Top 14 Justifications For An Invasion Of Libya
By End Of The American Dream
March 07, 2011 "EOTAD" -- Over the past couple of days, top government officials from both the United States and the EU have been openly discussing the possibility of military intervention in Libya. In fact, it has seemed like there has been a full court press in the mainstream media to sway public opinion toward supporting a potential invasion. We are being told that we simply cannot stand by as Libyan civilians die. We are being told that this would be a "humanitarian" mission. We are being told that this would not be like Iraq or Afghanistan. Even now, the U.S. military is moving the USS Enterprise and other warships closer to Libya in case they are "needed". Other nations are also sending warships into the Mediterranean and are preparing for military action. It really does appear that authorities in the United States and Europe really are serious about potentially going into Libya. But is there really any way that the United States can really justify getting involved in another war in the Middle East? Will the American people ever be convinced that an invasion of Libya by the U.S. military is a good idea?
Fortunately, so far it appears that the mainstream media propaganda is not working. A recent Rasmussen poll found that a whopping 67 percent of Americans do not want the U.S. to get more involved in the unrest going on in Arab countries and only 17 percent of Americans do want the U.S. to get more directly involved.
But that doesn't mean that top politicians in the U.S. and in Europe are not going to continue to try to change our minds.
British Prime Minister David Cameron sure sounds like he is ready to go to war....
"If Col Gaddafi uses military force against his own people, the world cannot stand by."
On Monday, Hillary Clinton made it clear that the U.S. government considers military action to be very much "on the table"....
"Nothing is off the table so long as the Libyan Government continues to threaten and kill Libyans."
It is almost as if they want us to believe that their hands are being forced.
Of course nobody in the mainstream media seems to be bringing up the fact that the United States has stood idly by and watched millions and millions of Africans be slaughtered in bloody civil wars and genocides over the past couple of decades.
For decades the U.S. has looked upon the suffering of millions of Africans with indifference but now they are trying to convince us that it is a "moral imperative" that we intervene in the civil war in Libya.
It is funny how things can change when oil is at stake. Libya is the biggest producer of oil in Africa and that makes it a very important nation to the global elite.
Fortunately, it appears that the American people are starting to get sick and tired of sending our young men and women off to the Middle East to fight these endless wars.
American blood should never be spent cheaply. Each American life is precious, and our military men and women should never be sacrificed unless there is a darn good reason for it.
Well, right now the global elite are working overtime to try to create some "good reasons" for going into Libya.
The following are 14 potential justifications for an invasion of Libya by the U.S. military that are currently being floated in the mainstream media....
#1 "We Can't Stand Aside And Watch Gaddafi Kill His Own People"
#2 "It Would Just Be A Humanitarian Mission"
#3 "Libya Is Torturing Prisoners"
#4 "The Libyan Rebels Will Not Be Able To Take Down Gaddhafi With Our Help"
#5 "U.S. Interests Are Being Threatened"
#6 "Gaddafi Is Crazy"
#7 "Gaddafi Has Weapons Of Mass Destruction"
#8 "Gaddafi Will Use Chemical Weapons If We Don't Stop Him"
#9 "Gaddafi Has "1,000 Metric Tons Of Uranium Yellowcake"
#10 "European Energy Companies Are Deeply Invested In Libyan Oil And Gas Fields"
#11 "Millions of Dollars Worth Of Infrastructure Will Be Destroyed If We Don't Intervene"
#12 "The Crisis In Libya Is Bad For The Global Economy"
#13 "Someone Has To Protect The Oil"
#14 "We Have Got To Go Into Libya To Keep Al-Qaeda From Getting A Foothold"
Al-Qaeda? Really?
Yes, they are being trotted out once again as a reason for us to invade someone.
A recent article in Time Magazine made the following claim....
"U.S. counterterrorism officials have noted the disproportionate number of Libyans turning up in the ranks of al-Qaeda both in northern Africa and in Iraq."
You can always count on Time Magazine for some good government propaganda.
Hopefully the American people will not fall for this nonsense.
But it looks like it is not just going to be the U.S. military that is going to be involved. This is already being framed as a "NATO operation", and we are being told that a direct invasion will probably not happen immediately.
Rather, we are told that a "no fly zone" would likely be set up first and special forces troops may be sent in to help "advise" the rebel forces.
Well, the truth is that the moment that we shoot down one Libyan plane or we insert one U.S. solider into the country we are at war.
In fact, the Pakistan Observer is reporting that hundreds of "defense advisers" from the United States, the U.K. and France have already landed in Libya and are helping to train rebel forces.
Let us hope that the Pakistan Observer report and other similar reports in the international media are not true.
The American people are sick and tired of using the U.S. military as the police of the world. The Libyan civil war belongs to the Libyan people and it should stay that way.
No mater how it is justified, if the U.S. military does go into Libya the Libyan people and most of the rest of the world are going to deeply resent it....
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War Room The neocons are trying to talk us into war -- again
By Michael Lind
Salon
Tuesday, Mar 8, 2011 07:01 ET
They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing," Voltaire said of the members of the Hapsburg dynasty of his day. The same might be said of the American hawks who are calling for U.S. military intervention in Libya's civil war.
Sens. John McCain and Joe Lieberman, along with others, have raised the possibility of establishing "no-fly zones" in Libya, along the lines of those in Iraq between the end of the Gulf War in 1991 and the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003, in order to prevent Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi from using his air force to bomb the rebels seeking to overthrow his regime.
Another suggestion is to help Libyan rebels establish secure enclaves, from which they can capture the rest of the country from forces loyal to Gadhafi.
The implication is that the enforcement of "no-fly zones," by the U.S. alone or with NATO allies, would be a moderate, reasonable measure short of war, like a trade embargo. In reality, declaring and enforcing a no-fly zone in Libya would be a radical act of war. It would require the U.S. not only to shoot down Libyan military aircraft but also to bomb Libya in order to destroy anti-aircraft defenses. Under any legal theory, bombing a foreign government's territory and blasting its air force out of the sky is war.
Could America's war in Libya remain limited? The hawks glibly promise that the U.S. could limit its participation in the Libyan civil war to airstrikes, leaving the fighting to Libyan rebels.
These assurances by the hawks are ominously familiar. Remember the phrase "lift-and-strike"? During the wars of the Yugoslav succession in the 1990s, Washington’s armchair generals claimed that Serbia could easily be defeated if the U.S. lifted the arms embargo on Serbia’s enemies and engaged in a few antiseptic airstrikes. Instead, the ultimate result was a full-scale war by NATO. Serbia capitulated only when it was faced with the possibility of a ground invasion by NATO troops.
Undeterred by the failure of lift-and-strike in the Balkans, neoconservatives proposed the same discredited strategy as a way to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Paul Wolfowitz and others proposed the creation of enclaves in Iraq, from which anti-Saddam forces under the protection of U.S. airpower could topple the tyrant. Critics who knew something about the military dismissed this as the "Bay of Goats" strategy, comparing it to the Kennedy administration's failed "Bay of Pigs" operation that was intended to overthrow Fidel Castro without direct U.S. military involvement by landing American-armed Cuban exiles in Cuba. In Iraq, as in the Balkans, the ultimate result was an all-out U.S. invasion followed by an occupation.
In Afghanistan, Afghan rebels played a key role in deposing the Taliban regime. But contrary to the promises of the Bush administration that the Afghan War would be short and decisive, the objective was redefined from removing the Taliban to "nation-building" and the conflict was then thoroughly Americanized. The result is today’s seemingly endless, expensive Afghan quagmire.
The lesson of these three wars is that the rhetoric of lift-and-strike is a gateway drug that leads to all-out American military invasion and occupation. Once the U.S. has committed itself to using limited military force to depose a foreign regime, the pressure to "stay the course" becomes irresistible. If lift-and-strike were to fail in Libya, the same neocon hawks who promised that it would succeed would not apologize for their mistake. Instead, they would up the ante. They would call for escalating American involvement further, because America’s prestige would now be on the line. They would denounce any alternative as a cowardly policy of "cut and run." And as soon as any American soldiers died in Libya, the hawks would claim that we would be betraying their memory, unless we conquered Libya and occupied it for years or decades until it became a functioning, pro-American democracy.
Those who are promoting an American war against Gadhafi must answer the question: "You and whose army?" The term "jingoism" comes from a Victorian British music-hall ditty: "We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do,/ We've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money too." Unfortunately for 21st-century America's jingoes, we haven’t got the ships, the men or the money. The continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have stretched U.S. military manpower to the limits. The U.S. has paid for these wars by borrowing rather than taxation. The long-term costs of these conflicts, including medical care for maimed American soldiers, will run into the trillions, according to the economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes.
If a lift-and-strike policy failed, and the result was a full-scale American war in Libya, how would Sen. McCain propose to pay for it? Republicans since Reagan have preferred to use deficit spending rather than taxes to pay for wars and military buildups. No doubt the Republican hawks would support paying for a Libyan war, like the Iraq and Afghan wars, by adding hundreds of billions or trillions to the deficit, even as they claim that non-military programs are bankrupting the country.
Napoleon and Hitler were brought down when they foolishly fought wars on two fronts. In hindsight they look like strategic geniuses compared to the American hawks who, not content that the U.S. is fighting two simultaneous wars in the Muslim world, are recklessly proposing a third.
Fortunately, the American people in 2008 chose not to entrust Sen. McCain with the office of commander in chief. While his domestic policy has been too timid and incremental, in his foreign policy Barack Obama has proven to be the cautious realist that America needed after the trigger-happy George W. Bush. His prudence is shared by his conservative secretary of defense, Robert Gates, who recently told an audience of West Point cadets:
"In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should 'have his head examined,' as General MacArthur so delicately put it."
Gates is right. Those who propose U.S. military intervention in Libya, even as the U.S. remains bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, should get their heads examined.
Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and is the author of "The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution."
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