2011-03-25

Degrees Of War And War Is War

I just left a comment at Skeptical Eye's (here's your stinking link) recent post about protesters. I basically argued it's all in the degree (sometimes a matter of perception) to which America involves itself in war and how their leaders sell it.

Clinton and Obama in their wars - and let's be frank, Obama is now officially a war time president since he chose to stick around in Iraq and even escalate operations in Afghanistan and now has his own war in Libya - positioned it as wars of "limited" action. They're not invasions on an Iraq scale and are seen as less offensive.

But it's still war - by other means even.

Clinton and Obama were skillful at explaining their military interventionism is conducted within established international institutions whereas Bush and the neoconservtives did not wish to be subverted by international organisms. That rubbed some people the wrong way.

But it's still war.

The other thing is while Bush's war was seen as an illegal act of an aggression on a sovereign state - lots of grey area there - the word "altruism" has crept into Obama's actions in Libya as it was with Clinton in Kosovo.

Perhaps. Maybe there truly is a moral component to war. However, the mere fact of what we witnessed genocide and massacres in Ivory Coast, Sudan and Rwanda and other places where the West turned a blind eye, makes this assertion hypocritical and meek, if not laughable.

8 comments:

  1. Thanks for the "stinkin' link" T.C.! Now I love you more than ever!

    And not only those places you mention...what about the suppression (and shooting of protesters) in Bahrain? Oh, but that's the home of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, so we don't want no freedom, democracy or popular uprisings there!

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  2. I found the two closely related articles at these links interesting. I remain displeased about our active participation, especially compared to the "participation" of Arab League nations, but the two articles below are edifying.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-obamas-libya-strikes-dont-require-congressional-approval/2011/03/24/AB9nxMQB_story.html

    http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/263104/libyan-intervention-does-not-require-declaration-war-david-b-rivkin-jr

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  3. Edifying? Zeus, you are insane.

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  4. There's room around here for but one nut and that's me.

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  5. Zeus, what it seems to me is technically, the President has NO authority to go to war - it's clear in Article 2 of your constitution. But what I think has happened is Presidents have have taken advantage of some grey areas in that they can intervene without DECLARING war.

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  6. The Obama administration is calling the Libya action a "Kinetic Military Action" and has put so many restrictions on it that it is doomed to failure. The "nail in the coffin" is turning Command and Control over to NATO.

    The anti-war protest has become a political tool of the Left. It no longer means what it once did. During the Vietnam War, protests were constant whether the president was Democrat (Kennedy/Johnson) or Republican (Nixon) because the issue was actually the Draft. After the Draft was essentially ended (it still exists but no one is being drafted), protests are ignored by the media and are rare unless a Republican is in the WH. Something we might see in 2012. Let's hope this won't still be going on then.

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  7. I don't know. It just seems to me the comments section of conservative websites are so much more interesting than liberal ones.

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  8. Kinetic. Funny. Nouveau age bs.

    I agree. How can you commit your forces and then go on with "limited" operations and then hand things off to NATO and expect to succeed? Nonsense.

    Macchiavelli once argued, if you don't go into war ruthlessly and to eradicate your opponent then you're doomed to fail.

    America has a nice tradition of "Obama-style" military interventions which seem to prove Old Mac right.

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Mysterious and anonymous comments as well as those laced with cyanide and ad hominen attacks will be deleted. Thank you for your attention, chumps.