“Humanitarian” seems to be the Democrats’ new word for “absolutely no national interest.”
The Democrats were not so interested in a “humanitarian” intervention against a much more brutal dictator in Iraq. But, of course, taking out Saddam Hussein, a state sponsor of terrorism who harbored one of the perpetrators of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, would make Americans safer.
Democrats are furious whenever American boys (girls and gays) are put in harm’s way — unless the troops are on a mission that has nothing whatsoever to do with defending the United States.
Obama ignored the murder, imprisonment and torture of peaceful Iranian protesters demonstrating against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s theft of an election in 2009. But he was hopping mad about Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak getting rough with a mob in Tahrir Square with less distinct objectives.
We knew what the Iranian students wanted: a stolen election overturned.
What did the Egyptians want? At the time, liberals angrily cited the high unemployment rate in Egypt as proof that Mubarak was a beast who must step down.
As The New York Times recently reported, since Mubarak stepped down, the driving force in the new government is the Muslim Brotherhood. America is worse off because Mubarak stepped down, which was Obama’s exact foreign policy objective.
On Monday night, Obama gave a speech intended to explain America’s mission and purpose in our new Libyan adventure. He said: “Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different.”
He forgot to add: “However, the United States of America will be turning a blind eye to atrocities in Syria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Jordan, the Ivory Coast and Bahrain.”
One searches in vain for a description of some American interest in supporting the rebels in Libya.
True, Gadhafi was responsible for numerous terrorist acts against Americans in the 1980s, including blowing up Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing 270 people, including 189 Americans.
Soon after President Bush’s 9/11 speech vowing to go to war not only with terrorists, but those who supported them, Gadhafi accepted responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing and paid the victims’ families $8 million apiece.
After Bush invaded Iraq, Gadhafi suspended Libya’s nuclear and chemical weapons program and invited international inspectors to verify that the programs had been halted. A few years after that, Gadhafi paid millions of dollars to the victims of other Libyan-sponsored terrorist attacks from the ’80s.
Only Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly thinks Obama is intervening in Libya to avenge the Lockerbie bombing.
However far off the mark Gadhafi is from being the Libyan George Washington, he poses no threat to the U.S. — whereas the rebels we are supporting might.
But Democrats couldn’t care less about the interests of their own country. Indeed, if there were the slightest possibility that our intervention in Libya would somehow benefit the United States, they would hysterically oppose it.
When it came to deposing the dictator in Iraq — which actually served America’s security interests — Democrats demanded proof that Saddam Hussein was 10 minutes away from launching a first strike against the U.S. and wailed that Saddam hadn’t hit us on 9/11 and posed no “imminent threat” to America.
What imminent threat does Libya pose to the U.S.? How will our interests be served by putting the rebels in charge?
Obama didn’t even suggest the possibility that our Libyan intervention serves the nation’s interest. Last weekend, his defense secretary, Robert Gates, said the uprising in Libya “was not a vital national interest to the United States, but it was an interest.” So, not a vital interest, but an interest. Like scrapbooking or Justin Bieber.
When it came to Iraq, liberals proclaimed that invading a country “only” to produce a regime change was unjustifiable, contrary to international law, and a grievous affront to the peace-loving Europeans.
But they like regime change in Egypt and Libya. Also the Balkans. The last military incursion supported by liberals was Clinton’s misadventure in the Balkans — precisely because Slobodan Milosevic posed no conceivable threat to the United States.
Indeed, President Clinton bragged: “This is America at its best. We seek no territorial gain; we seek no political advantage.” Democrats see our voluntary military supported by taxpayer dollars as their personal Salvation Army.
Self-interested behavior, such as deploying troops to serve the nation, is considered boorish in Manhattan salons.
The only just wars, liberals believe, are those in which the United States has no stake. Liberals warm to the idea of putting American troops in harm’s way, but only for military incursions that serve absolutely no American interest.
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