While Libya War Grows, Obama Team Denies It’s a War
March 24th, 2011Via: Wired:
It’s one thing to say that the U.S. is right to take action against Moammar Gadhafi. It’s quite another to insist that it’s not even a war. And it’s simply dishonest to do so while escalating the war.
But that’s the spin from the Obama White House. While the president travelled through Latin America, his aides told sympathetic audiences in Washington that Operation Odyssey Dawn “is a limited humanitarian intervention, not war,” in the words of White House Mideast troubleshooter Dennis Ross. A letter to Congress notifying lawmakers that Odyssey Dawn was in effect studiously avoided the word “war,” preferring the more anodyne “military efforts” — which are “discrete” and “limited in their nature, duration, and scope.”
Ross’ remarks are outright deceptive. And it fits a pattern with President Obama: escalating U.S. military commitments while portraying them as essentially finite and limited.
OK, so this is horrible, and disrespectful, and deceptive and all that, but we haven’t declared war since WWII. How is this worse than Truman calling the Korean War a police action, or “just” sending advisers to Vietnam, or “we’ll be greeted as liberators” or …? Isn’t “escalating U.S. military commitments while portraying them as essentially finite and limited” pretty much SOP for all US presidents? Isn’t this how the people always get tricked into long wars?
Presidential War Power by Louis Fisher
“War is peace,” says the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize Sinner.
Here I go again.
Avatar:
When people are sitting on shit you want, this is how you treat them. For those who haven’t watched the movie, it’s all about Earthlings having the technology to go to other planets and they are doing so in this story to get the semiconductor material on the planet and they do so with no scruples.
Killing the indigenous population; bombing their home to smithereens, etc.
While this is a supposed fictional movie – it is so true as to what is happening on Planet Earth.
Wish we had a Jake Soolly, or a Tarak Mantau to save our Big Blue Marble. Big Time.
“They killed their Mother..There is no green left.” (Jake says on the night before the battle)
Best one in I don’t know how long: “kinetic military action” http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0311/51893.html
(emphasis added)
“I think what we are doing is enforcing a resolution that has a very clear set of goals, which is protecting the Libyan people, averting a humanitarian crisis, and setting up a no-fly zone,” Rhodes said. “Obviously that involves kinetic military action, particularly on the front end. But again, the nature of our commitment is that we are not getting into an open-ended war, a land invasion in Libya.”