Chest Beaters

This article by Glenn Greenwald... I get what he's saying about the implications of U.S. military action in Libya without Congressional approval, but, I don't. Seems like a bit of triviality at this point. The Congressional stamp of approval for military action is made of rubber. Is it better to maintain a polite fiction (or cynical exercise in mocking 'democracy') rather than the truth? What I am getting at is that Greenwald is very concerned about the importance of maintaining this perception, the underlying reality is the same either way whether the politicians go through their meaningless rituals of democratic decision-making when it comes to America's foreign policy or not.

Anyway, I clicked comments and saw a typical example of a blockhead attitude that I've argued with since forever by the exclusively named NotOrbitBoy,

I don't think polls should dictate our actions. But I find it amusing to see them used when convenient. . . as is done here at Salon.

The story of today is that while former hall monitors debate the bureaucratic bs, Libya's foreign minister has announced a ceasefire.

That ceasefire is a direct result of the threat of military action.

Big stick. Big results.

Acknowledge it.

Link (again) at Sig

NotOrbitBoy

I can hear the echoes of his chest beating reverberating in my speakers.

As we have seen already, the no fly zone was not about ending hostilities or protecting rebels. Qaddafi announced a cease-fire right after the vote, which was far more than the original no fly-zone 'objective' and should have been accepted by the west as a great triumph right away. It was a savvy move on his part, daring the international community expose their own lie by taking action anyway, and perhaps in the process draining international support. Anyway, its reasonable to speculate that his cease-fire was a calculated political decision rather than a quaking in his boots panic button move and complete equivocation. He could buy time with a ceasefire, maneuver out of the international response, and then quietly go about strengthening his position and planning to manufacture a pretense for resuming hostilities later. In any case, the west could have had their mandate for enforcing a no fly zone satisfied.*
* The actual UN decision gave more latitude than a no fly zone.

Instead, the U.S. announced that a cease fire was not good enough, rendering everything we said about doing this to protect Libyans from Qaddafi's air force complete bullshit. The west obviously has bigger plans than what it originally laid out, shocker, and is already proven willing to use force to implement them by going for the military resolution in the first place. The pretense of concern for protecting little people was clearly a sham, which, when you consider that while at the same we're so concerned about suffering from all the fighting in Libya we're using flying death robots to rain death down onto Afghanistan and Pakistan, killing civilians by the truckload, was already a blood soaked farce, but never-mind that. The NotOrbitBoy's of the world are still convinced that hook is a goddamn worm right up until he's drawn, filleted and his innards are fed to a gull on the dock.