Updated Secrets of U.S. History

Have to say that I’m conflicted about our mission to Libya this past week. I am pleased though, to see us acting with the authority of the UN Security Council, the cooperation of European countries dependant on Libyan oil supplies, and at the request of the Arab League.

Yeah, the Arab League; amazing that. All the F-16’s and MIG fighters they’ve been buying all these years and still they ask us to make war for them. Saudi pilots are probably all members of the royal family and the Saudis probably aren’t fond of sending their own children into combat any more than our members of congress are. They all hate Gaddafi: being monarchs themselves they could hardly approve of some two-bit colonel who overthrew the Libyan monarchy in 1969. But they do have in common their extraction-of-resources-based economies and their national policies of repression of their people and aggression toward Israel.

Tonight I saw Monsour O. El-Kikhia on the Daily Show. He’s Chairman of the Poli-Sci Dept. at U.T.S.A. and he’s from Benghazi. He said that the allied airstrikes saved 25,000 to 50,000 lives there when they stopped Gaddafi’s forces from taking the city, and that our actions are giving young people there a chance at a better life. I hope so.

But I hope you’ll take a look at this page I found on Crooks and Liars yesterday.(Click on title to view) It’s a list of U.S. military interventions around the world since World War II. I’d paste it up here but it’s about ten pages long. I’d never heard of some of these, and I’ve been reading history for over forty years. Think of Robert McNamara in ‘The Fog of War’ when asked about the Cuba Missile Crisis, he said that we have been on the brink of destruction about twenty times that he knew about. If we carry on blindly with our National Security State on a Permanent War Footing, we’re bound to eventually find what we’ve been asking for. What a shame.