To me, Odyssey Dawn suggests the name of a Seventies porn star, one of those spacier ones who made a couple of films until the prospect of working again with Ron Jeremy sent her back into the soap bubble from whence she came, and off she floated.
Yes, I can almost hear it now, the voice of coming attractions announcing: "Odyssey Dawn in Harold Lime's Hot Dog Girls II, starring Leslee Bovee, Desiree Cousteau, and introducing Sandy Melons as the Surfer Chick..."
Unfortunately, Odyssey Dawn is the latest preposterous name for the latest ill-conceived, muscle-stretching military operation, this one intended to restrain Libya's Gaddafi from massacring rebel forces--whoever they are ("The intelligence failure in Libya, and indeed across the Maghreb, has proved absolute. Western leaders know almost nothing either about the Libyan insurgents or about what is happening on the ground. It would be madness to commit US and allied forces to destroy Col Gaddafi, with no notion of what would follow" [Max Hastings, Financial Times])--but has already mission-creeped in the time it took to sneeze into dictator-disposing regime-change intervention.
Reading around the blogosphere and the print punditry, I gauge that a lot of smart people are ambivalent about this coalition use of air strikes to take out Gaddafi or at least box him in.
I'm not ambivalent. I think it's another travesty in the use of American force whose consequences have been scarcely calculated and serves to distract us from the one key thing we're unwilling to face (Hastings again):
The most powerful single strand in opinion throughout the Muslim world is bitterness about America?s continuing support for Israeli oppression of the Palestinians.
It is irrelevant whether this is just, or reflects a misplaced sense of priorities. It is a core political reality, depriving the west of moral authority throughout the region. If American troops displaced Col Gaddafi, within weeks they would either abandon the country to anarchy or find themselves the objects of popular hostility as they grappled with the hideously familiar problem of which factions to put in charge.
The fact that military action against Libya was being championed by the same neocons (Max Boot in Commentary, for one) and liberal/humanitarian interventionists (such as Tony Blair*) who advocated the invasion of Iraq should be enough to trigger warning bells about the motives and competence of these ideological serial bombers, and arguments such as this one glibly glide over the basic human fact that we will be killing people who pose no threat to us, have not attacked us, and against whom no declaration of war has been made. Ron Paul shouldn't be the only elected official willing to stand up and express opposition to this latest rush to destruction.
*In the Independent, Robert Fisk wondered why so little had been heard lately from Blair:
Surely he should be up there, clapping his hands with glee at another humanitarian intervention. Perhaps he is just resting between parts. Or maybe, like the dragons in Spenser's Faerie Queen, he is quietly vomiting forth Catholic tracts with all the enthusiasm of a Gaddafi in full flow.
Fisk wrote too soon. This weekend finds Bloody Blair in the Times UK and The Wall Street Journal, sounding like the Blair of old, vomiting his fine line of mellifluous Churchillian drivel.
Source: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2011/03/isnt-odyssey-dawn-part-of.html
Sarah Palin Sean Hannity Harry Reid Mitch McConnel Rush Limbaugh
No comments:
Post a Comment