Senator Lindsey Graham delivered himself of this profound statement to CNN’s State of the Union program 24 April: Qadaffi “needs to wake up every day wondering ‘Will this be my last?’” Senator John McCain intimated over the weekend, after a “fact-finding” trip to Libya, that President Obama should just get it over with in Libya, whatever that means. Most military gurus suggest that putting troops on the ground is the only way to just get it over with, but Obama has promised to not only not do that but that no arms to the Libyan insurgents would be forthcoming, either. Ditto for NATO, Obama’s current surrogate in war-making.
One would have hoped he would know better, but Obama has taken a tiger by the tail concerning Libya, whether by listening to these two arrogant senators or his mushy-headed Amazons, State Secretary Clinton, UN Ambassador Rice, and National Security Council honcho Samantha Power, whose shtick apparently is that revolutions can be started in small countries if big countries will stir up strife, as per Libya, the raison d’etra being that there are (gasp) oppressed people in those countries yearning to be free. Some folks believe Power pushes this agenda in order to somehow make it work against Israel, for which she apparently has no love.
It’s hard to imagine a U.S. senator saying what Graham did about a head of state, even though he has the right to hate Qaddafi with a purple passion. He proved that senators can wallow in stupidity and still get elected. Lots of folks do. It’s hard to imagine a U.S. senator spending a handful of hours on foreign soil and deciding publicly that the rebels are okay-guys deserving of U.S.-accomplished victory, but that’s what McCain did, having no way actually to know anything about these “good guys.” He then extended his Easter vacation to Cairo for reasons upon which one can only speculate.
In a recent hearing, the intelligence was delivered from a reliable source that elements of al Qaeda had been noticed in the rebel contingent, something Qaddafi had already determined and made known…pooh-poohed for his trouble by this government. This is no brief for Qaddafi, but to be bombarded by a country to which he poses absolutely no threat and see his own people slaughtered in the air attacks is something that shouldn’t happen, another way of saying that Obama must be easily influenced by people with agendas and no common sense, the latter which element he seems to share.
It must be galling to the president that the senator he defeated in the presidential election of 2008 has made it his business to decide when this country should jump a small country of 6.3 million population, determine how it should be done (but not with a handoff to NATO), go to the battlefield and from there tell the world how the current stalemated situation should be handled.
It must be galling to the president in light of this stalemate confirmed by his own top military advisers that he listened to his Amazons caterwaul about Qaddafi killing his own rebels and insist that he “just do something,” like the scared spouse screaming at her husband upon spotting a mouse in the house and heading for the stairs. “Just doing something” has amounted to wholesale slaughter but the girls apparently hadn’t thought of that…or maybe they cogitated that they and the UN should decide which set of Libyans should die, choosing the gang in Benghazi to live over Qaddafi and his loyalists. After all, don’t they all look alike?
The Yemenis are slowly but surely agitating their 32-year strongman Saleh out of office without any help from the U.S., though Saleh is this country’s only Arab ally anywhere. Al Qaeda and/or the Muslim Brotherhood, sworn enemies of this country, will be taking over Yemen, just as will be the case in Libya if Qaddafi goes. Obama should be hoping that both strongmen stay the course.
Then, of course, there’s Syria, where strongman Assad has his army shooting the agitators in the streets, something the Amazons apparently haven’t caterwauled about to the UN. Syria is now a Libya look-alike, but McCain had this to say on 25 April on NBC’s Today show: "I don't see a scenario right now or anytime in the near future where the injection of U.S. or NATO military action would in any way beneficially help the situation, I'm sorry to say." Wouldn’t help??? Is that the understatement of the year? If exactly the same thing being done to Libya wouldn’t help Syria, why keep on devastating Libya?
With a president declaring war no. #3 that a senator says is not being fought correctly, what’s a citizen to do? Add a deep recession to the mix with workers walking the streets and the dollar losing value exponentially…food and gasoline prices out the top…a Congress in constant civil war. Maybe Senator Graham had the grim answer: “Citizen needs to wake up every day wondering ‘Will this be my last?’”
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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