This how the influencers are influenced to justify to the “prol's that rule of law properly means nothing. All in place before Obama sent in Special ops and claimed that there were no boots on the ground.
Reasonable cop/barbaric cop.
Declare victory and get on with ousting Gaddafi
By Mark Malloch-Brown
Financial Times, March 31 2011 15:12
It is not just Libya that now risks long-term division. Telltale signs of fragmentation in the international community’s approach are opening up. Not for the first time Muammer Gaddafi may be on the verge of securing a public relations coup against his western opponents. Now we must declare humanitarian victory, and regroup.
Tuesday’s London conference was a confused affair. The Germans and the Italians touted a ceasefire and exile for Colonel Gaddafi. Others, notably Saudi Arabia and the African Union, stayed away. The US and the UK, meanwhile, insisted the military job was not done, with David Cameron, the UK prime minister, noting on Wednesday that UN Security Council resolution 1973 might give the allies a legal basis to arm the Libyan opposition.
Andrew Roberts, 03/30/2011
The Daily Beast
Forget U.N. resolutions! After decades of Gaddafi's deadly attacks and his support for terrorist groups across the world, America has every right to seek revenge, says Andrew Roberts.
In all the discussion of where, if anywhere, American strategic interests lie in regard to Libya, one very obvious motivation for U.S. action seems to be being ignored: Vengeance. Yet the certain knowledge that the West will eventually take revenge for terrorist crimes committed even as long ago as the 1970s and 1980s is itself a vital strategic interest. Rogue states must always know that there is no such thing as a statute of limitations on murder, and that even after four decades, the slate has not been wiped clean.
Phi Beta Iota: Apart from the fact that both authors above are completely lacking any strategic ethical or analytic construct, neither seems ready to acknowledge that Western colonialism, militarism, and predatory capitalism have achieved holocausts across the Southern Hemisphere unimagined and unachievable prior to the end of World War II. At the same time, both authors avoid the more obvious fact that strategically and ethically, a great deal more could have been achieved on behalf of human rights and general prosperity if the West had eschewed predatory unilateral militarism; and avoided being “best pals” with most dictators–The Real Axis of Evil–suspending ethics (which have an intangible value that Will and Ariel Durant address in The Lessons of History) for short-term commercial gains at the expense of BOTH the indigenous public and the home country public. Philip Allott of Cambridge has it right in Health of Nations–for all of their merits, the Colonial and Industrial Eras have spawned what Tiger Lionel called The Manufacture of Evil, and it does no one any good (George Soros makes this observation) to have the US use the last of its military power in a strategic, intellectual, and moral vacuum. We are witnessing not the clash of civilization, but the clash of classes–the global elite against the global public.
