Dear Good Concerned Engaged Enlightened Rule-of-Law Liberal
Progressives: Is it clear enough for you now? Does he have to spell it
out for you, slowly, using short and simple words, and maybe some
cartoons to make it clear? Your noble Nobel Peace Laureate – bringer of
hope and change, restorer of the rule of law, world-historical
paradigm-shifter, etc., etc. – has just publicly (not to mention
arbitrarily) committed the nation to “the supreme international crime”:
aggressive war.
He has pledged the blood and treasure of the
United States to "regime change" in Libya: that is to say, an act of
military aggression designed to overthrow the government of a sovereign
nation which has not attacked your own country nor posed the slightest
threat to it. This is, of course, precisely the same blatantly illegal
posture taken by that great monstrous bogey-man of all good concerned
engaged enlightened rule-of-law liberal progressives everywhere, George
W. Bush, in his invasion of Iraq.
On Friday, Barack Obama
scribbled his name at the bottom of a newspaper article written by hired
minions of the leaders of Britain and France, pledging to keep killing
people in Libya until Moamar Gadafy is driven from power. Nothing short
of "regime change" will satisfy these towering colossi of world
statesmanship;
as the Guardian reports, they utterly reject any calls "for an immediate ceasefire, or a negotiated exit for the Libyan dictator."
Peace?
Pah! No, it will be war, war, and more war until these leaders of the
great Western democracies get the outcome they demand: the ouster of
their clapped-out former client-tyrant, and his replacement by what they
hope will be more amenable operators. Or is that too cynical? Surely
what these Three Amigos of the Apocalypse are seeking is nothing less --
and nothing other -- than the "freedom of the Libyan people," right?
You
know, the kind of freedom where your leader can take your country into
an open-ended campaign of military action without the consent of the
people or the people's representatives -- and then escalate the conflict
far beyond the mandate of an already rubbery UN resolution into
outright, undeniable aggressive war, through the oh-so-constitutional
method of ... an op-ed piece in the Washington Post.
That's
real freedom, baby! Can't you feel it in the air? Can't you feel it all over your body -- like a rash?
Now,
you might think that such a brazen act of criminality would raise one
or two hackles somewhere out there in God's shining city on the hill.
(That is, you might think that --
if you'd been in a deep, dark
cave the last ten years and hadn't seen the veritable tsunami of
atrocity, deceit and lawlessness that the American people have swallowed
without complaint.) In any case, across the length and breadth of
freedom's land, scarcely a bit of notice has been paid to this open
commitment to a policy that was unequivocally condemned as a "supreme"
evil back in the Nuremberg Trials. It seems that nobody bats an eye
anymore when an American president adopts Hitler's policies.
No,
instead of offering blastments of moral outrage at yet another
president launching yet another illegal regime change operation in yet
another Muslim country, our Good Concerned Engaged Progressives have
nothing to say. They are still too wiggly about Obama's meaningless
expectoration of blather on the "budget battle" -- that ludicrous
puppet-show where two factions of hirelings strut and bellow over the
few infinitesimal differences in their techniques of corporate whoredom.
This is what seems to be the most pressing matter of the day to the
Good and Engaged -- because of course it may have some bearing on what
is their Tillichian "ultimate concern": the re-election of a man who is
now embarked on his first wholly-owned war of aggression. That's right,
the Peace Laureate is no longer simply following (and extending) the
Terror Wars of his predecessor -- he's done gone and started one of his
very own! Reason enough to fight tooth and nail to get him another term;
after all, you don't want one of those militarist Republicans in
there, do you?
(Of course, we don't mean to imply that the
Laureate's new war of aggression is some kind of radical departure.
Heaven forefend! An arch-conservative like Obama would ever do anything
that was not deeply rooted in American tradition. His killing spree in
Libya is an echo -- perhaps even an
homage -- to similar actions undertaken by one of the presidents that he most admires: Ronald Reagan.)
The
Three Amigos' joint declaration of aggressive war notes ominously that
Gadafy is so evil that "the international criminal court is rightly
investigating [his] crimes committed against civilians and the grievous
violations of international law." This would, of course, be the same
international criminal court that the Peace Laureate's own government
refuses to recognize -- for fear that its own leaders and minions might
rightly end up in its dock for "crimes committed against civilians and
grievous violations of international law." Such as, oh, say, waging an
aggressive war of regime change that blatantly violates your UN mandate.
But
of course, that "mandate" was, as usual, just a threadbare fig leaf to
mask the hardcore machinations of power politics -- which these days
consists largely of soft, weedy cowards finding ways to prove how tough
and "credible" they are by shedding other people's blood. Thus you will
not be surprised to learn that the Amigos' diplomatic minions are now
feverishly "considering how the language of the United Nations mandate
can accommodate a more active role on the ground."
So this is
where we've come to: from earnest, knitted-brow assurances of a "limited
intervention" to outright declarations of open-ended war for regime
change -- and "accommodations" to bring in more boots, bullets and bombs
"on the ground." This is a crime, "the supreme international crime,
differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself
the accumulated evil of the whole," and it's being committed, openly,
proudly, by the Democrat in the White House.
But precisely because this "accumulated evil" is being committed by a
Democrat in
the White House, the "progressive" movement is silent. They don't care.
Aggressive war? They don't care. International law? They don't care. A
blanket refusal of ceasefires and peace plans that could spare countless
civilian lives? They don't care. An "active role on the ground" -- new
mounds of Iraq-style "collateral damage," corpses, chaos, breakdown,
extremism, brutality, suffering? They don't care.
And so we end
with another address to our Good Concerned Engaged Enlightened
Rule-of-Law Liberal Progressives: If you will stand for this, what
won't you stand for? And further: If you will stand for this -- what
do you stand for?
