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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bearcatbob who wrote (419653)	4/2/2011 10:47:38 PM
From: Brumar89	4 Recommendations Respond to of 793903

Some things people should remember: There were Congressional authorizations and widespread public support for going into both Iraq and Afghanistan. I know the left didn't agree those things (though they do largely agree with Libya now, quite hypocritically) but the left is a minority and doesn't represent the nation as a whole. Furthermore, Afghanistan was openly giving haven to the planners of 911 and the US had been involved in Iraq for many years, maintaining a no-fly zone and international sanctions. IOW we had US national security interests in those countries. But we had no pre-existing military involvement in Libya or any serious national security interest similar to the Taliban governments open alliance with Al Qaida. The Obama administration snuck into involvement in Libya, seemingly making sure the President was out of the country before taking military action. The argument that we should agree with a policy of intervention merely to promote democracy or prevent bloody oppression fails. Why aren't we intervening in Syria, Yemen, etc.? It is NOT true that Bush adopted a policy of invading countries willy nilly only to impose democracy or prevent people from oppression from their own governments - if we had he'd have invaded Lebanon, Syria, Sudan, and other places. Furthermore, the administration hasn't been clear on what our mission is and what we may do on behalf of that mission. We hear different conflicting answers on different days on a lot of questions: Will we or won't we arm the rebels? Will we put boots on the ground? Supposedly no, but later we learn we've already got spotters there and US SF are training rebels. Is our goal to overthrow Gadaffi or not? We were told we were enforcing a no-fly zone, then find out we had been targeting ground forces. Then after that comes out we hear we've withdrawn our air-ground support, but other NATO countries will be taking our place. The administration looks like its bungling around, not knowing what it wants to do, changing policies in response to news stories. There's lots of reasons to be critical. We can be critical of what the administration is doing and how its doing it and still hope the US prevails in whatever our leaders decide our mission is. You can be extremely critical of the hapless witless Obama adminstration and still hope and pray for this: I hope President Obama is lucky. I hope Qaddafi’s regime collapses like a sand castle, that the Libyan opposition turns out to be decent and united and that they require just a bare minimum of international help to get on their feet. Then U.S. prestige will be enhanced and this humanitarian mission will have both saved lives and helped to lock another Arab state into the democratic camp. Dear Lord, please make President Obama lucky. smalldeadanimals.com We have to pray Obama is lucky. Because he sure doesn't seem to know what he's doing.

To: Bearcatbob who wrote (419653)	4/3/2011 10:17:36 AM
From: Katelew	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793903

OK. I didn't realize we were in agreement on the intervention itself. While the attacks back on Obama might be justified as revenge for the attacks on Bush, I still don't think it's serving the right well. From my perspective as a non-partisan, it's painting the right as petty, cynical and mean-spirited. The YouTube clip is hysterical, isn't it. It's been amusing to watch BOTH sides of the aisle try to get their heads around this Libyan intervention. People trying to justify their earlier comments and clarify their postions as circumstances change (or the polls changed--ha) has been a trip.