Over there, over there...

Two Cohen's -- liberals of note -- take on the arduous task in the press of trying to convince the American people that the Khaddafy threat in Libya justified hot U.S. intervention, under cover of NATO, for moral reasons.

Like many of my generation, I became an interventionist in Bosnia. Sickened by carnage, and by the lies and ignorance of Western politicians who prolonged the carnage, I understood that caution — or more accurately hypocrisy masquerading as prudence — can be as criminal as recklessness.

A war with very specific reasons and equally specific crimes committed overwhelmingly by Serbian forces was dressed up as a millennial conflict beset by Balkan fog and moral equivalency in order for craven Western leaders to justify an inaction that killed.

So I sat in Sarajevo and fumed and tried to pierce the fog with words. I tried to say who was killing whom beneath the gaze of blue-helmeted United Nations “peacekeepers” and below the fatuous flights of NATO planes patrolling empty skies. Was Sarajevo to be another Munich?
...
Libya, in the wake of this damage, was a risk for President Obama. There were many reasons for not intervening — a third war in a Muslim country was not what America needed and the homegrown quality of the Arab Spring has been central to its moral force. But to allow Muammar el-Qaddafi to commit a massacre foretold in Benghazi would have been unforgivable.

The intervention has been done right — with the legality of strong United Nations backing, full support from America’s European allies, and quiet arming of the rebels. The Libyan people have been freed from a crazed tyranny. Unlike in Iraq, burdens were shared: America flew the intelligence missions and did the refueling while the French, British, Dutch and others did most of the bombing. Iraq was the wrong prism through which to look at Libya. I’m glad I resisted that temptation. Another cycle has begun.

In the end, I think interventionism is inextricable from the American idea. If the United States retreats into isolationism, it ceases to be itself — a nation dedicated, however much it falls short, to a universalist ideal of freedom.

Show us the Libyan concentration camps.
Show us the skeletal men, reminiscent of Bosnia.

The sad truth is, the administration forget to sell Ghaddafy as a dangerous enemy -- he was more a laughable joke than any true threat to our national security. To us here, most importantly, and to innocent life, plenty of which was sacrificed up in the pre-emptive NATO campaign.

And is it so wrong for Americans to care more about the lives -- and livelihoods -- of their own struggling sons and daughters, rather than worrying about what a decades-long dictator might have in store for his own people (emphasis on that key word: might...), over there? Spend our resources on fixing our own problems, preventative maintenance here to protect our citizens over pre-emptive bombing from above there, to kill some lives to save others...

Especially when, it's hard to tell, their good guys from their bad...

So, up goes the hype meter, it seems:

Libya under Moammar Gaddafi was not Germany under Adolf Hitler. But lives were at stake, mass murder was threatened and the man doing the threatening was capable of unspeakable acts of terrorism. Did any of this have anything to do with our vital national interests? Not really. But we had the wherewithal to avert the killing. That gave us the moral obligation to do so.

U.S. policymakers now grappling with the question of America’s role in the world ought to look to the past as well as the future. We were once an uncaring nation, not selfish by any means, but tone-deaf to the cries of victims elsewhere. We defined our national interests narrowly and dismissed morality as the preoccupation of amateurs or special-interest pleaders. Larson’s book is instructive on this score. Martha Dodd may have slept with the enemy, but, in moral terms, she was no worse than the country she represented. It just slept.

Yawn.
You see this creeping up a lot in the press lately: making the case that only isolationist pacifists would see this one as a time not to respond... Personally, I think the administration, and their press people, badly misread the public temperature for more foreign wars. And we're way more skeptical that what our hardware (and manpower, in other places) is doing "over there" really is helping "protect" us, over here...

Congressman John Lewis of the CBC got it right recently, when he said, eventually, all our foreign interventions and pre-emptive actions will come home to roost... Hmm, where did we hear that one before?

* and is it still wrong to notice, so many of these liberal men excited for our taking out the "wrong" Arab dictators, who coincidentally threaten Israel with their own actions, are of Jewish descent themselves?

It'd be like only having Cuban-American immigrant men opine on whether or not the time is wise to pre-emptively remove a Cuban dictator who surely is a madmen threatening the lives of his people?