Have We Lost Our National Soul?

The Obama administration has come up with a remarkable justification for going to war against Libya without the congressional approval required by the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution of 1973.

American planes are taking off, they are entering Libyan air space, they are locating targets, they are dropping bombs, and the bombs are killing and injuring people and destroying things. It is war. Some say it is a good war and some say it is a bad war, but surely it is a war.

Nonetheless, the Obama administration insists it is not a war. Why? Because, according to “United States Activities in Libya,” a 32-page report that the administration released last week, “U.S. operations do not involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they involve the presence of U.S. ground troops, U.S. casualties or a serious threat thereof, or any significant chance of escalation into a conflict characterized by those factors.”

In other words, the balance of forces is so lopsided in favor of the United States that no Americans are dying or are threatened with dying. War is only war, it seems, when Americans are dying, when we die. When only they, the Libyans, die, it is something else for which there is as yet apparently no name. When they attack, it is war. When we attack, it is not.

This cannot be classified as anything but strange thinking and it depends, in turn, on a strange fact: that, in our day, it is indeed possible for some countries (or maybe only our own), for the first time in history, to wage war without receiving a scratch in return.
~ from Attacking Libya -- and the Dictionary by Jonathan Schell ~

If you think back to your childhood, almost every person can remember being the victim of or, at least, watching a schoolyard bully in action. The bully would zero in on one or more kids half his size. He would spend a good portion of the school year intimidating, threatening and then beating up one or more targets.

Bullies tend to select targets that they know won't or can't offer much resistance. Even when the victim decides to stand his ground and fight back, his lack of muscle mass or fighting skills are of no match to the aggressor (who may laugh and mock the attempts at self-defense). The bully scores his "victory" without any worries of receiving as much as a trivial scratch.

This is what the United States has become -- a bully in the global schoolyard. As Schell points out later in his essay, President Obama's increasing reliance on drones allows human operators in far flung locations to rain "destruction down from the skies" without ANY fear of direct retaliation. After blowing a target to smithereens, these operators can clock off and go home to their routine lives.

It would be convenient if we could simply lay the blame for this inhumane development in the death and destruction of our fellow human beings at the feet of Obama and his administration. But it is the fact that the vast majority of Americans are not outraged and in the streets protesting this burgeoning soullessness that has caused the blood of so many to stain our hands as well.

If we cannot summons the interest nor the will to demand that our leaders quit bullying others, then we have lost our national soul and we deserve to be damned!