What Has Been Accomplished?

The western world has now proved that when politicians get bored with finance someone is going to get blown up. Think about it, instead of bickering and arguing about who is borrowing froma who the military dominate western civilizations all get together and bomb the shit out of some country that has no air defense. It is a truly great idea and is a trademark play by any good political party. Now of course leaders cannot just say that they are creating a distraction so they need to find justification that hints of compassion. “We are going to drop the most powerful conventional ordnance in the world from a few thousand feet in the name of protecting civilians and that will make things better. Do not worry about those bombs killing any civilians, our bombs are engineered to only kill the bad guys.”

So we have bombed the bad guys but now what do we do? It is clear that public support for boots on the ground is thin and there are few targets left to hit without killing thousands of civilians. Here is the issue western powers now face, they were so eager to support the rebels because it appeared Gaddafi would be toppled quickly. The reasoning seems to have been that by supporting the rebels oil production would be impacted for a shorter amount of time. For some reason no one thought about the possibility that Gaddafi might not be toppled by unorganized rebel crowds and we would have to buy oil and natural gas from him again. He might be a little cranky.

What has been accomplished? By creating a temporary stalemate in Libya are civilians safer or will the bloodshed be worse? Instead of providing aid we slammed the door for civilian safety. We cannot stop Gaddafi without boots on the ground, air-power cannot attack urban battlefields without high collateral damage, and we opened the door for Iran to stir up more unrest which will lead to more deaths.

The thing that bothers me the most is our general mindset as a nation. Instead of thinking about actually helping people, we think about how we can either throw money at a problem so it might go away or how we can prove our airplanes can kill people on the ground easily. I guess history will continue to show that societies have little ability to do the right thing.