Walter Russell Mead laments:
Via Meadia is glad the press doesn’t hate Obama as much as it hated Bush; otherwise the papers would be full every day with stories about the unintended, tragic consequences of the humanitarian intervention gone awry in Libya and about the policy failures and miscalculations that landed us in this mess. There would be eloquent lamentations and beautifully choreographed hand wringings by our professional moralists and the custodians of the collective conscience at our better universities and more prestigious magazines. There would be telling comparisons of the destruction of the tombs in Timbuktu with the looting of the Baghdad museums. There would be impassioned denunciations of the hubris that led the ideological zealots to promote the holy war, and scathing, mocking reminders of the promises they made about how nice things would be if we took their advice.
As it is, we are just doing our best to ignore the rubble and move on, while many of the same people who pushed the Libya intervention try to gin up a new war in Syria. At least if we make a mess in Syria there is a strong national interest case for the intervention, and a small war in Syria might well reduce the risk of much uglier and nastier war with Iran. Via Meadia is still scratching its head wondering what exactly we gained that was worth the humanitarian catastrophes and bloodbaths the Libyan war unleashed.
Only a few months until November.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Speaking of Libya, it has an increasing gun problem. And before anyone accuses me of being a hypocrite in my Second Amendment support, it’s not really a gun problem — it’s a culture problem.
There were all kinds of atrocities being committed by the rebels that we supposedly went to war to prevent from government forces and the media was silent.
I’m sure things went splendidly in Libya, because NBC and CBS haven’t said otherwise…
Not to mention all the Soviet shoulder fired SAMs that walked into the hands of parties unknown.
But speaking of Timbuktu, a vice president of Dillard’s told me a good joke about it so I’ll repeat it here. His version was about an Texas Aggie, but any college will do.
The national collegiate poetry competition finals were being held in New York and it came down to a tie breaker between a Harvard man and an Aggie. The tie breaking quesiton was “Deliver a four line poem using the word Timbuktu.”
The Harvard man, well healed and well bred, strode up to the microphone and said in his sonorous voice:
Sand, sand, shifting sand
A fifty camel caravan
Fifty camels, two by two
Destination Timbuktu
The crowd went wild with applause, the Harvard man bowed, and then the cameras turned to the Aggie, who was standing there with a blank look on his face, sweating bullets. Then his eyes brightened and he sauntered up to the mic and in his hick accent said:
Me and Tim a huntin’ went
Came across three whores in a pop-up tent.
They was three and we was two
So I bucked one and Tim bucked two.