As our planes and missiles bomb Libya, we are back 200 years to the first foreign military action in American history, commemorated in the Marines’ Hymn, intervention in a dispute over the throne between Arab brothers.
What we are doing in Tripoli now is, of course, sanctified by the U.N. and in concert with other powers, but it is a clear return to U.S. policy as “policeman of the world” advocated by Dick Cheney and Bush’s Neo-Cons who led us into the Iraq disaster.
This time, however, instead of grey old men, the faces of intervention are those of three modern women of the Obama Administration, brandishing the best of humanitarian motives rather than dreams of American empire, but the risks of being trapped once again in a quagmire of nation-building are the same.
“The change in the region will not and cannot be imposed by the United States or any foreign power,” the President said yesterday. “Ultimately, it will be driven by the people of the Arab world.”
But the Arab world, as it usually does, is speaking only in whispers and behind a veil of deniability, while a Coalition of the Cautious–China, Russia, Germany, India and Brazil–abstain at the U.N., reserving the right to blame you-know-who if anything goes wrong.