From the Halls of Montezuma...

It is a tiresome and tragic fact of life for 30-somethings in this country that we wake up every few years to find out that we are bombing a Muslim country to "protect" its people. And although we've seen this show so many times, our fearless leaders inevitably act as if there is no precedent from which they could learn.

What exactly do we hope to achieve in Libya? Nobody knows. What was the crime of the hundreds of Libyan soldiers who have already died under our bombs? None. Who are the people we are protecting, and what are their motives? Nobody knows.

It is profoundly distressing, and distressingly unsurprising, that Barack Obama would authorize this charade. He has stated that it is "our policy that Gaddafi must go". Really? On whose authority? On what authority does our president demand the departure of the leader of another country?

Bush did it, of course. "Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq...." But that was Bush. Obama is different. Well, Obama was different. But now he has fallen to the bloodthirsty megalomania that infects every single president we have while insidiously masquerading itself as piety and humanity. It's bullshit.

You don't kill people to protect them. You kill them to kill them. This is something that every child understands, a notion which all adults understand as well unless they have sufficient college degrees and sufficient power.

Libya has not threatened us. It has not attacked us. For most of us, that should end the debate. But we are not governed by most of us. We are governed by self-important messianic imperialists who think a bomb is a terrible thing to waste, regardless of their political stances at home.

Gadaffi has been in power since our president was 8 years old. If I were a Libyan, I'd probably want a change. I may even join the rebels and be willing to kill to see that change instituted. But I'm not a Libyan.

The fact that the UN authorized this should not make this seem any more just. The UN was founded on the principle that states couldn't invade other states. Period. But what happened within states was nobody's business, because if you opened that door a crack, states would keep invading other states and simply insist that they were doing so to "help" those states.

So the UN has betrayed itself. The US, of course, betrayed itself long ago. We regularly kill people who have never raised a hand against us, invade nations that never offended us, and do all this is the name of "peace" and "compassion".

Despite all the legal and moral trainwreck, there is the utter absence of common sense. Who are the people we are killing? We neither know nor care. Who are the people we are protecting? Same answer.

What possible assurance do we have that the American-sponsored rebels would be any better than Gadaffi? None. Richard Engel, the best foreign correspondent in the U.S., said that fully 20% of the rebels he interviewed said they were trying to overthrow Gaddafi "because he's a Jew". Of course.

Surely those people will set up a democratic paradise thanks to our bombs. After all, how many times has that happened before? Oh yeah. Zero.