Wrong Way on a One Way Street

[McCamy Taylor]

There are some things we all can agree on. Like war is never the best option. But now, we are back at war on two fronts, just like we were in 2008. Damned if I know why the Libyan people are worth bombing to death in order to make them free, while the Egyptians had to muddle their own way to democracy. Maybe it has something to do with oil. I’m sure all the western governments are eager to see gasoline prices go back down. Just not sure that war in Libya is the best way to achieve that goal. Look what the Iraq war did for the cost of gas.

In retrospect, building nuclear reactors on the world’s most active fault line probably was not such a good idea, no matter how many carbon emission credits they generate. There is a phrase that goes “Never again.” It applies to genocide and it applies to nuclear weapon’s strike. I always assumed it applied to Chernobyl, too.

Oil is flowing again in the Gulf. Too bad it’s flowing onto beaches and not into tankers. The cost of food is rising, while more of us sink into debt and poverty. A well funded, independent public broadcast system is key to a healthy democracy, so we are slashing the budget of our poorly funded public radio because someone had the nerve to speak his mind. As more jobs get outsourced by companies that are on the government dole, our right to collective bargain is being chipped away. As the world’s ocean temperatures rise and coral reefs die, our Congress has declared greenhouse gases an endangered species. Social Security was supposed to keep our elderly from dying on the streets when times got bad. But as soon as a second Great Depression hits, they want to dissolve our publicly funded pension plan. School integration was supposed to give all kids an equal chance. So now they want to abolish the public school system and make affordable, decent education a privilege not a right. Over one hundred fifty years ago, they freed the slaves and made them citizens. Now, our government wants to create a new race of born in the USA noncitizen residents whose labor will be cheap and easily exploited.

“Health care reform” was passed two years ago, but everyday I see people who are too sick to buy private insurance but not (yet) poor enough to qualify for government funded health care. One of them is dying at this moment. There goes another. And another. I wonder what the souls of newly born babies think as they pass the spirits of the recently departed. Life seemed so much simpler when I was a child. Getting a man on the moon was supposed to solve all our problems.

“An American monkey, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men.”
Charles Darwin

[northoftheborder]

1. sad but all true.

[ProSense]

2. Not oil

Gaddafi had no problems giving the oil companies free rein. He was a perfect Bush/Cheney ally.

[TBF]

3. Libya says may give oil deals to China, India

Tripoli: Libya is considering offering oil block contracts directly to China, India and other nations it sees as friends in its month-long conflict with rebels, Libya's top oil official said on Saturday.

Reuters
Posted on Mar 20, 2011 at 07:17am IST

http://ibnlive.in.com/news/libya-says-may-give-oil-deals-to-china-india/146528-2.html

[TBF]

4. K&R nt

[bhikkhu]

5. I think I understand the sentiment

...Egypt muddled its own way through, because they had a "people's army" which cared more for the country they came from than for an old dictator. In Libya its different, and Gadhafi seems to hold the minds of many in the same manner as Jim Jones did, back aways in time.

Sometimes history seems like a grand chess game - you can study it all you want, but the next move is always a question. Now, sometimes it feels like everyone is losing and all the good things are going away. Its always the wrong way, but who can say whether its the sum of bad choices, or whether there is still some move that could turn things around? If we stood and watched while Benghazi and some hundreds of thousands were put to the sword - maybe that would be the move to make. If we simply stopped Gadhafi's army, perhaps that's all, and the regime crumbles under its own delusional weight. It could be decades of blood either way - we don't know.

I don't think any move brings back inexpensive oil, or balances the budget, or delivers a tide of sanity to US politics. I don't think any move stops global warming, halts the Sixth Great Extinction, or leads to a world where we don't have to change greatly our expectations.

I would like to think, nevertheless, that what the UN is doing is saving lives that are worth saving, and that our part - however unnecessary it is for us do do good for strangers - is somehow to our credit. One basic rule is that a move decided by compassion is not wrong, even if you lose.

[Bluerthanblue]

6. very well said.

:hug:

[McCamy Taylor]

7. When they dropped the nuke on Hiroshima, they said it was to save lives.

So sometimes moves decided by "compassion" are dead wrong.

I hope this administration is not planning to offer up its own version of "compassionate conservativism".

[bhikkhu]

8. There is some truth to that

I think the great tragedy there isn't so much that we destroyed two cities (as we had already destroyed almost every major Japanese city), but rather that the Japanese people were deluded by their own government into the belief that they were in an absolute life-and-death struggle with forces bent on their eradication. That was why so many died fighting even when hope was far past, and why it was likely that over a million US soldiers might have died in a ground invasion. As far as saving lives, it's hard to argue against the lives saved by avoiding an invasion, but the reason for that projection again was a successful campaign of lies in Japan about our intentions (however much evidence there might have been in support of those lies).

From reading war journals of the Japanese, one of the greatest surprises and turning points was how compassionate the US was after the war - rather than kill them or leaving them to die, in spite of everything, we brought food and medical aid and helped rebuild their country. They mostly thought that we were going to kill them all, but our actions changed everything after the war and our best helped bring out the best in that country.

...none of which directly bears on Libya. I think that studying history is vital, but approaching a problem you have to at some point focus solely on the problem. Libya has nothing to do with our domestic politics or our history, Gadhafi is not any other leader, past or present, and we have no particular ties to either side. It was fairly simple, I think, for the UN to listen to the pleas of the Libyan representative and see that if nothing were done quickly Benghazi would have been destroyed.

Our news this weekend could have been bits and pieces of how the city was reduced to rubble, unconfirmed reports of massive civilian casualties ("no mercy, no pity", he said), and then vague satellite pictures of possible mass graves in the desert. Its all happened many times before, it would have been out of the news within days, and things would go back to normal. We'd wring our hands about what a bad guy Gadhafi was, but make all kinds of justifications about how we just couldn't get involved, there was no clear mandate, a leader should serve the people, but there's nothing you can do if he doesn't, people over there are all half-crazy anyway.

If you followed the UN debates on it, I'm happy France took the lead on this, and happy that we followed and helped.

[Overseas]

9. Thank you. This is really well said.

It encompasses a lot of grief in very few words.

[mojowork_n]

10. Libya is an oil field built on a fault line.

Just as in Iraq, where 3 distinctly different regions of the former Turkish Empire were
tied together into a new country, Libya had distinctly different western, eastern and southern
political/historic entities.

But rather than sit back and watch the socio-cultural seismic tremors potentially cause a
long-term disruption of the oil flow, this "crisis" is an opportunity for the oil companies
to be pro-active about replacing yet another aging dictator.

While it's possible to point to a lot of not-so-great chapters in the Ghaddafi story, he
did raise his country's standard of living to be head and shoulders -- Number One! -- in all of
Africa, as measured by the Human Development Index. The ranking compares to some European
countries.

But none of that is of any importance when it comes to preserving the best interests and
primacy of the global oil cartel.

[SidDithers]

11. But officer, I'm only going one way...nt

Sid