Kinetic Military Action

In the past I have been accused of dumping on Obama, so I guess here's another installment. Monday night our President went on network TV to explain our actions in Libya, some days after we had already gone to war. 

I wrote this piece Monday (3/28) without having seen what he said, but the news reports the next day outlined his rationale.

My objection is that we went to war--we went to war--with very little debate or discussion.  Killing other human beings, no matter how justified it may be in this particular case, certainly warrants a bit more consideration than that.

From Linh Dinh, here, a piece he calls Winding Down Obama, an excerpt:

As firemen and cops are being fired across America, as teachers are being told they must accept austerity measures, the country is broke, after all, as public radio and television, with their supposed liberal bias, lay on the chopping block, as more homeless sprawl and tent cities spring up, as casinos, a sure sign of desperation, mushroom, the United States has entered another costly war without any fanfare or discussion whatsoever. Obama didn't have to persuade anybody, no sending a Secretary of State to make a fool of herself in front of the United Nations' General Assembly, no congressional vote, which, last time I checked, was supposed to be a Constitutional requirement, no media blitz. No lies even. He simply ordered more than a hundred Tomahawk missiles, so far, to rain down on Libya, with many more to come. In any case, this it not even a war, but merely a "kinetic military action," according to an Obama aide. Such straight faced butchery of language, even as one butchers real people, shows that the United States has entered a deep psychotic state. Upon winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama himself declared, "I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence."

The rest of Dinh's post continues in that vein, and I can't say that there's anything there I disagree with.  Take a read and see what you think.  Perhaps as I sit in my hotel room, wishing I was at home with my loved ones, I'm feeling cynical tonight.  Maybe this will all work out, the world will be a better place for this action, the forces of good will prevail and be proven to have been right.

But the process was flawed, badly.  And as I cast my vote for Barack Obama in 2008, I hoped for more, much more.