By: Kelly Malambri / Staff Writer
The recent conflict in Libya has raised many questions, including whether or not the United States should be involved in a conflict for the sake of another country once again. Genocide and corrupt governments are an inevitable force of evil which, as proven by history, rise and fall like the tide, and can never be fully abolished everywhere at any given time.
While total peace is seemingly impossible to achieve, the quest to spread it in Libya through Operation Odyssey Dawn by the U.S. and the United Nations is a noble one.
According to the New York Times, a UN doctrine “responsibility to protect,” or “R2P” states: “World powers have the right and obligation to intervene when a dictator devours his people.” However, many argue the U.S. only “protects” countries from genocide and harsh dictatorships within which it has some sort of interest and has recently come under condemnation for it.
For example, in order to quickly establish the no-fly zone desired by the UN over Libya, the U.S. took charge of the mission because of its cruise missile capabilities. While this tactical move does make sense, the U.S. refrained from using its advanced capabilities, whether in terms of armaments or political sway, in other areas devastated by genocide like Rwanda and Bahrain, in which it currently has little interests.
Unfortunately, financially it would be very difficult to defend societies against every conflict which arises such as these, and morally it would be even more difficult to convince the tax-paying public of the U.S. that intervening in a country with which we have no economic or political interest would be beneficial when the U.S. already faces great conflict internally and has lost many soldiers to fighting on the behalf of other countries.
Because the country will never fully agree on which wars to wage, some deserving countries will unfortunately be left without U.S. intervention. We must fight for those in need while accepting that the U.S. cannot physically fight for all. Although this fact is the ugly truth, it therefore makes sense to defend those countries with which the U.S. does have interests.
While it seems harsh to leave the countries with which the U.S. does not have political interests left to fend for themselves, it is better that the U.S. attempts to achieve peace in some countries than not fight for troubled societies at all. Although we strive and hope for it to be, the U.S. is not a perfect union. However, like Nicholas D. Kristof points out in his New York Times article, “just as it’s worthwhile to feed some starving children even if we can’t reach them all, it’s worth preventing some massacres or genocides even if we can’t intervene every time.”
In an attempt to help those facing grave dangers in other countries, and in an attempt to maintain security of certain interests, the U.S. has come to a wise decision by intervening in Libya.
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