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re: Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggy!" till you can find a rock
Greg — (archived)

So in other words the Republicans don't care about bringing democracy to Libya and helping the people. What about all those mass graves and tortured people? I see they got a big yawn this time, though they were supposedly the reason to invade Iraq.

Of course the idea of actually helping Iraqis was never a policy until the quagmire started. The plan was to establish Chalabi and the INC as another more sympathetic dictatorship, move the bases from Saudi Arabia, make some preferential deals for oil and then move the rest of the soldiers out.

Cheney said so himself, that the idea was to put in Chalabi.

The present government of Libya is a bad government. It was a bad actor in international affairs whose pursuit of WMDs was contrary to the American national interest. It is also repressive in its attitude toward its own people. Similar things could be said about Iraq. In the case of Iraq, hawks tended to dance to-and-fro between a focus on the national security threat (which turns out to have been, shall we say, overstated) and on the humanitarian issues in play. One way or another we invaded. This invasion is credited by many -- myself included -- with inspiring Gaddafi to offer to behave better in national security terms in order to avoid a similar fate. The Bush administration took this deal. That was a significant achievement, but note that it could only be achieved by deciding that we didn't actually care about Libya's treatment of its own people. If our opposition to Libya were truly motivated by humanitarian concerns, then we would continue to follow a strategy of regime change, Libya would make no deals, and our national security would be impaired in the short term.

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