Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Legitimate Cause to Attack Libya?

I find it interesting that with current air strikes on Libyan soil, there has been no tagline or reasoning in terms of US interests for why we are attacking Libya given by the White House. In other words, by Afghanistan the rallying point was September 11th and by Iraq it was the fear that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. With the current attacks on Libya, there seems to be no one within the government even claiming that there are US interests at stake that are causing us to launch attacks.
                The question then becomes why are we launching military attacks against Libya? President Obama stated his reasoning for why the US finds itself engaged with Libya militarily:
The "core principle that has to be upheld here is that when the entire international community also unanimously says that there is a potential humanitarian crisis about to take place, that a leader who has lost his legitimacy, decides to turn his military on his own people, that we simply can't stand by with empty words, that we have to take some action (http://abcnews.go.com/International/libya-coalition-attacks-intensify/story?id=13182261 ) .”
The problem with this reasoning is that there are other countries in the world, even on the continent, that are undergoing a “potential humanitarian crisis” and have leaders who have lost their legitimacy. If other countries are undergoing the same issues as Libya, why is Obama able to get away with circumventing congress and launching an attack against a country that posses almost zero threat to the US? Why hasn’t the media completely attacked this decision, like both times the US invaded Iraq?
                The reason that Obama has been able to get away with military action without having to come up with an official tagline or reason to satisfy the American people is, I believe, simply because the US is acting multilaterally. For the first time in a while, the US is going along with rest of the world; the US is not acting on its own accord in a military engagement. Because a UN resolution has been passed, many people feel that there must be legitimate cause for invasion in Libya, even when we have not been presented with a concrete reason of why we need to launch air strikes against Libya and not a whole bunch of other unstable countries.

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