What are the criteria by which we decide to take military action against brutal dictators?

Why some and not others? Anyone know?

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You nailed it.

Why some and not others? And when DUers were saying Iraq was about oil, were you just as critical?

Libya has oil, and the instability drives up prices.
YES. Oil is the lifeblood of our world. Oil makes all the difference.

So unless you come up with a better reason, I'll stick with the one that works.

from lack of medical care? I realize saving lives isn't as profitable or macho as a war, but if the goal was to save lives, you would think we would start with our own nation.

You know why we don't, and why we didn't interfere in Darfur, the Congo or any of the other places where there are tyrants killing their people?

Profit. Oil.

That isn't a cop out - that's the truth. It's not heroic to let our own people die while we rush off to kill others, and it's not noble, either.

It's for profit and oil.

...the usual people explained it all at the time.

Look, DU would have opposed the League of Nations, and it was toothless.

They'd definitely have opposed the formation of the UN because of the part of the Charter that gave the Security Council very, very circumscribed ability to use force.

I wish people would drop the special pleading, and say what they mean -- no international situation is grave enough to call for the use of force, ever -- except the invasion of US sovereign territory. It's a position, and a principled one -- embrace it.

And vote for Bob Taft.

dying from lack of medical care? Is that a principled position, too? Or is that not profitable or macho enough to worry about?

I'm still not clear on the criteria.

...from lack of medical care when we are one of the wealthiest nations in the world. Pay no attention to that, though, because it isn't profitable and doesn't allow people to pontificate about how noble this war is.

The oil thing is the only thing that makes sense.

Unless we all go back living in the woods at once, get ready for more wars for oil, not less.

Reality's a real nightmare, isn't it.

into another war with zero public input.

Re "Yep, must have oil. It's all about money/natural resources."

Does motivation make it somehow NOT the right thing? And just because we only intervene in SOME cases where a brutal dictator is murdering his own people, does the fact that it isn't in ALL of them mean we should NEVER intervene in ANY of them? I just don't get the all-or-nothing reasoning that seems to have gone viral around here the past few days.

Bet you bought into Iraq war lies.

I don't understand why Yemen can be left to languish in tyranny and Libya today after years of Qaddafi has finally met the invisible criteria. Yet here we are. Secretary Clinton knows that this appears to be a war for oil. They wanted at all costs to avoid that perception. Yet here we are.

Please don't be ignorant.

Please don't call me ignorant.

That isn't the UN's job. The UN could invade the fucking US, our cops kill that many a day likely.

I think the 'news' has been manipulated for weeks to prepare the US citizenry for this outcome. Do I think they give a tin nickel for the people? No I don't. Do I think that we can come to the aid of all oppressed people in the world? No I don't. Maybe we should, but I'm getting tired of funding the endless wars and listening to the endless justifications for them.

They weave motivations for us to make us happy for trading our butter for bombs and I find that utterly despicable.

Sky News?

BBC?

CNN?

What?

Do you ask why not?

Control of oil, important trade routes, blocking a strategic competitor, that sort of thing.

Occasionally U.S. local politics plays a role - e.g. voting blocks sympathetic to one side or another of some struggle going on back in their ancestral homeland.

Good to know!

Though some people in Libya will be better off for the intervention and some worse off. Some parts of the population support Gaddaffi and some don't. I have no idea of the true proportions of either and I don't see how anyone else can really know either.

I don't think the western powers-that-be care much about the average Libyan. I see little evidence that they care much about the average American, judging from current events. Social security funding seems to be taking a back seat to cruise missile funding, for example.

1) Is it in our national interest?
2) Is it in our national interest?
3) Is it in our national interest?
4) Can they strike back and inflict intolerable damage or embarrassment to us or our allies?
5) Did they provide a sufficiently egregious justifying cause that no other country, whose opinion we have to care about, will question?
6) Is it in our national interest?
7) Is it in our national interest?
8) Is it in our national interest?
9) Is it in our national interest?
10) Is it in our national interest?

A long running civil war in Libya, with a resistance group, partly defined by tribal identity and location, attacking the economic assets of the Gaddafi regime will be very bad for the price of oil and thus bad for the interests of the United States and its current leadership. The US economy can't sustain rising oil prices as a general thing, and especially not now that it's weak and fragile. The current leadership can't get reelected if the economy loses oil pressure and conks out. If Gaddafi retakes Benghazi and the Rebels lose, that is probably not the end of it. It may be the end of the rebellion but not of resistance. That resistance would likely take the form of "terroristic" attacks against petroleum installations. There may be a period of prolonged anarchy inside Libya - a fertile ground for Al-You-Know-Whoda. Gaddafi is an old fart and the Libyan people know he is going to die sooner or later like the Egyptian people sensed about Mubarak. Attacking the dictator in his senility represents their best chance at freedom, rather than waiting for his sons to take over. So, even if Gaddafi is militarily successful, his "stability" credentials like Mubarak's are of no more value to the West. There will be no peace in Libya with him or his spawn around.

Now it should be clear that Gaddafi is a vile monster and has to go! I hope they are successful in getting rid of him, because he is a vile monster, and the Libyan people ought to be able to chart a new and less autocratic direction like their neighbors in Egypt and Tunisia.

..and shout "No Blood For Oil", though, isn't it?

crush a democratic uprising? I understand the reservations of DUers here, but I also don't like to see brutal suppression of a people for the likes of a dictator.

....here. It's a small sample -- let's hope it's unrepresentative.

"National interest" isn't just oil and money.

Look at the emphasis on being liked, on "winning hearts and minds." Nobody much cared about Libya--until action against Gaddafi could be couched as supporting the hopes and wishes of the Arab "people." The US came under fire for not supporting the anti-Mubarak protesters quickly and forcefully. Libya matters, it seems, in official Arab public opinion. Therefore "we" suddenly got religion. We couldn't do it before the "important" bit of merely supporting, aiding, encouraging the public aspirations of the Arab people (whatever such blather actually means--we'll see in a decade or so) because it would have been seen as merely mercenary. We couldn't actually do it on our own because, well, the right thing without UN cover can't be the right thing. Leadership is all about following the right people (and squashing the others).

Nobody cares about Bahrain. It's Shi'ite versus Sunni. The Arabs we care about are Sunni. The Sunni rulers can kill all the Shi'ites they want. Iraq's not going to say much; they have their own internal problems. Iran's going to scream--and be absolutely right about the hypocrisy, and how simply mirroring the UN stance on Libya would be taken as hopeless aggression on th part of the Iranians. Except that people assume that if Iran says X, "not X" must be true.

Nobody cares about Yemen. Some the protests in Yemen is Shi'ite versus Sunni; some of that is traditionalist vs modernist. (Note: In Libya most of the "rebels" are modernist. Most of the Egyptian and Tunisian protesters, at least the front men, were modernists. Educated, not always Western but "modern" and not traditional tribal.)

Syria might be a bit of a problem; we don't like Syria, so you wouldn't think that's much of a problem. The problem would be that opposing the chinless wonder would be taking Israel's side and siding against Hezbollah. So nobody's going to much care about Syria.

Sa'udi Arabia isn't a problem, or at least I don't see it becoming any more of a problem than Oman's been.

My entire problem is that the reasons given aren't the real reasons. They're convenient. Unlike the reasons given for the 2003 Iraq invasion, I don't even think the reasons of convenience are even believed by those making them publicly. (I do think they're believed by some of the administration's staffers that argued them.) But if you're going to kill bystanders and not-so-bystanders, I think that one should be honest about the reasons. Killing for the sake of PR, for the sake of image is base. Altering one's stance for the sake of PR shows a character lacking any kind of decent content--and I think we should be judged on the content of our character.

Also, if we can cover up their misdeeds and make the media look the other way.

Myanmar, no oil.

North Korea, no oil.

that's probably just as important as their lack of oil.

One cruise missile = byebye any DPRK nuclear potential. Problem is, as you said, there's no resources there to take. We'd be stuck holding their hands through reconstruction like Iraq.

And no, I am NOT AT ALL interested in doing anything to DPRK. They're just not a threat.

Wouldn't want them to fight back too hard

Isn't that what the UN is there for?

So, apparently, the UN isn't really all that important.

Got another guess?

The original UN resolution was to "return inspectors" Bush decided to return them, pretend that they weren't "getting it done" and invade on the idea that Saddam was hiding his WMDs!

The Libya operation has been approved by the UN, with no dissenting votes, and welcomed by the Libyan people that Gaddafi wants to slaughter.

The Iraq war was a UN-be-damned, stupid, ill-advised misadventure in search of non-existent WMDs. And the WMD pretext was only possible because Bush chose to ignore the UN inspectors, as you point out.

I am surprised at how many DUers are equating Libya with Iraq. Libya was done in the right way; Iraq was about the most horrible screw-up imaginable.

...'Spitfire Summer' of DU -- we few, we happy few, outnumbered by the fascists....

It'll always be about Iraq. It'll always be about Bush, so long as there's a England DU.

at that moment in time. You would think there is more to it, oh yeah there is...if they have a huge scary eastern country willing to support them. That too.

Which one of my children am I willing to sacrifice to get rid of them.

Lou

So we can cheer it on on the TV like it was a friggin sports game.