Okay, so now the most leftist president we have ever had has opened up a third front in the Middle East. Sure, it has been done in the liberal way of war . . . lots of wish-it-weren’t-soing, lots of crabwalk drills, lots of getting the French to bomb first, lots of important people doing diplomacy, and so on. In short, you have what one blogger aptly called a “designer-boutique” war.
But it’s a war, for all that. Bombs are dropping for all that. In the Middle East, of all places. In Libya, which has lots of petroleum down below, and this means that all those old “no blood for oil” signs in the basement need not go to waste.
The left is apoplectic, of course. Ralph Nader has said that if George W. should have been impeached, then Obama needs to be, and so on. Neocons are gratified that Obama has adapted to certain conservative “realities,” but we could just as easily wonder if the neocon internationalists weren’t just paving the way for certain left-of-center globalist realities.
If George Bush were the epitome of conservative foreign policy, then Obama’s quiet adoption of his policies would say something profound. Gitmo is still open, the Patriot Act is still here, rendition still occurs, and so on. But the logic can work the other way too. Let us ask it this way: is Obama more of a true blue leftist than Bush was a true blue conservative? If so, then maybe the comparisons should be going the other way. Maybe Obama is being less inconsistent than some of his predecessors.
All that said, I wish our troops well, and I hope the rebels in Libya manage to get from a hot frying pan to a frying pan not quite as hot. I hope the unrest throughout the Middle East results in all their borders being eventually opened up to deliveries from Zappos. This will mean that they will soon after be open to the missionaries who will follow, and then we will finally be getting somewhere.