Oh god, the whining. I guess I'm the last hawk left here. I'm sick and tired of the hand wringing over protecting the poor misguided military children. They volunteered, they want to be there. Or, if they joined for the college money, ha ha, you deserve what you get.
Now, on Team America, World Police. Ok, have it your way isolationists. Let's bring them all home. I'm sure some other benevolent great power will spring up to protect the sea lanes, keep tinpot dicators from getting too bold and such. I'm sure they'll patch countries back together and leave them better than they found them, I'm sure that they will be lousy imperialists just like us. Or maybe.... Maybe yet another crazy dictator will arise, take over half the world, kill 10-20 million of his own and then 3 years too late we will fight him after we finish re-arming and re-training a military that both has boots and can pour piss out of them. And once again the cost in American lives will be lighter than everyone else but will be hundreds of thousands. I'd prefer to keep conflicts small personally, but it is proving a negative, we see a few dead servicemembers now and you can't prove to someone that the cost of isolationism would be much, much higher. Someone will police the world when we don't, the terms will not be near as favorable as us doing it.
Now Libya in particular. It is a legitimate question whether we should intervene. I personally fall into the adjust their mean sea level camp. It would be fine if we publicly said that it was an internal Libyan affair and we would do nothing. I find that morally wrong, but again, within our rights as a nation with no direct interest there. The chilling effect of people getting bombed by their own government no longer looking to the USA for help is pretty huge though, as is the void for some helpful little jihadis to step in, oppose the dictator and win a ton of hearts and minds.
But, as I said, legitimate decision whether or not we should be there. A decision that needed to be made on about day 2 of it being revealed he was sending attack aircraft against mobs of his own people, not 4 weeks later. Everyone knows that the "rebels" looked to us and Europe for help. It should have been a clear answer yes or no early, not leave them hanging, fighting with the hopes we'd save them. Sit with our thumb up our arse until everyone else says we got to do something, that's that good old USA leadership that made us great.