[lbo-talk] Libya

[Mike Beggs]

On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 1:33 PM, Somebody Somebody
<philos_case at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> I suspect that we would have fewer waffling on the left if this scenario were to present itself. Naturally, most of us are antagonistic towards a Zionist state which commits daily outrages against the Palestinian people and Arab nation as a whole. Unfortunately this same criticism applies to the United States, a country whose soldiers pose alongside dead Afghans in photo-shoots, tortures its own citizens when they whistle-blow massacres in Iraq, and continue to use robotic aircraft to fire hellfire missiles into homes in Yemen, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

I think you inadvertently put your finger on the problem with part of
the 'anti-imperialist' case against the intervention. Instead of an
analysis of the balance of forces, it's the presence or absence of a
single factor that makes all the difference, and other circumstances
don't matter at all. It's the inherent evil of the US/Euro military
that matters, and you think the supporters of the intervention (or
abstainers for that matter) just don't think it evil enough - thus the
thought experiment. It's a single-variable analysis in a multi-variate
world.

Mike