By Dave Anderson:
Michael Cohen at Democracy Arsenal asks a very important and so far unanswered question:
The question that needs to be asked is not how will doing nothing further US interests; the question is how will doing something further US interests.
The argument that 'doing something' will improve our "plummeting credibility" in the Arab world is both not a rationale for acting; it's not even in the national interest of the United States. In general, I'm sort of amazed that progressives - after Vietnam, after Iraq and after Afghanistan - would be using the argument that we need to send US troops in harm's way to preserve US credibility. After all, wars should be fought for national interests, not national image.
Here is the Libyan oil field map (courtesy of the LA Times). The oil is spread around both the pro and anti-Quaddafi areas of the country.
There are no mega-concentrations that are near the coast or in the near off-shore that are easy to protect in rebel territory. Instead, most of the oil fields in the combat zone are significantly inland and transfer heavily relies on brittle pipelines. Pretty soon, if not already, both sides will have plenty of men who have access to military grade high explosives and the knowledge on how to use them against brittle targets. Both sides will have incentive to conduct economic seiges against each other by cutting the pipelines in each respective territory if NATO air strikes produces a stale mate, or the loser to take a page out of the Sunni Arab playbook in Iraq if the NATO air strikes produce a Northern Alliance moment instead of a Kosovo moment.
So supporting air strikes and the probable insertion of at least British and French Special Forces to direct those air strikes will degrade American economic interests over the short and intermediate term. What happens when the losing side decides that a conventional fight against NATO air power is damn dumb, disperses into light infantry groups and begins to destroy the hard currency engine of Libya? Do we say it is time to say in the Marines yet again to sort out a nasty tribal war where we have minimal objective interests but feel like pissing away thousands of lives and tens of billions of dollars that our political class says we don't have unless it is for the priority of blowing people up?
Why yes we will.
Again, WTF....
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