Qaddafi "A whole new level..."

**I had to edit a lot of swear words out of this one. I'll let you imagine where they were. It can be like a game!

A few days ago, when I was talking with Hana, the Egyptian girl who was staying in our house last week, about the events in Libya she said to me, "In Egypt we were saying that the only way Mubarak would leave the country was after he burned it down...but Qaddafi is taking it to a whole new level...." That pretty much sums it all up.

If a leader starts indiscriminately gunning down his own people in front of the world's eyes, the international community really should be feeling some moral imperative to do something. I don't mean we have to send in the troops Iraq-style, but instituting a no-fly zone really does seem like a no-brainer. Stopping Qaddafi from bombing his people should be the least we can do.

On top of that, Europe needs to stop buying Libyan oil, um, like...twenty years ago. And they need to cease their feckless diplomatic hand-wringing. The political calculus behind coming out and supporting the Egyptian people was at least marginally complicated in that Mubarak was (maybe) less obviously a ruthless dictator to most people, but this unabashed massacring of peaceful protesters supposedly excused by the pre-recorded rants of a drug-addled dictator should pose no challenge to the political mathematicians of America (and Europe, but they're not my government).

In all this, I can't help but think back to the book written by my old Thesis adviser at Vassar that examined the similarities between Iraq and Vietnam and concluded that the most important similarity of all was that both war's legacies had sapped America's willingness to intervene in cases of actual moral necessity. He wrote the book in 2006, and though this argument may not be new, I had never heard it before, and his conclusion seems remarkably prescient and relative to today's events.

Is Obama's reaction to the Middle East a kind of reincarnation of some old school George Washington-style protective non-involvement doctrine? Is this the natural reaction to the over-active interventionism of George Bush's neoconservative era (something I attempted to write much of my thesis about)? Is this plain and simple uncertainty? Or is this just a purely-political bet that the public will be happier in the long run if we stay out of it and keep our hands clean? The history major-nerd in me cares about that stuff a lot, but more than anything, the human being in me only cares about putting an end to the insanity that is Libya.

I'm not one to herald the decline of America blah blah blah, but I am one, deep down, to worry about America ending up on the wrong side of history. American interventionism is a topic that comes up quite a lot in basically every political conversation I've ever had here in the Middle East, so this post does not do justice to everything I think about it, but suffice to say, I think America needs to do something more than use stern language and renew sanctions not only for political but also moral reasons.