hanoijane:
The fact that neither you nor your military planners seem able to see the parallels between your actions in Libya and those of the French and Americans in Viet Nam seems almost beyond belief.
That you see a close parallel tells us a great deal about you, and what you don't know, or more likely, refuse to see.
I have nothing against Americans per se. Today they are welcomed as visitors and treated with respect. And they were treated with the respect they deserved during the American War.
Not quite. This statement tells us a lot about you, none of it complimentary to your morals, culture, and your ethics.
Get over yourself, jane.
All that sniping aside, this adventure in Libya remains of dubious objective. If you look at the UNSC resolution underlying the political justification/support for it, it's rather vague and somewhat open ended.
What, quite frankly, is the envisioned end state?
To end the civil war/uprising/rebellion?
What is being done by outsiders is prolonging the civil war.
To facilitate a partition of the country?
That isn't the mandate.
To overthrow the Ghadaffi regime?
If that's the objective, it's being done all half arsed, at best, and it isn't the mandate ... though that seems to be the subtext ...
One doesn't protect civilians by prolonguing a civil war, but the first is what the UN mandate is intended to do, and the second what the NATO operation is doing.
It's a mess, but a quite different sort of mess than the Viet Nam mess was.
Not all messes are equal, jane, there are an infinite variety of messes to be had, found, made, and caused.
What a piece of work is man ...
