War and (No) Peace

Protest against Qaddafi -Photo by William Murphy
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On October 20th 2011, the hunt for one of the world's more brutal and stubborn dictators came to an abrupt end when U.S. and French airpower stopped Moammar Qaddafi's convoy, allowing Libyan rebels to capture and kill their former ruler. Qaddafi was brutally beaten and manhandled, and finally shot numerous times before he died, defiant to the end. On the same day, President Barack Obama delivered a speech to the American people, beginning by extolling the new opportunity in Libya for free and democratic self-determination and ending by invoking the memory of Americans lost to the Qaddafi regime and the hope of a bright future for the Libyan nation.

I can't help feeling oddly left out by all sides. I consider myself obliged to ask what should be the glaringly obvious question: why were we ever involved in the Libyan civil war in the first place?

We have been currently fighting in Iraq for eight years now. The war in Afghanistan is two years older than that. We have spent billions of dollars on both wars in fighting, training, equipping, and rebuilding. Our losses total over four thousand, and that's not counting the physical and mental damage of the wounded. As if that wasn't enough, as a nation we are deeply in debt to just about everyone with no end to the printing of money in sight. We have no money to spend on extra things. Our political and social problems at home also remain unresolved, with youth taking to the streets in cities across the nation, a divided congress that has not passed a real budget in a frighteningly long time, and a jobs crisis that simply refuses to disappear.

And this year it seems it was time to add another war to our roster.

Which leads to the second point: what justification did our involvement ever have? I get irritated when American politicians speak of "protecting our interests overseas." It is only another way of saying that America's purpose is to police the rest of the world. The only problem is that a police force must have the authority and oversight of a government watching over its shoulder. The United States is not the world's government and nshould never act like it (incidentally, the U.N. does not count s a world government, in case the point came up: member nations agree with and work with the other member nations, until they don't agree, and then they fall back on older alliances and disregard the U.N.)

On top of all of the aforementioned problems, President Obama never even sought the approval of Congress to perform missile strikes and aerial attacks. Neither was the United States even remotely under threat from Qaddafi.

And the icing on the cake is the president's ignorant view of democracy and the role it plays in the Middle East. It is extraordinary that Mr. Obama automatically assumes that democracy was the original intent of the people rising up to oppose Qaddafi. He should look to Egypt as an example, with its ominous rumblings of a not so free government. It would seem that the White House assumes that democracy by definition means fair and secular rule by the people and blamelessly just. In reality, true and pure democracy is the promotion of the group, religion, or party that happens to be the most popular at the moment, aka, mob rule.

Why are (some) of our country's leaders so eager for another war? As political author and talk show host Jason Lewis likes to say, why so ready to expend "blood and treasure" fighting someone else's fight? Doing so does not always result in winning friends. In fact, it may make us some enemies.