The Trade Of Kings Dryden

A War is a War is a War and It Ain't Gonna Be Cheap

“War is the trade of kings.”–John Dryden

“History teaches that wars begin when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.”–Ronald Reagan

You have to love Jon Stewart’s take on U.S. military intervention in Libya as “America at Not-War.” The administration’s  insistence that our involvement is not war but intervention harks back to the days of LBJ. And the rationale is just another version of the same cynical sham repeated by every U.S. president since Harry Truman.

The second segment of Jon Stewart’s video pokes fun at President Obama’s rather clumsy justification for humanitarian intervention: “All Obama has done is laid bare the shining spread sheet on the Hill that has always been the real force behind presidents’ foreign policy decisions despite all our soaring freedom rhetoric…Obama just gave us a little less poetry and a little more long division.” Stewart also points out the hypocritical nature of U. S. intervention, something that anyone who has any memory or experience with war in Vietnam should know inside and out.

Tarak Barkawi in his essay for Al Jazeera entitled, “No-fly zone: Clouding words of war” states: “Few critics have even bothered to point out the obvious selectivity. Obama meant no idling before this particular tyrant, while the UN Security Council offered the beatific state of protected innocence to some Libyans only, not to Syrians, Yemenis, Palestinians or Bahrainis, much less those suffering in the Ivory Coast, Zimbabwe or elsewhere.”