Stopping the Slaughter

The Obama Administration is really good at taking credit for things that didn’t happen. We have 9% unemployment because Obama’s policies prevented it from becoming 11%. We lost 7 million jobs because Obama prevented that from being 10 million. We had a severe recession because Obama prevented an actual depression. Health insurance costs have risen 45% because “health care reform” is, um, providing insurance for millions who could not get it before.

Okay, that last one was a non sequitur, but Obama does that too.

Now we have that same concept applied to starting a third war without constitutional authority. The action is already justified by the assertion that “we have prevented the slaughter of thousands of civilians.” Daniel Larison has a sane perspective on that.

“Saying that the war has averted a humanitarian catastrophe is an extremely useful claim, and there’s no obvious way to disprove it. Outside governments intervened, and a humanitarian catastrophe hasn’t happened, and supporters of the war take it for granted that one would have happened otherwise.” […] “Unlike a preventive war designed to eliminate another country’s arsenal of unconventional weapons, preventive humanitarian interventions can’t be discredited by a lack of physical evidence. If a humanitarian crisis doesn’t happen, there will always be uncertainty about whether the intervention was ever really necessary.”

Not in the minds of the cheerleaders who urged the war, of course, but in the minds of sane people who do not believe that deadly weapons should start flying at the slightest opportunity merely to prove that this nation has the biggest dick among nations.

Chris Matthews has been beating a drum for the past two days on Hardball about former Clinton people influencing the present administration to intervene in Libya and that their motivation is some form of mass national guilt over our failure to intervene in Rwanda. Given the incoherent manner in which this administration seems to manage foreign policy, I guess it might be possible that we would do something stupid today based on the bizarre idea that it would atone for something bad that happened 17 years ago.

Meanwhile the media does its best to support the ”prevention of slaughter” theory, even in the face of a severe lack of facts with which to do so. Hardball aired a report by Richard Engle who said that the “no fly zone” had “been successful in Benghazi, but it certainly hasn’t stopped the slaughter down here in Ajdabiya.” He continues his report merely by saying that the Ghadaffi forces are attacking that town and that there is fighting.