Obama gets his war

Well, Obama’s in the shit now. He can stamp a big hopeful, changey “O” on Libya.

As I type this, I am amused at how close the word “Libya” is to the word “Dubya,” and how appropriate it is I am recalling him now, as the United States flings itself into yet another middle-eastern hot spot.

(Maybe we need to avoid presidential candidates with signature initials in the future?)

As soon as CNN sent the word to my cell phone that our planes were throwing bombs, I did what I’m used to doing at these times, and turned on Fox News. Wall-to-wall coverage. Switched over to CNN. Commercials. Back to Fox News.

Fox News is like having a fly-on-the-wall view of the opposition’s war room. Whether the GOP marching orders come from Fox or are just reported there hours or days earlier than elsewhere, when shit is jumping off, you can count on Fox News to be right on top of it. Albeit in their weird, slanted way. But once you know how to filter out the bafflegab and editorial tilt (hint: watch the pictures, don’t listen to the words coming out of their mouths), they do a pretty good job of being Johnny On The Spot. I didn’t even bother to check MSNBC. Besides having a liberal axe to grind—the yin to Fox’s yang—which I hate, they run prison reality shows all weekend. They’re not even a full time news organ.

But I digress…

For the record, Fox’s spin is that bombing the hell out of brown people is always fine, but Obama waited too long to start in the case of Libya.

And I half agree. If the U.S. was going to jump in, the time to do it would have been when Libya’s military was opening fire on their own people, not a week or two afterwards. Now we just look late to the party.

But that’s strictly a philosophical construct. Because it’s hard to see how reinforcing the branding of the U.S. as “Crusaders” in another Arab country right now, even as we try to hide behind NATO’s skirt, is anything short of a historic blunder.

Yes, Gadhafi is a madman. He’s a tyrant and a murderer of his own people. But so is everybody over there. Nobody’s hands are clean. It’s the same thing I said when Bush Jr. invaded Iraq. If we use the leaders’ misbehavior over there as justification to invade their countries, we have an entire continent on our to-do list. And we don’t dare turn our judgmental eye on Asia, lest it fall on the dictatorial overlords who run China and to whom we owe most of our assets for the next couple of generations.

That is not what I signed up for, nor is it what anyone is claiming the founding fathers had in mind, either. They would have been cool if we went to war because, say, a country with whom we had mutual military and political interests was under the gun. An ally. But basically, America was formed to protect its citizens’ freedoms, not those of the entire world. Or those of foreign nations not allied with us, but sitting on top of large quantities of the world’s most precious commodity. (Sorry everybody selling gold on Fox—in case of a real emergency, oil will power your car and light your home a lot longer than gold will.)

I admit, America’s franchise grew considerably after WWII, largely because that war produced two super-powers at its end and without the U.S.’s ever-expanding military muscle to keep the Soviets at bay, old Uncle Joe Stalin would have had us all speaking Russian by now.

But that was the Old World Order, this is the new. And the new paradigm is, conventional warfare is becoming as unwieldy as useless as marching and firing in blocks-long rows of soldiers turned out to be for the British in our own war of revolution. As times change, so do tactics. And these days, launching bombs from miles away that invariably produce exhaustively documented proof of extensive civilian collateral damage is nothing more than an excellent way to speed up the next 9/11.

With the communications revolution that is inarguably upon us must come the understanding that the battlefield has shifted once again. Optics are everything. And the same way the optics of Egyptian freedom fighters having cans of Made-in-the-USA-labeled tear gas lobbed at them was bad—the same way Abu Ghraib was bad—this military intervention is bad.

Even assuming our intentions are entirely noble—which they never are—the perception as well as the reality is, the U.S. is now involved in a three-front war with Muslim nations. And believe me, in the Muslim world, where it really counts, that is the perception. Even less than oil, they see it as religious persecution. After eight years of the Bible-thumping of George W, how could they not? Obama may look like them, but he’s acting more and more like his reviled predecessor.

CNN.com’s headline right now is “Gadhafi Promises Long War.” And just to keep it interesting, this time we have been cast as the “new Nazis.”

I guess everybody is someone else’s Hitler.

Recently, my nephew the Marine learned he was gonna receive a posting to Okinawa in a few months, then ride out his enlistment in the cushy bosom of one of the few “safe” military gigs then available. The whole family breathed a sigh of relief; finally something was going our way.

Now, that cushy gig in Okinawa is suddenly looking as unhealthy as being sent back to Afghanistan to serve out his bit, if not more so. And with a three-front war looming, based on Obama’s record to date, you can bet he will turn to W’s stop-loss program to keep bodies in the field when the need arises.

I’m frequently reminded of a Bono quote from the ’80s. I don’t remember what issue of Rolling Stone I read it in (U2 were cover stories about three times a year during the late ’80s) or who he was talking about, but I see now that it applies to Obama as much as anyone. He said, “No matter who you vote for, the government always gets in.”

And sure enough, instead of being the mavericky firebrand he campaigned as, Obama seems to have been consumed by the office and replaced by a stock presidential figure, plucking presidential decisions right off the same dusty shelves his predecessors have.

Well, have a nice war, Mr. President. Put this one in your cart and proceed to check-out. Meet the new Nazis, same as the old boss.