NEOCONS STILL THINKING UNILATERALLY.

Neocon writer Alana Goodman at Commentary writing about America’s involvement in Libya and its role there seems to think that the US should act unilaterally and affect ‘regime change’. She writes: We are already in Libya – so whether or not we should intervene is not up for debate. What should be questioned is whether we need to expand our mission to include regime change. It was a mistake for Obama to rule this option out at the beginning. And based on the situation in Libya right now, the president may end up having to face this very real prospect soon. The demeanour of statements like this demonstrates perfectly neoconservative arrogance. First off, ‘we’ – i.e. the US – are not ‘in’ Libya at all, (unless one includes the CIA that we have now been told are in Libya helping the rebels); the US are, or were, simply part of a UN-sanctioned intervention designed to prevent civilians being killed in a civil war. Goodman uses the word ‘we’ in the context of the US rather than in a context that includes the allies that have undertaken to protect the civilians of Libya, so when she says ‘what should be questioned is whether we need to expand our mission to include regime change’, the ‘we’ she’s referring to is the US, not the UN. This is confirmed by the fact that Goodman goes on to say that it ‘…was a mistake for Obama to rule out this option at the beginning’, as though it was up to Obama to rule in or out when, in fact, it was a UN decision. Indeed, being true to form that the neocons usually are, Goodman doesn’t even mention the UN; she ignores it entirely. Even America’s allies don’t get a mention. They, the UN and America’s allies, might just as well not exist as far as the neocons are concerned.