If war is not the answer, what is?

If war is not the answer, what is? As far as I can see, the various anti-war groups that gathered at Westlake Center this afternoon to commemorate the launching of the Iraq war on 03/19/2003 don't have any concrete alternatives to offer. Today's battle cry: no U.S. involvement in Libya. While it's difficult to claim than any U.S. action can be attributed to ideologically pure motivations, especially in the Middle East, not intervening against the Gaddafi regime could result in a major humanitarian disaster. “No matter how one feels about Libya today and the role of the Gaddafi government; regardless of how one evaluates the Libyan opposition, a U.S.-led war or intervention in Libya is a disaster for the Libyan people, and for people and progress around the world” according the International Action Center. On Thursday, Gaddafi threatened to level the rebel stronghold of Bengazi with many of its residents fleeing to the Egyptian border. The refugee situation alone is likely to claim thousands of innocent lives.

U.S. isolationism seems to be the only policy these activists would support. While Gaddafi doesn’t have the resources to become another Hitler or Hirohito, he’s still powerful enough to ravage the Libyan people. If Libya turned into another Rwanda or Iraqi Turkistan, will these people still say that the international community should sit on its hands. It’s important to pick one’s battles. During the Bush administration, the U.S. undoubtedly rushed into a war in Iraq based on trumped-up intelligence and suspect intentions. Failing to come to the aid of the Libyan people would mark an equally damning lapse.

One the underlying problems of the current anti-war movement is their lack of rhetorical focus. At today’s rally, speakers connected U.S. foreign wars with union busting in Wisconsin and the impending nuclear disaster in Japan. The global financial crisis and bank reform was also invoked at one point. The arguments being that prolonged military spending is the cause for current state and federal budget deficits, which forces cuts to domestic spending, and that nuclear power was originally developed for military applications only to be turned over to cost-cutting corporations in the public sector. There’s a much more straightforward explanation for the anti-union bills currently being proposed – a resurgent republican party and it’s long-term animus towards unions. As for taking aim at the transfer of technological innovations from the public to the private sector, I’d say the public has done all right in that exchange – including a little thing called the internet. The anti-war cause would be better served by a more straightforward line of reasoning.

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