Interventions That Only a Mugger Could Love

Trey Smith

Libya marks the second anniversary of the death of Muammar Gaddafi with the country on the brink of a new civil war and fighting raging in the eastern city of Benghazi, birthplace of its Arab spring revolution.

Violence between radical militias and regular forces broke out on Friday night and continued yesterday, while the capital Tripoli is braced for fallout from the kidnapping earlier this month of prime minister Ali Zaidan. Federalists in Cyrenaica, home to most of Libya's oil, open their own independent parliament in Benghazi this week, in a step that may herald the breakup of the country.

For months, radical militias and regular forces in Benghazi have fought a tit-for-tat war. Last week two soldiers had their throats slit as they slept in an army base. But Friday's killing of Libya's military police commander, Ahmed al-Barghathi, shot as he left a mosque, has became the trigger for wider violence. Hours after an assassination branded a "heinous act" by US ambassador Deborah Jones, armed units stormed the Benghazi home of a prominent militia commander, Wissam Ben Hamid, with guns and rockets.
~ from Assassination Pushes Libya Toward Civil War Two Years After Gaddafi Death by Chris Stephen ~

Hmm. The US doesn't seem to be building a very good track record when it comes to interventions in predominantly Muslim countries. We attacked Iraq to bring democracy, freedom and peace -- that hasn't turned out so well. Ever since the US intervention, Iraq has been on the precipice of a civil war. According to the above news report, the very same thing is happening in Libya. Owing to this track record, one should anticipate about the same result when we pull out of Afghanistan.

This is not an argument to stay in Afghanistan. Far from it. It is just to point out that when a US Commander-in-Chief -- be it a Republican OR a Democrat -- tells the world that the US must intervene for humanitarian reasons, it is a lie. Is it humanitarian to bat at a hornet's nest, then leave when the hornets come swarming out?

Defenders of these so-called humanitarian interventions will say, It's not our fault. Our aims were pure. You can't blame us if the people we liberate mess up the peace and democracy we so graciously provided them.

Even in that deluded reality, the US still is to blame. It shows that we are very poor teachers who, utilizing the corporate model of education, should be fired because our "students" perform so abysmally.