Interesting. I once believed that liberals were principled. Then I swiftly learned that a liberal has no principles whatsoever. Power > principles.
If you want to retread the Iraq war, have fun. But there are a couple key differences that the rest of us are taking into account when we ponder what makes a foreign policy move good or bad.
1. Iraq and Libya are very different situations when we got involved. In Iraq you had a stable despotic state. Libya had a civil war. In Iraq you had a guy who did some kind of terrible things in the passed and was doing the usual horrible dictator stuff today. In Libya you had a guy who was looking to slaughter an entire city to show the rebels who was boss. Threat of action on the level of mass murder is justification to do something, the question is then, what do we do?
2. Did we need to invade either Iraq or Libya to accomplish the mission? In the case of Iraq, the answer was yes. In Libya, the answer was no. Invasion, as in putting soldiers into a country in mass numbers to kill enemy soldiers, is effectively taking over that country which is very much not ok because we are not the people of Iraq. In the case of Libya, the people that were rebelling were the people of Libya. They have the right to 'invade' their own country by taking out their dictator. So in the case of Iraq, we did a bad thing, and we did not do this bad thing in Libya.
3. What do we need to do to protect the most lives? In Iraq, there has been a number of estimates of the death tolls of civilians due to our invasion. Some small, some quite large. Its laughable to think Saddam would of murdered the numbers of people that died as a result of our actions over the same time period. If he tried, then us liberals might of been more interested in doing something. But that was an if, and not a reality in the situation. On the other hand Qaddafi was telling people he was going to slaughter a city to show the rebels what's up. That was unacceptable. Thankfully we didn't need to send the army in, we could just bomb his army for a while and let the rebels take care of themselves. That wasn't really a useful strategy in Iraq.
So in the end, you are comparing Apples to Pineapples. They might rhyme but there are some key differences that you are actively over looking.
Now all, get back to the usual crazy that I disapprove of.
