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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.
