Five Reasons Not To (Have) Intervene(d) In Libya
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Not to spoil it, but…
4) Because we don’t know who we’re supporting. Everyone but the Latin American version of the Warsaw Pact and the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) is against Gadhafi. Yet that doesn’t mean the rebels – or, rather, their leaders – are necessarily benign.
5) Because actions have unintended consequences, and actions taken by governments are almost guaranteed to boomerang. This is particularly true in the foreign policy realm, where the physical and cultural distance between the generals and the field is much greater than it is at home, serving to reinforce the myopia of know-it-all government officials and ‘analysts’ who, in reality, are just making it up as they go along. The result, as they put it in CIA slang, is ‘blowback,’ the title of an excellent book on the subject by the late great Chalmers Johnson.
Neither us nor the EU need more oil. But that’s apparently what we’re really out for…after all, something has to power the 30% of France that isn’t supplied by its nuclear plants.