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Wednesday, April 06, 2011 5:53:33 AM
There's no clear process of how America decides whether or not a cause is worthy of our intervention.
Some say it is abuse of human rights.
"We have every reason to fear that left unchecked, Gadhafi will commit unspeakable atrocities," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said.
If that's the case, there are about a dozen and a half other countries on the list with worse records than Libya. Shouldn't we also be intervening in Darfur? Maybe Iran?
No, concern for human rights can't be it.
Do we intervene militarily, as President George W. Bush did, when that country poses a possible threat to the United States? Does anyone think Libya posed a tangible threat to the United States? As far as I can tell, Libya challenging the U.S. is the equivalent of a sugar company trying to get rid of its best cotton candy business partner.
Libya poses no danger to the U.S.
So we're down to the very last cause, the one force so stunningly powerful it inevitably forces the hand of the U.S. whether the country wants to or not — money. What kind of financial power does Libya have over America?
The Wall Street Journal reported Gadhafi's forces are currently preventing 1.3 million barrels of oil from entering the market every day — oil usually bought by the U.S. at the much-lower-than-the-neighbor's price of $105 a barrel. Ever since the region started heating up, prices have been climbing, now at the highest prices in the last two and a half years.
Although Libya provides less than 20 percent of our enormous oil consumption, the prices will continue to fly higher and higher as long as the unrest in the region spreads.
In America, two out of every three drops of oil are imported. Usually this oil is imported from a region full of authoritarian governments, and if there's one thing authoritarian governments don't like, it's unrest. The U.S. is thus faced with a sick choice — intervene in another country's affairs, or let oil prices at home rise high enough the people actually start noticing and blaming the administration. Some people might be having their teeth pulled for advocating the wrong idea, but watching gas go up 30 cents a week at the pump? That's just sick. Someone has to stop it.
If there's a better explanation for why we're in Libya it is yet to be heard. It's not our moral outrage, and it's certainly not for our own safety. The only other reason it could be is to protect our pocketbooks. Or, as our leaders call it in public, "doing the right thing."
http://www.uiargonaut.com/sections/opinion/stories/2011/march/32511/americas_invasion_of.html
Some say it is abuse of human rights.
"We have every reason to fear that left unchecked, Gadhafi will commit unspeakable atrocities," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said.
If that's the case, there are about a dozen and a half other countries on the list with worse records than Libya. Shouldn't we also be intervening in Darfur? Maybe Iran?
No, concern for human rights can't be it.
Do we intervene militarily, as President George W. Bush did, when that country poses a possible threat to the United States? Does anyone think Libya posed a tangible threat to the United States? As far as I can tell, Libya challenging the U.S. is the equivalent of a sugar company trying to get rid of its best cotton candy business partner.
Libya poses no danger to the U.S.
So we're down to the very last cause, the one force so stunningly powerful it inevitably forces the hand of the U.S. whether the country wants to or not — money. What kind of financial power does Libya have over America?
The Wall Street Journal reported Gadhafi's forces are currently preventing 1.3 million barrels of oil from entering the market every day — oil usually bought by the U.S. at the much-lower-than-the-neighbor's price of $105 a barrel. Ever since the region started heating up, prices have been climbing, now at the highest prices in the last two and a half years.
Although Libya provides less than 20 percent of our enormous oil consumption, the prices will continue to fly higher and higher as long as the unrest in the region spreads.
In America, two out of every three drops of oil are imported. Usually this oil is imported from a region full of authoritarian governments, and if there's one thing authoritarian governments don't like, it's unrest. The U.S. is thus faced with a sick choice — intervene in another country's affairs, or let oil prices at home rise high enough the people actually start noticing and blaming the administration. Some people might be having their teeth pulled for advocating the wrong idea, but watching gas go up 30 cents a week at the pump? That's just sick. Someone has to stop it.
If there's a better explanation for why we're in Libya it is yet to be heard. It's not our moral outrage, and it's certainly not for our own safety. The only other reason it could be is to protect our pocketbooks. Or, as our leaders call it in public, "doing the right thing."
http://www.uiargonaut.com/sections/opinion/stories/2011/march/32511/americas_invasion_of.html
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