When President Obama intervened in Libya last year, he claimed that "it's in our national interest to act" to remove a tyrant who -- in response to Bush's invasion of Iraq -- had just given up his weapons of mass destruction and pledged to be America's BFF.
Apparently Gadhafi neglected to also tell Obama, "I've got your back."
Obama said: "We must stand alongside those who believe in the same core principles that have guided us through many storms ... our support for a set of universal rights, including the freedom for people to express themselves and choose their leaders; our support for the governments that are ultimately responsive to the aspirations of the people."
The Libyan mob was the equivalent of our founding fathers! (If you overlook the part about it being a murderous Islamic mob.)
Meanwhile, Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA's Bin Laden unit, said: "The people we are fighting for in Libya, the backbone of that movement, are former mujahedeen from around the world." We are "enabling people who may not be formally aligned with al-Qaida but who want the same things to grasp ever closer to power."
Scheuer said the media had taken "a few English-speaking Arabs who are pro-democracy and a few Facebook pages out of the Middle East and extrapolated that to a region-wide love of secular democracy," adding, "It is as insane a situation as I've ever encountered in my life."
No wonder Obama's running for re-election on his foreign policy expertise!
Among Republicans, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum all called for aggressive action against Gadhafi, including enforcement of a no-fly zone.
Santorum cited Reagan's 1986 bombing of Libya (after Gadhafi had killed American servicemen in Berlin), saying, "If you want to be Reaganesque, it seems the path is pretty clear."
Gingrich took all sides, first demanding: "Exercise a no-fly zone this evening. We don't need to have the United Nations. All we have to say is that we think that slaughtering your own citizens is unacceptable and that we're intervening. This is a moment to get rid of him. Do it. Get it over with."
Then, two weeks later, he said: "I would not have intervened."
Only Mitt Romney and Haley Barbour resisted calling for aggressive action against Gadhafi, with Romney merely criticizing Obama's deer-in-the-headlights response, and Barbour stating more directly, "I don't think it's our mission to make Libya look like Luxembourg." No offense, he said, "but it is not ever going to look like what we'd like."
The New York Times' Thomas Friedman exulted that the Arab peoples "have come up with their own answer to violent extremism and the abusive regimes we've been propping up. ... It's called democracy."
The Washington Post's David Ignatius praised Obama's major shift in strategy in seeing the Libyan uprising as a "positive development" and refusing to provide aid to the embattled dictator. "My own instinct," he said, "is that Obama is right."
French liberal blowhard Bernard-Henri Levy announced that "Libya will go down in history as the anti-Iraq. Iraq was a democracy parachuted in by a foreign power in a country which hadn't asked for it. Libya was a rebellion which demanded help from an international coalition."
The Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette editorialized: "Most of the world is rejoicing because of the historic success in Libya. We're glad it was accomplished by Libya's people, not by a U.S. invasion ordered by right-wing American politicians."
I note that the American ambassador in Iraq has not been murdered and his corpse dragged through the streets. I also recall that, a few years ago, when Muslims around the globe erupted in rioting over some Dutch cartoons, one Muslim country remained utterly pacific: George W. Bush's Iraq.
Apparently U.S. invasions ordered by right-wing American politicians are the only ones that work in the Middle East. Fake uprisings orchestrated by Muslim fanatics are less propitious.
Learn your history, Americans. The American Revolution was not the revolt of a mob. It was a carefully thought-out plan for a republic, based on ideas painstakingly argued by serious men in the process of creating what would become the freest, most prosperous nation in world history.
The much-ballyhooed "Arab Spring," with mobs of men gang-raping American reporters, firing guns in the air and murdering their erstwhile dictators, is more akin to the pointless bloodletting of the French Revolution.
That godless antithesis to the founding of America is the primogenitor of the horrors of the Bolshevik Revolution, Hitler's Nazi Party, Mao's Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot's slaughter and America's periodic mob uprisings, from Shays' Rebellion to today's union thugs in Madison, Wis., and Occupy Wall Street.
Americans did win freedom and greater individual rights with their revolution. By contrast, the French Revolution resulted in bestial savagery, a slaughter of all the revolution's leaders, followed by Napoleon's dictatorship, followed by another monarchy, and then finally something resembling an actual republic 80 years later.
Violent mob uprisings have never led to a functioning democratic republic.
