Sunday, March 20, 2011

Protecting Libyan Civilians, Not Others

By Robert Parry
March 20, 2011

Even if you think that the incipient Libyan civil war was an unfolding humanitarian tragedy that justified some international intervention, it is hard not to take note of the endless double standards and selective outrage that pervade U.S. foreign policy.

Read on.

5 comments:

Morton Kurzweil said...

There are no civilians in warfare. Wars are won or lost when 'civilian' populations are starved into submission or revolt against a political or religious leadership that uses its population for military aggression at the expense of human rights.
There is not one military leader who led a nation to victory without the sacrifice of its citizens to the state.
WW2 might appear to be an exception, but the greatest military victory in history retained colonial influence that is in the current news and the nineteenth century century ideas of manifest destiny and empire building remain the cause of global economic slavery in the name of human rights.

mnv said...

Despite the ambivalence Obama, according to the CM, has shown regarding a US military intervention in Libya's incipient civil war, you say, the fact is; that no amount of it could dispel the belief that the reluctant warrior is in fact a, enabler of the imperialistic designs of the military industrial complex.

Anonymous said...

We are NOT protecting Libyan civilians, we ARE using the opportunity created by the courage of those civilians to protect and enhance our access to OUR (effin') oil which happens to be under their sand.

http://tinyurl.com/657xso6

John Puma

J. Tyler Ballance said...

Given that a "no fly" zone is an act of war, and only Congress has the power to declare war, then,

WHY has Obama not been impeached for this obvious abuse of Executive power?

Americans MUST NOT tolerate Presidents from either Party who will abuse the Constitution, especially by waging unauthorized wars.

Ethan Allen Speaks said...

As usual Robert, your voice of reason is informed by the factual assessment of recent history, not the jingoistic propaganda and revisionism of the incurious and unwitting.
Hopefully this recent adventure will not metastasize into yet another unilateral exercise. Our government needs to insist that both the material costs and human effort are equitably shared by all governments allied in the protection of the civilian Libyan population. In my opinion this would be a perfect opportunity to ban all the sale and shipping of weapons and military equipment to Libya and its fellow traveler regimes in the region.