The U.S. involvement in Libya may be due to a few guilty consciences.
It might take a war historian to say this with confidence, but from a public schooled blogger's perspective, it seems that throughout history wars were started for the purpose of acquiring control of land, water, things or people. There was an aggressor and an aggressee. And a foresighted potential aggressee might start a war to defend those assets. (Agressee isn't a dictionary word, but you know what it means.)
It was only in the past few decades that wars have been conducted to prevent one group of people from slaughtering another group of people. "Ethnic cleansing" was the phrase popularized by the war in Yugoslavia. Citizens around the world were exposed to news reports about the wholesale slaughtering that was going on. And enough people were appalled by it that eventually some country leaders took it upon themselves to put a stop to it. The war initiated by the Clinton administration eventually brought an end to the killing there.
Killers on the African continent got a pass. In Rwanda the Tutsis took a big hit when the Hutus used machetes in their own ethnic cleansing process leaving a half million to a million dead. They got a pass. Darfur got a pass. One important lesson those willing to commit genocide learned from those regions and Yugoslavia was the utility of keeping the bodies off the TV screens.
This brings us to Libya today. Tim Carney had a piece at WashingtonExaminer.com titled Obama aides fine moral clarity in Libya's foggy war. Mr. Carney tells us that Obama's ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, and his special assistant Samantha Power both appear to be suffering from guilt over having looked the other way when the massacres occurred in Rwanda.
"I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again," Susan Rice said about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, "I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required." ...
For [Rice], the Clinton administration's refusal to intervene in the 1994 slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis by the majority Hutus who controlled the government was a grave sin of omission. Launching U.S. Tomahawk missiles and F-15s at Moammar Gadhafi's forces is her act of penance.
So is guilt the motivator for America's involvement in Libya? Appears so. The ultimate outcome will tell us whether that approach helped or hurt the U.S. Obama, who has his own trouble making decisions, would have liked to vote "present."
Side story -- Back in the Clinton administration a liberal acquaintance praised the TV show "Night Line" with Ted Koppel. So I decided to watch it to see what was so great about it. There was Koppel interviewing a panel about something, and Lawrence Eagleburger was asked about Yugoslavia. In his reply he said Clinton's Yugoslavian adventure seemed a little inconsistent with his indifference toward the slaughter in Rwanda. Eagleburger tossed out a remark that neglecting Rwanda might even be racism. Whoa, what? The spit hit the fan. Koppel came at him hard. How dare he insinuate that Bill Clinton could be racist; Bill Clinton was the least racist person in America, etc. Eagleburger backed off, and Koppel, having shown his true colors, lost a potential viewer.
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