Left I on the News

When George Bush wanted to invade Iraq, we were given the story that Iraq was amassing Weapons of Mass Destruction. It was a complete and deliberate lie, of course, but it least it was a provable lie. With the benefit of history we could know that Bush was either wrong or lying (with the vast preponderance of evidence coming down on "lying").

Now we've come to Barack Obama, and his war on Libya. There, we attacked, says Obama (and Gates and Clinton and etc.), to prevent a future slaughter. We know there would have been thousands of civilians slaughtered, probably tens of thousands (Clinton's number). It was a certainty. So now the U.S. is empowered to attack not only on alleged intelligence about the present, but about the wildest possible speculation about the future, speculation which can never be disproved. Really, that pretty much opens the door to anything, doesn't it?

By the way, there have been dozens of completely unarmed civilians slaughtered in Bahrain (how many unarmed civilians, as opposed to armed rebels, have actually been killed in Libya, is an open question). Today listening to the news I heard two different people (former U.S. Ambassadors and folks like that) talking about Bahrain. One managed to avoid mentioning the dead at all, with the clear implication that there were none, while the other downplayed them as insignificant and of a completely different character. Actually, as the first sentence of this paragraph indicates, I'd probably agree with him, but from the opposite point of view.