Libya

Lately the discussion has been "Democrats vs Republicans. Basically the same thing these days, aren't they?"

After Libya, I'm more inclined to agree, as, I think, a lot of people are.

Don't get me wrong. I'm actually completely in favor of using American military power to stop a nation's military from simply going out and slaughtering their own citizens. Nobody inside can stop them, so it has to come from outside. We did it in the case of the Serbian conflict and I think we should have done it in Burma.

But the "humanitarian" aspect of Libya has not at all be sold to me. The rebels appear to have guns, in this case. It's not a massacre, as in Burma, but rather, an armed rebellion with two sides who seem to be killing each other. In that event, I don't see why it's "humanitarian" to back the rebels over the Libyan government troops. Or vice versa. In fact, I'm not sure why we should be remotely involved in what's going on in Libya.

Now that we're in it, though, I hope we're in it all the way. "Never do your enemy a small injury". We have certainly demonstrated to Ghadaffi that we don't like him anymore, and we will back a rebellion against him, which means if he actually gets through this rebellion, he is certainly going to seek his revenge against us and there won't be any more Mr. Nice Guy.

Because as I recall, he was one of the unstable leaders back in the days when he was drawing his "line of death" and basically made us go in and bomb him. After that he seemed to settle down. Gave up his nuclear ambitions. He stopped bothering us and we stopped bombing him.

Now the honeymoon is clearly over. We are back to bombing him and if he gets out of this, he's going to seek ways to get back at us.

Had we done nothing and the rebels won, we could have welcomed them. Congratulations on your successful overthrowing of that guy we never really liked anyway! Had we done nothing and Ghadaffi won, we could have just said good job on repressing those rebels, and gone back to business as usual. But now we've picked sides, and we'd best make sure that they win.


I supported Iraq. Saddam was flaunting the U.N. and shooting at our planes and had been known to own and use chemical warheads, even if we couldn't find any. He never really wound down from the first gulf war.

I supported Afghanistan. Taliban. Nuff said.

But Libya I just don't understand.