Remember the breathless, round-the-clock coverage of the opening days of the the first Gulf War… CNN’s Bernard Shaw reporting from underneath a desk in his Baghdad hotel room as cruise missiles and “smart” bombs rained down around him? And then there was the “Shock and Awe” campaign that kicked off the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the almost celebratory manner in which our embedded press covered the fireworks. We were glued to our sets.
Yet barely 24 hours into the US air assault on Libya, and it’s hardly worth a mention on tonight’s 11PM news.
Huh. Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya… it’s become such second nature to us, I suppose it’s no longer remarkable.
…and whether Bush does it or Obama does it, it’s still wrong to be a nation at war and not be on a war footing, not to ask for sacrifice from anyone but the tiny percentage of citizens in the military. We had a nation with its shoulder to the wheel in WWII saving tinfoil and bacon grease and scrap iron, growing vegetables on vacant lots. Now we hand out tax breaks and keep on buying our big-ass trucks. Oh sure, we’ll pause for a moment in small-town America and stand by the side of the road with our hands over our hearts when a hearse with a flag-draped coffin bearing one of our own goes by, but in the big cities nobody even notices. War is commodified and largely remote-control.
Think of this as another oil opportunity. Overthrowing another horrible dictator who bribed his people into complacency, and stealing the oil that’s rightfully ours, it deserves to have freedom. Yeah, we’re great humanitarians.
Or maybe we’re all just busy posting our angst about something in Japan that probably isn’t going to affect us that much, or possibly even affect the Japanese that much. I just can’t figure out your priorities.
Sigh. If only history would tell us this will turn out good.
The point is that Obama knows he’s not going to get any votes from the constipated, impotent idiots who can only get off by seeing violence from the safety of their tv screen.
You people are idiots. Providing a little air cover so that people rebelling against a dictator don’t get slaughtered by their own government isn’t “going to war.”
And if this were about oil, we’d be bombing the rebels and propping up the horrible dictator, just like we’ve done so many other times. Quadafi was exporting oil just fine before this started. Helping to get rid of him will do nothing but disrupt oil flow out of Libya.
Jesus, the US military is actually used to good effect for once and you ninnies are shitting yourselves. People trying to free themselves from dictatorship armed only with rifles are getting murdered by government tanks and fighter jets. They’re asking why the world is sitting back and letting it happen. They’ve asked for outside military help to give them a fighting chance. Do you really want us to sit on our hands?
The way media sees it:
Another black man perpetrating violence against his own people? Hardly worth a mention on prime-time news. Isn’t there a little missing white girl we could cover for a week or so?
It ALL comes down to air superiority.
If you have the technological edge your enemy might as well not even have an airforce or army.
Which is why postponing the Raptor is a super crummy idea…..
People can watch the latest Jerry Bruckheimer or Michael Bay flick and see all the (CGI) shock and awe they could ever want.
Lots of people don’t care about being witness to real world revolution, they just want to be entertained.
In related news, you guys going to report on I-1157?
I figured you’d be all over it yourself for your own reasons but that the Stranger would as well, for it’s “hell freezes over” alignment of viewpoints.
You left out Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, and Panama.
But I’m more in line with jonesy @7, above, although a little more tepid.
“Do you really want us to sit on our hands?” In a word: yes. We could’ve helped in other ways. A century of imperialism of one form or another is enough. And, yes, dropping a missile on another country is an act of war.
@7 I get where your coming from. I don’t think people are idiots. I think they’ve been lied to so many times that they can expect the worst every time, and more often be right than wrong.
Supporting the populist uprisings in the Middle-East is a good thing so long as we never ever send in troops.
The lack of media coverage might not be a bad thing. The start of the second Gulf War increased CNN’s ratings by about 9 times. If real life explosions become less profitable for the News , they may not be such enthusiastic cheerleaders for conflict in the future.
@7 is right. So far about the only thing the US has done is launch some cruise missiles and the French have sent in some jets. Not exactly on par with the initial bombing of Iraq which included many times more strikes and a land invasion.
Iraq was also a bit more open to journalists.
We’re doing the right thing for once, well at least the lesser of two evils thing for once. The people that insist that everything we do is about oil are as myopic and silly as those that claim its only freedom.
@13: great, so the west screws over Africa with colonialism, and now when we can do a little to pay them back, it’s time to be hands off, screwing them over again. They’re getting it coming and going.
Setting up a no fly zone does not have the consequences of a full scale war. We had a no fly zone over Iraq for over ten years, and no one would say we were at war with Iraq during that time. Oh, and by the way, that no fly zone was the only reason the Kurdish Free State was able to exist which, in case you didn’t know, was a good thing for everyone involved. Except maybe for the dictator that otherwise would have murdered any Kurds who tried to self-govern without the benefit of US air cover.
The West’s collective karma is not abated by creating more.
Oh, yes, our benevolent economic sanctions and no-fly zone killed as much as 500000 children. Don’t fucking tell me we weren’t at war. Protecting the Kurds worked out so well. But we freed a people from their evil dictator and we’ll do it again with a little help from our friends this time!
Also @16 weren’t we providing cover for the Kurdish forces so that they could help out in the greater fight in Iraq? How’s that working out nowadays?
You’re confusing the issue by lumping economic sanctions in with the no fly zone. Hmm, I wonder why?
And last I checked, northern Iraq has been the only relatively stable part of the country over the past 8 years that we’ve (stupidly) been occupying the place. The reason for that? It’s because… wait for it… the Kurds were able to set up their own functioning society while we were enforcing the no fly zone. So I’d say it worked out pretty well.
I don’t need to watch CNN to get coverage of the actions in Libya. I have multiple blogs, papers, Twitter, and NPR to keep me informed. Fuck cable news.
@19 Economic sanctions went hand-in-hand with the no-fly zone. You can’t compartmentalize those interventions. As you’ll recall, no-fly-zone escalated in 1998 and caused more casualties. My point re: Kurds is they helped out far less with military missions on the ground in the rest Iraq than was originally advertised. I am not saying this will be the same with Libya, but we’ve always been promised limited interventions and had them escalate over the past 10-15 years.
In any case, this is just another mission of colonialism–one more mission that America cannot afford. It’s also hypocritical. I know you don’t see it that way which is fine.
@7- Yes, let’s sit on our hands. When threatened by us a few years ago Gadhafi stopped all his work on weapons of mass destruction. Now he and like minded nuts around the world are learning that cooperating with us on that issue gets them nothing in the long term. We’re putting our security at risk to improve the standard of living of people who would, literally, cut our throats.
Not to mention that we’re talking 70 million dollars in missles alone (so far) not counting the money it cost to ship them over there. Our NATO partner Italy is only 500 miles from the coast of Libya, less than half of the range of a Tomahawk. Why aren’t they launching from their soil?
@21: well, I’m just going to respond to a couple of points and leave it at that.
1. No one is talking about economic sanctions in Libya, so I don’t really see what that has to do with the current situation.
1a. Yes, limited intervention could become more, but I honestly don’t see that happening here. Intervention seems more about giving Libyans the chance to get to the point where the Egyptians are right now, which is the ability to remake their government free of both dictators AND foreign influence. Whatever the current administration’s faults, they don’t seem to be war-hungry. Luckily there’s not a Republican in office.
2. The no-fly zone over Northern Iraq was not about empowering them so they could be military allies. It was about protecting a dissident group from a blood thirsty dictator. Bush used their help as a prop to justify the invasion in 2003, but we can’t make all our decisions forever after assuming that we’re going to have the worst president in history come in and thoroughly fuck everything up.
@23 FYI. Granted, these sanctions are new/limited and maybe the EU can do better than we did with other countries. I don’t really know.
@23 re: 1a. “Whatever the current administration’s faults, they don’t seem to be war-hungry.” Expanded war in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen to name a few.