Not in Nam, of Course

Cruise missile liberals will be looking for war crimes in Libya like Iraq pimps are still looking for WMD in Iraq even though it seems clear that bloody reprisals are the order of the day on either side of the conflict (via Charles Davis).  It turns out that in a civil war the emphasis falls on the latter word.  The desire to cover warfare in the wash of moral hygiene is completely reprehensible, symptomatic of a desire to name as righteous that which is at best merely necessary.  And plainly in the case of Libya you'd have to stretch the definitions of necessity far, far beyond their breaking point.  What such arguments represent is the apparently endless expansion of circumstances in which the right action is to use warfare as a tool of policy, the endless march of deathdealing as an act of mere governance.  Qaddafi was a troublesome vassal; send in the sorties!  It is notable that the loudest cheerleaders of this war do not actually desire anything remotely resembling a revolution.  "As much as possible of the current bureaucracy, police and army should be retained," says Juan Cole, which unintentionally illustrates the truth: that this was not a revolution, not from the Euro-American perspective; it was a hit.  If Qaddafi were quite the Hitler he's now supposed to be, or to have been, or whatever, then it would hardly do to keep his party apparatus in place.  Look, I know this is uncomfortable for you self-flattering rebel sympathizers who imagine yourselves at the wheel of a Spanish ambulance each time you type your login name and password into your Google account, but you are being played for fools and suckers; your extravagant sympathies and your juvenile desires to align yourselves with revolutionary causes blind you to your meager posts as adjunct propaganda writers for the Western war machine.  Did Qaddafi commit enormities?  Yes.  All leaders do; all governments do; the United States does every day; the French and the British do every day; the Sub-Saharan nations are rife with them; Central Asia is rife with them; South America is rife with them--you would support one monster over another only in the hope that it will not one day turn on you?  Perhaps you consider a skeptical pacifism childish; I say to you the moral life of children is superior in every way to a perpetual adolescence.  Endorsing violence except at the uttermost end of need is monstrous; cheering it, even then, is evil.