We are excitedly told the rebels have taken over a key town on the way to Tripoli. As they potentially move into Qaddafi territory of course no one speculates what the triumphant militias will do when they sweep into a Qaddafi town that has been softened by US and French aerial bombardments. Will they bring lamb, falafel and yogurt sauce, or will they be pumped up and ready to kill everybody in sight? We really don't want to think about that.
By this point, the US message about Colonel Qaddafi -- the pocked-faced monster of Tripoli who we once bombed but now have been in bed with for the past few years -- is getting quite incoherent and contradictory, either intentionally or because one person doesn't have a clue what the other is thinking. One moment, the Obama team wants to get rid of him; then, the next moment, there is an assurance regime change is not our policy this time, like it was in Iraq with Saddam Hussein. Also, it's clear the UN resolution doesn't say anything about "regime change."
By now, of course, despite the diplomatic double-speak, the game is out of the bag and -- UN resolution be damned -- everyone knows we're there to get rid of Qaddafi. We are the United States of America, and our prestige in the world depends on us doing what we say we're going to do " well, not exactly doing what we say we're going to do but doing what everybody over the age of 12 expects us to do, which is do what those with power in the US want done. In the process, if we actually do save people from being killed -- even if we kill more people to save those -- that's wonderful, because it will serve as good PR when the war gets into the quagmire stage and the antiwar critics suddenly begin to make sense.
The problem with humanitarian US military interventions is that the concept is completely self-serving and deceptive. If US military interventions could be morally clear in their motives -- say, like the Lincoln Brigade against the Spanish fascists -- sending planes to help Libyan rebels might be a good thing. But the United States has too much dubious history to live down, too many self-interests at play and is too dishonest and secretive about its real motives to actually do anything for purely humanitarian motives. Humanitarianism is a cover for something else, and escalation is virtually guaranteed.
The notion of limiting the intervention to a no-fly zone is preposterous. First of all, it's clear the UN language was intentionally vague so going beyond a literal no-fly zone was part of the plan. It's also clear with the recent rout of the rebel forces headed toward Tripoli by barely one-fifth of Qaddafi's forces that aerial intervention just won't cut it if we want more than a stalemate. Now we're getting discussion of sending in arms and the concomitant discussion that arms shipments will require trainers to tell the Libyans how to shoot them. Naturally, there are reports that the US is sending in covert CIA teams.
Those who have followed US military intervention history over the past decades know the rest of the story, which will become an ongoing information struggle between the Obama Administration's and the Pentagon's PR capacities and their vast agendas of secrecy.
The so-called "Obama Doctrine," in this sense, is the same doctrine we've seen for years. It was described best by Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism .
Klein defines "disaster capitalism" as "orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities." She says the right-wing's favorite economist Milton Friedman led her to her thesis on Shock Doctrine. Here's the Friedman quote she cites as inspirational:
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