War, then and now: Libya

 

I was typing up old poems and putting them in a folder when I came to “Horace and the Preparation for war.” http://www.lawrencehelm.com/2010/08/horace-and-preparation-for-war.html

Lefty, aka Billy Blogblather, didn’t object to that representation of his ideas, if I recall correctly; so I can’t help but wonder what he thinks of Obama’s bombing of Libya. Lefty, as was the case with most of Western Europe, heralded Obama as the inaugurator of world peace and Welfare-Stateism. Western Europe has made the transition from anti-war-anti-Bush, to pro-war against Libya just as Obama has, but I wonder about Lefty. Did he make the transition as well?

Victor Davis Hanson has written a short clever article synopsizing the changes: “By bombing Libya, Obama turned America upside-down.” Since the article is offered for flikr, tweeting, etc. I don’t think Hanson would object to my reproducing most of it here:

By bombing Libya, President Barack Obama accomplished some things once thought absolutely impossible in America:

•War-mongering liberals. Liberals are now chest-thumping about military "progress" in Libya. Even liberal television and radio cite ingenious reasons why an optional, preemptive American intervention in an oil-producing Arab country, without prior congressional approval or majority public support – and at a time of soaring deficits – is well worth supporting, in a sort of "my president, right or wrong" fashion. Apparently, liberal foreign policy is returning to the pre-Vietnam days of the hawkish "best and brightest."

•Europe first. Many Americans long have complained about the opportunistic, utopian Europeans. Under the protective U.S. defense shield, they often privately urged us to deal with dangerous foreign dictators – while staying above the fray to criticize America, at the same time seeking trade advantages and positive global PR. But now the wily Obama has out-waited even the French. He has managed to shame them into acting, using a new possum-like U.S. strategy of playing dead until, finally, even Europe was exasperated – almost as if the president were warning them, "We don't mind the Gadhafi bloodletting if you, who are much closer to it, don't mind." The British Guardian and French Le Monde will be too knee-deep in the Libyan war, busy chalking up Anglo-French "wins" and worrying about European oil concessions, to charge America with the usual imperialism, colonialism and militarism. We are almost back to the 1956 world of the Suez crisis.

•Iraq was just a Libyan prequel. Conservatives have complained that past opposition . . . to George W. Bush's antiterrorism policies and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was more partisan than principled. Obama ended that debate by showing that not only can he embrace – or, on occasion, expand – the Bush-Cheney tribunals, preventative detentions, renditions, Predator attacks, intercepts and wiretaps and Guantanamo Bay, but, now, preemptively attack an Arab oil-exporting country without fear of Hollywood, congressional funding cutoffs, Moveon.org "General Betray Us"-type ads, Cindy Sheehan on the evening news, or "Checkpoint"-like novels. In short, Obama has ensured that the exasperated anti-war movement will never be quite the same.

•Monster-in-recovery. The Gadhafi clan has been wooing Westerners through oil money and multicultural gobbledy-gook. In the past few years, the British released the Lockerbie bomber, a native of Libya; Saif Gadhafi, the would-be artist and scholar and the son of Col. Muammar Gadhafi, essentially bought a Ph.D. from the prestigious London School of Economics; the creepy Harvard-connected Monitor Group hired out cash-hungry "scholars" to write on-spec tributes to Gadhafi's achievements; and singers Mariah Carey, 50 Cent, Beyoncé and other entertainers earned a pile of petro-dollars for crooning before the Gadhafis. Then, suddenly, Obama spoiled the fun and profits by turning Gadhafi from a rehabilitated monster back into Ronald Reagan's old "Mad Dog of the Middle East."

•Stuff happens. Many supporters of the Iraq war condemned Abu Ghraib as the poorly supervised, out-of-control prison it was. Lax American oversight resulted in the sexual humiliation of detained Iraqi insurgents. It was a deplorable episode in which, nonetheless, no one was killed, and yet it took an enormous toll on the credibility of administration officials. But while the media covered the Libyan bombing and the Middle East uprisings, a number of Afghan civilians allegedly were executed by a few rogue American soldiers. That was a far worse transgression than anything that happened at Abu Ghraib under Bush's tenure – but apparently an incident that, in the new media climate, can legitimately be ignored. Obama made "stuff happens" a legitimate defense for those doing their best to run a war from Washington.

•War really is tiring. The media serially blamed a supposedly lazy Ronald Reagan for napping during military operations abroad. George W. Bush was criticized for cutting brush at his Texas ranch while soldiers fought and died in Iraq. Obama rendered all such presidential criticism as mere nitpicking when he started aerial bombardment in the midst of golfing, handicapping the NCAA basketball tournament and taking his family to Rio de Janeiro.

•The road to Damascus? After Bush's interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, many war-weary Americans believed that we would never again get involved in a Middle East war. But now, with Obama's preemptive bombing of Libya, giddy American interventionists are again eyeing Iran, Syria – and beyond!

In short, Obama turned America upside down when he bombed Libya – and in ways we could have scarcely imagined.

With Obama's preemptive bombing of Libya, giddy American interventionists are again eyeing Iran, Syria – and beyond.

Hanson is obviously enjoying his little exaggerations. I can’t imagine Lefty thumping his chest about military progress in Libya. In fact I haven’t heard Lefty say anything at all about Obama or Libya recently. While there may now exist a majority my-President-right-or-wrong Liberals out there, there are probably a growing number of minority Liberals and Leftists who are disillusioned by Obama’s following in the footsteps of all previous presidents who went to war when they deemed it necessary.

As for me, nothing has happened recently that violates the ideas presented in “Horace and the preparation for war.” Idealists may imagine we are, or can be, in a post-war era, but reality keeps contradicting them. Nothing has changed in regard to war since the time of Horace.