Gadhafi Eats Babies, Film at Eleven

by Jeff Huber

Mar 29, 2011

Nothing clots the relentless drip from a liberal’s bleeding heart more decisively than the tattered banner of humanitarianism, especially when it’s brandished by master propagandists to sanctify an otherwise unforgivable war.  Our present caper in Libya is an exceptional illustration.  

Hanoi Jane enforces humanitarian
no-fly zone over North Vietnam.

Even our mainstream media, once our fourth estate but now the abject echo chamberlain of the American warmongery, openly admit that the Libya conflict is one of the most fumble-thumbed lunacies ever to escape from the five-sided funny farm known as the Pentagon.  We don’t know why we’re there, we can’t say how long we expect to be there and we can’t say exactly who’s in charge.  Our Libya excursion is a bigger cluster campaign than Iraq and the Bananastans combined; Carl von Clausewitz is once again clawing at his coffin lid over our cock-and-bull combat capers.   

Young Mr. Obama said our involvement would be a matter of days, not weeks, but it’s already been weeks and our involvement won’t end in a matter of months or even years.  In his little “Please don’t hate me” speech in front of a flock of war scholars at National Defense University Monday night, he announced that NATO has taken charge of the operation.  That’s like saying Halliburton has turned responsibility for its shenanigans over to KBR.  NATO is a wholly owned subsidiary of the American Pentarchy.  Its operational commander has always been and always will be an American four-star officer and NATO will never be able to mount so much as a Campfire Girls’ field trip without massive U.S. support and direction.       

Obama also said that we’ll now kick back and play a “support role,” merely supplying “intelligence, logistical support, search and rescue assistance, and capabilities to jam regime communications.”  Kid, that’s the whole guts of the operation.  What NATO nations actually supply couldn’t keep the show going past the overture.  And how long do you suppose it will take before our financially strapped little NATO buddies decide they have to go home and help their sick grandma wash their hair or something?  The only reason NATO nations are on board with the Libya gig so far is to scam another year’s worth of justification for their phony-baloney defense budgets.  

The Libya scrape is also as illegal an armed force fiasco as we’ve ever conducted.  Talk about treating the Constitution like a roll of Charmin. Tricky Dick Nixon and Barbara Bush’s eldest little booger eater kissed Congress’s kiester compared to the way Obama is cramming junk into its trunk.   Obama didn’t even given the legislature a reach around on the subject of whether or not the country to war this time.  In his little speech Obama said he “consulted” with “the bipartisan leadership of Congress.”  Hey, Dill Weed…  “Consulting” with your favorite sots from the legislature at happy hour isn’t what the founding fathers had in mind when they gave Congress alone the power to declare war.  It’s not even the Authorization for Use of Military Force discussed in the War Powers Resolution of 1973.  

In absence of any constitutional authority for his new war, Obama invoked the UN Security Council resolution that blessed establishment of a no-fly zone over Libya.  Since he’s a Constitutional scholar, I’d guess Obama knows damn good and well that the Founders didn’t say anything about letting other countries declare war for us either.  Maybe he just saw it in the speech and decided that his speechwriters must know what they’re talking about and he should just go with it.  You think?

By the standards the liberal-istas held the last administration to, our sand castle safari in Libya should have them singing “We shall overcome” in the National Mall morning, noon and night, but no.  The hand wringers are champing at the bit to kill! kill! kill! in a humanitarian cause.  

Those poor Libyan kids.  We have to overthrow Gadhafi as soon as possible so we can send Sally Struthers over there and feed them, and so Secretary Cruella Clinton can make sure all the little Libyan girls get to go to school like those little girls we liberated in Afghanistan get to do now.  And that naval blockade we set up, that’s to keep Gadhafi’s fishermen from killing all those poor dolphins and whales in the Gulf of Sidra, isn’t it?  And thank goodness we don’t have to worry about all those Libyan spotted owls and giant redwood trees because we’ve sent in our elite Army Rangers to take care of them.  Isn’t that nice?

   

Roll another Juan...
Just like the other Juan..

I feared that the preceding spoof on liberal perceptions of war might be over the top until I discovered that even progressive icon Juan Cole has gone daft in the bat hangar.  In what has to have been a hallucinogen inspired piece titled “An Open Letter to the Left on Libya” Professor Cole argues with a straight face that the left should support U.S. participation in the UN sanctioned war because the “Neoconservatives hate the United Nations and wanted to destroy it.”  He adds, just as seriously, that the humanitarian aspect of the war should garner liberal support because “Allowing the Neoconservatives to brand humanitarian intervention as always their sort of project…gives them credit that they do not deserve, for things in which they do not actually believe.”  So liberals need to drive America off another cliff before the Neocons do it first and get all the kudos, eh Juan?

Cole also makes the chemically conceived assertion that a United Nations Security Council resolution is “the gold standard for military intervention.”  Christ hanging from a dance pole, is that the way things work now?  The mightiest nation in the history of humanity commits its troops to combat because a flock of third-world thyroid cases order it to?

Obama made reference in his little speech to the “horrific scale of violence” in Libya, implying that Gadhafi has taken measures to suppress his insurrection (something he’s as entitled to do as we are) that are more draconic than those taken by heads of state in Egypt and Syria and all those other places where where we didn’t intervene militarily.  In his little letter, Juan Cole claimed that “The other Arab Spring demonstrations are not comparable to Libya” for a number of reasons Cole enumerates but clearly doesn't understand.  There is no reason to accept any assertion that Gadhafi’s actions to retain power are any more brutal or less appropriate than the ones taken to counter the other rebellions on the region.  Any reports to that effect had to have come from intelligence or news sources, and as we know from significant and bitter recent experience, both of those entities are even less trustworthy than our politicians and intellectuals.   

Everybody needs to get it through his or her or its head that innocent civilians get killed in wars, and they get killed by both sides.  We “good guys” killed more civilians during the Second World War--and did so on purpose--than the “bad guys” did, and if you don’t believe me I’ve got three words for you: “Nagasaki,” “Hiroshima” and “Dresden.”  And I guarantee you that we’ve killed more innocent people in Iraq and Afghanistan than Gadhafi could ever hope to exterminate. 

Please keep that in mind the next time the news hounds of war start howling about how we have to blow up the planet in the name of humanity again.  Lives, like villages, are not saved by their destruction. 

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.