“I’m wondering if there’s a neocon pundit in the world.. who would claim that any of our military interventions of the New American Century did anything other than create humanitarian crises or make existing ones worse.”
– -Jeff Huber, US Navy Cmdr, retired
This is very troubling. I’m finding it very hard these days to find anyone who doesn’t sound like a babbling idiot on the Libyan air campaign. Even Jon Stewart goes deep into conflation territory on Libya vs. the unrest in Bahrain and Yemen, where the populace, so far, has not faced genocide from its government. It must be about the oil! Except that the oil industry already had full access to Libyan oil.
I actually I think that we’ve all been rendered nearly brain-dead by thirty years of “conservative” movement dogma, elite failure across the board and Republican shock doctrine policies. So let me say this straight out: Libya isn’t Iraq, Barack Obama isn’t George Bush and Bob Gates isn’t Donald Rumsfeld.
How this military intervention turns out will be determined by the sanity of the mission and the competence of the people executing it. So far, we haven’t been scare-mongered into sending our army into a country that didn’t ask for us to be there, set up our own government based upon failed “conservative” dogma, build a torture program to elicit false intelligence for political purposes, kill 100,000 civilian non-combatants, and maim and displace millions more. There are plenty of legitimate criticisms one can make about this administration but, unlike the people previously in charge “of our military interventions of the New American Century,” they’re not a bunch of incompetent psychopaths.