Times change but people don’t!

This is another form the drafts queue...

Send in the clowns.

The big news over the weekend was this:

Western forces hit targets along the Libyan coast on Saturday, using strikes from air and sea to force Muammar Gaddafi’s troops to cease fire and end attacks on civilians.

Libyan state television said 48 people had been killed and 150 wounded in the allied air strikes. It also said there had been a fresh wave of strikes on Tripoli early on Sunday.

There was no way to independently verify the claims.

CBS News on its website said on Sunday that three U.S. B-2 stealth bombers had dropped 40 bombs on a “major Libyan airfield” that was not further identified. A Pentagon spokesman said he had no information about such an attack.

So the question of the moment is where are all the outraged masses? Where is all of that righteous indignation we saw back when the U.S. went back into Iraq to clean up the mess that lingered for a decade plus after the ‘first’ Gulf War?

I’m curious because anyone who doesn’t think this is just as much about oil as it was in Iraq, is living in  a huge state of denial. I’m curious because this is so much about regime change and the parallels are so stark (between Libya today and Iraq a few years back) that the amazing irony of it all could only be lost on only the truly stupid.

Dare I say, there is a different measure put to the current chief executive only because he is a Democrat?

And anyone who for a moment thinks things might be different if HRC had gained the Presidency, need only look as far as the current Secretary of State’s actions and statements of the last few weeks to have that notion dispelled:

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Thursday that a U.N. no-fly zone over Libya would require bombing targets inside the country to reduce the threat posed by Moammar Gadhafi’s forces...

“A no-fly zone requires certain actions taken to protect the planes and the pilots, including bombing targets like the Libyan defense systems,” Clinton said as she neared the end of a Middle East trip dominated by worries about Libya, where a rebel offensive is apparently flagging.

This really should come as no surprise as Hillary’s husband was a big fan of lobbing bombs into countries on a regular basis while he was president.

I stopped there. This was from way back in 2011. What I found funny is that there was no mass of demonstrations on the part of all the folks who had gone out when we invaded Iraq. I just found that more than a little ironic.

Here we are six years later and we can see the results of Obama Foreign Policy as executed by Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. That Foreign Policy was one of disengagement couched in the expectation that World Bodies would take up the mantle of maintaining peace and order the world over.

Well, we see how that worked out now don’t we.

After World War 2, the United States maintained a troop presence in Germany and Japan for DECADES. There was a logic in leaving troops in those nations after the war and it was to use them as a stabilizing force in those societies.

In Iraq, we didn’t do that.

The result... ISIS. The result... a refugee crisis in Europe.

There was a reason for that too. Don’t forget that the former administration fostered the Arab Spring in the hopes that a wave of Democracy would take hold throughout the Middle East. The result turned out to be exactly the opposite.

As the Arab Spring spread to Syria, Qatar and Saudi Arabia saw the unrest as an opportunity to unseat Bashar al-Assad, an Alowite Muslim leading a country that is majority Sunni (like Qatar and Saudi Arabia), while at the same time undercutting the economic interests of rival energy exporters Iran and Russia, which have long backed the Assad regime. As Mitchell Orenstein and George Romer point out in Foreign Affairs, the major belligerents in the Syrian civil war—Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Russia, and the United States—are all energy exporters concerned with the future of energy extraction and how it will reach an oil-and-gas-hungry European market. They describe how Qatar has long searched for an inexpensive way to ship its natural gas to Europe, a goal that puts it in direct competition with Russia:

I could talk about China in the South China Sea, I could talk about North Korea, I could talk about a whole host of things but this post would wind up inordinately long if I did. Barack Obama got a Noble Peace Prize: The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to United States President Barack Obama for his "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."

Honestly, this is one that should be given back because if ever a guy was given a pass our former president got a monstrous one as he continuously dropped the ball over eight years in office. Not that you would hear any of his supporters ever admit to it.