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The Spectacle Blog
Stephen Chapman interviews experts who don’t buy a central contention in Obama’s case for the Libya war: a looming “bloodbath” in Benghazi.
Alan Kuperman, an associate professor at the University of Texas’ Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, is among those unconvinced by Obama’s case. “Gadhafi,” he told me, “did not massacre civilians in any of the other big cities he captured — Zawiyah, Misratah, Ajdabiya — which together have a population equal to Benghazi. Yes, civilians were killed in a typical, ham-handed Third World counter-insurgency. But civilians were not targeted for massacre as in Rwanda, Darfur, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bosnia or even Kosovo after NATO intervention.”
The rebels, however, knew that inflating their peril was their best hope for getting outside help. So, Kuperman says, they concocted the specter of genocide — and Obama believed it, or at least used it to justify intervention.
Another skeptic is Paul Miller, an assistant professor at National Defense University who served on the National Security Council under Bush and Obama. “The Rwandan genocide was targeted against an entire, clearly defined ethnic group,” he wrote on the Foreign Policy website. “The Libyan civil war is between a tyrant and his cronies on one side, and a collection of tribes, movements, and ideologists (including Islamists) on the other. … The first is murder, the second is war.”
Now, these experts could be wrong. Libya is run by a dictator whose character is certainly consistent with mass murdering dictators of the past. But the Obama administration has supplied far less evidence for its case for war than the Bush administration made for its reasons for going into Iraq (and we remember how well founded some of those reasons turned out to be). Maybe that has something to do with the fact that Bush deigned to get congressional approval for his wars.
View all comments (12) | Leave a comment
More Blog Posts by W. James Antle, III
http://spectator.org/blog/2011/04/04/obama-and-the-bloodbath
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Floyd Looney | 4.4.11 @ 10:38AM
If you want to see a bloodbath, check the Ivory Coast. Unfortunately they have chocolate and not oil, and unfortunately its Muslims committing genocide of Christians, so the world does not care.
Zack| 4.4.11 @ 11:27AM
Of course, Bush had the luxury of creating his "evidence" from thin air. That might explain why his evidence was "better."
Alan Brooks| 4.4.11 @ 1:30PM
They wont listen, Zack, they WANT Obama to fail in libya so they can up the percentage in electing another Bush-lapdog. And they actually think an extreemist such as Rand Paul has a chance to be POTUS!
REPUGLICANS ARE DELUSIONAL.
Oldefarte| 4.4.11 @ 1:52PM
The only EXTREMIST that I'm aware of sits within the oval office at 1600! Whatever Ryan is/isn't, at least he was born in this country and can confirm same with a long-formed birth CERTIFICATE!!!!!!!!!!!!!
W. James Antle III | 4.4.11 @ 2:25PM
Note that "better" is your word, not mine. Chapman opposed the Iraq war, I opposed the Iraq war. The Bush experience is all the more reason to debate the reasons for going to war and to make our leaders substantiate their claims.
Jonah| 4.4.11 @ 4:29PM
They won't listen, Antle, Liberals are braindead and won't admit that Obama is now GWB's lapdog.
Bill Hussein O'Stalin| 4.4.11 @ 11:42AM
If Qhadaffi is a dictator, then he must be a benevolent one. According to Wiki, all citizens receive fee basic health care and it's not state run, at least exclusively. Libyan citizens also receive free education and free health care. Just weeks before the attacks started Qhadaffi announced that he wanted to divide the oil profits up amongst all the citizens.
You call that a dictator? Sounds to me like we are getting none of the actual facts and all of the baloney.
buckeyeman| 4.4.11 @ 11:47AM
Will Obama get credit for "saving or creating" 100,000 lives based on his hypothetical estimate of the possible slaughter?
Wayne | 4.4.11 @ 12:14PM
The "bloodbath" was just an excuse. This is the change Obama believes in, and he would just as soon see the entire region become an Islamic State.
Too Many Tims| 4.4.11 @ 12:37PM
I do see where we blew up a couple of dozen rebels after they were seen to be firing their weapons into the air in the vicinity of a patrolling NATO plane.
This will not lead to Afghan or Iraq style outrage, of course.
Oldefarte| 4.4.11 @ 2:00PM
My theory is that the president was/is lukewarm in wanting to becoming involved in Libya, since its dictator is probably a friend of his. Mubarak in Egypt was definately expendable in his philosophy. Probably the thinking was for the US to stay in the background, but was called out due to the MSM's outcry over the uprisings in Libya. The frightening thing is that in all these countries, these demonstrator-freedom fighters are majoritively Muslim terrorists seeking to overthrow their dictatorial-run countries. What will eventually transpire is that the whole middle east will resemble Iran with extremist-Muslims in charge. Instead of dealing with a Mubarak, the US will be facing one or more iatollahs!!!!!
Oldefarte| 4.4.11 @ 2:12PM
Anyone doubting this theory should consult Christopher Ruddy's excellent editorial in today's NEWSMAX!!!!!!!!!