Libyan No-Fly ZoneFollow

All of those sites varus linked are lying. It's true because I said so.

No, you are. Assuming that when Obama speaks those words that it translates into increased focus on domestic oil production is pretty darn silly. Who are you trying to convince? You know that's not what he means, and we know that's not what he means. If his intention was to increase oil production, he'd say that he was increasing oil production. Heck. He'd get an immediate 10 point bump in polls and would almost guarantee himself another term in office if he actually clearly promised that.

How many times do we need to point out that the words Obama says don't quite match up to what you claim he's saying.



He's not focusing on those either. At the risk of explaining something to you which you should presumably already know, when a politician lists a bunch of things together, they often do that specifically so they can conceal the ratio to which those things are part of the agenda. Kinda like when you spout off about "Oil subsidies!" when pressed about how the government is helping to increase oil production, while kinda overlooking that only a tiny fraction of those subsidies go towards anything remotely related to actually increasing oil production. In the same way, it's very telling that Obama doesn't mention increased drilling as part of his energy plan, and kinda lumps in natural gas along with "clean coal", biofuels (a complete waste of time btw), and the even more vague "alternative energy" catchall.

Guess where most of the money actually goes? Not to drilling. And not much to actual natural gas (which also requires drilling, and that's a no-no), and not much to actual coal production. Where does the bulk of his energy money go? Well, it's a couple billion for carbon sequestration. Wont help increase coal production, much less make it cheaper or more available, but he's spending money on it, so that counts, right? And subsidies for inefficient biofuels. And designs for solar plants that his own supporters will almost certainly never allow to be built full scale. And more spending on god knows how many other boondoggle projects which will never be anything other than money funneled into friendly hands. Very very very little of which actually helps to increase any sort of energy production or decrease costs.


But hey! He's all about energy independence, right? I'm not trying to say that "drill baby drill!" is the end-all solution or anything. The issue is much more complex than that. But let's also accept that there is an almost Pavlovian resistance on the left to anything related to oil production in this country and that there are a hell of a lot of barriers (to several forms of energy production btw, not just oil) that the left has put in place to make energy production very expensive. It just doesn't help matters at all when someone like you constantly insists that this just isn't happening and that nothing their "side" is doing is making things more difficult than they could be.


And no. It's not just about Obama either.

So....Hows the Libya thing going?

Anyone even slightly concrned about who the 'rebels' are, and who is leading them?


I seem to remember that a previous Mujahideen was armed and trained by the CIA to fight a proxy war, and we all know how that ended up.

We're doing the same sort of stupid half-assed foreign policy which has pissed off so many people in that region in the first place. We need to start grasping the reality that those we promise to help don't really understand why we stop helping them just short of them actually getting themselves out of the problems they're in. We keep doing half measures and not committing to anything. And we end out leaving lots of people in the lurch when we lose the will to follow through with what we started.


I'll also point out for the record that I seem to have correctly predicted the stale mate which would result from our ill-conceived approach. Shocking! So what now? Sustain an eternal civil war with no end and no victor? I'm sure that's going to help our relations with that part of the world greatly.

Edited, Apr 5th 2011 2:21pm by gbaji

But it was a good idea for Iraq and Afghanistan last decade, right?

Yeah. Tardy b'stard. I called it what it was before it happened.

And I thought you'd all decided it wasn't a 'war' but a 'humanitarianlolintervention'.

They're not even remotely the same. In those cases, we had objectives specific to regime change and we put the forces in play to obtain those objectives. So far, the only officially stated objective for this mission is to prevent civilians from dying. We're not helping either side "win", but acting to prevent either side from killing too many people. Surely you can see how that's much more likely to result in a stalemate, right?

We should have either decided we wanted to remove Khaddafi from power and put our forces to work doing so, or we should have stayed out of it, let the war resolve itself and then provide humanitarian aid after the fact. My earlier point is specific to the fact that the rebels and the civilians in the area aren't really going to appreciate the geo-political reasons why we're using air power to destroy planes, tanks, and artillery being used to attack them, but stopping short of actually helping them win the civil war. They likely are acting like normal people would and assuming you're either helping them, or you're helping Khaddafi, or you're not involved. Getting involved but only to a point, and not to help them win, but just to help them not lose too badly is a monumentally stupid way to do this, and is pretty much guaranteed to accomplish very little while pissing everybody off at us.


And that's exactly the sort of half-help that makes so many nations hate us. We act just enough to perpetuate conflicts, but not enough to end them. We encourage local people to rise up against their oppressive leaders, but then don't help them win. There's a pretty long list of potential friends who we've promised aid to and then yanked away the help they really needed when they really needed it. And in most cases it was because we lacked the political will to finish something we started. Korea, Bay of Pigs, Viet Nam, Lebanon, several South American countries, the Kurds (in a couple countries), and now the Libyans.

What was markedly different with Iraq and Afghanistan is that we actually did push our involvement to completion. In the case of Iraq, despite massive efforts by the political left to bail out when things got hard. Fortunately, they didn't succeed and we didn't end out with yet another example of the US ******** people over. The vote is still out on Afghanistan, but so far Obama has continued the Bush strategy there, so there's still hope. Libya represents a return to the liberal "dip our toe into the water" approach to foreign policy which has been such a disaster in the past.

Training and equiping the next generation of Mujahideen obviously...D'uh!

Nice to know you are finally begining to wise up .

Did you bother to read the article you linked?

Islam needs a revolution like Christianity had. It needs its enlightenment. These events may very well be the beginning of that enlightenment. To throw this possibility away on the assumption that we're merely up to our old tricks again is beyond ridiculous, even for you. By all means, though, keep telling yourself the evil west is the cause of Islamic extremism.