constitutes armed conflict between different factions of a country’s population. I don’t think “populace vs. dictator and his military” meets that test.
Sounds more like a revolution to me.
There’s a reason you want to leave the past out of it. Your sophistry is astounding. Bush was wrong, and you complained about it. Obama is wrong, and you support it.
If you were arguing for the right of the U.S. to attack anywhere, anytime, anyreason, I’d at least have some respect for your consistency.
Right reasons? It seems pretty clear that Obama’s instinct was to keep the US out of this mess and that against his better judgment he’s been pressured into it by Hillary Clinton and others. See this article in the NYT.
You really view the two scenarios as being similar? Because it’s hardly sophistry to point out the long list of differences between the two, and thus argue that one is valid whilst the other was not.
For instance, I missed the bit where we said we were doing this as a preemptive strike against a country building WMD. I missed the uprising in Iraq prior to us taking action. I missed the part where the security council authorised Iraq. I missed the bit where the Arab League stated their support for action in Iraq.
See, when you’re comparing two very different scenarios, I don’t think you can accuse a person of sophistry if they say they support action in one, or not the other. By all means accuse them of being mistaken, but that’s a different question.
I like that article:
"Mrs. Clinton joined Samantha Power, a senior aide at the National Security Council, and Susan Rice, Mr. Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, who had been pressing the case for military action, according to senior administration officials speaking only on condition of anonymity. Ms. Power is a former journalist and human rights advocate; Ms. Rice was an Africa adviser to President Clinton when the United States failed to intervene to stop the Rwanda genocide, which Mr. Clinton has called his biggest regret.
Now, the three women were pushing for American intervention to stop a looming humanitarian catastrophe in Libya."
"Hillary and Susan Rice were key parts of this story because Hillary got the Arab buy-in and Susan worked the U.N. to get a 10-to-5 vote, which is no easy thing,” said Brian Katulis, a national security expert with the Center for American Progress, a liberal group with close ties to the administration. This “puts the United States in a much stronger position because they’ve got the international support that makes this more like the 1991 gulf war than the 2003 Iraq war.”
So, there’s a good moral reason for taking action, and it’s a cause that is backed by local and international opinion. Nope, I really don’t see that as a bad start.