Humanitarian Interventionism by the Numbers

AntiWar - If there was any doubt about why the United States is involved in an increasingly messy military engagement in Libya, President Barack Obama cleared the air in his speech on March 29th. The US has no vital interest at stake but is involved in a humanitarian mission, to save innocent lives, akin to the Balkan enterprise of the 1990s. Other evidence provided by top administration officials suggests that the ultimate intention is to replace Muammar Gadhafi, in other words regime change, similar to the military action that removed Saddam Hussein from Iraq.

Obama could have made a plausible case for removing Gadhafi based on imminent threat. Gadhafi has been a major state supporter of terrorism, no doubt about it, and he did down both American and French commercial airliners in 1988 and 1989, resulting in major loss of life. He also ordered his agents to bomb a club frequented by American soldiers in Berlin in 1986, killing three, and resulting in a punitive attack by US military aircraft on Tripoli. Though the United States has come to terms with Libya and its regime it is indisputable that Gadhafi is a murderous thug and he is eminently capable of resorting to the terrorism card if he feels his interests demand it. Now that he has been condemned by the UN and attacked by NATO, he almost certainly will again exploit his considerable financial resources to fund terrorism. But President Barack Obama did not cite the danger posed by Gadhafi and instead chose to emphasize the humanitarian aspect of a US military intervention.

Recall for a moment that when Iraq occupied Kuwait in 1991 there were tales of Iraqi soldiers hurling infants out of incubators. Additional atrocities were described tearfully by a young woman who turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. Almost everything being reported about the bloodthirsty Iraqis turned out to be false, deliberately so, to make the case for war. In light of the deliberate deception that has been part and parcel of every American intervention anywhere since the end of the Second World War, how can anyone believe the official narrative? Why should anyone assume that Muammar Gadhafi will decide to slaughter his own people, particularly since he has a major interest in making the rebellion to his rule go away, an unlikely outcome if he engages in wholesale massacres...
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