To the Editor:
Re “A Very Liberal Intervention,” by Ross Douthat (column, March 21):
We comprehend that the undertaking in Libya is indeed fraught with peril on many levels. The Arab nations that joined the alliance are uncomfortable partners; we are involved in yet one more muddled situation in a part of the world that views us with much suspicion and much contempt.
We are uncertain in our ultimate aims, and we are unclear whether those aims can be reached. We don’t know, even if successful, what form new leadership will take. Protecting our own national security is not the issue here. We are militarily engaged in other countries that require our attention and our resources and drain us economically. And there are other countries in this region that, like the Libyan rebels, may soon be looking to us for more than moral support.
These are all legitimate reasons to question our sanity in what we have now undertaken. Yet despite all of this, if we stand by idly, watching as the seeds of democracy are crushed and a people are slaughtered systematically by one of their own, what are we?
When we have the opportunity and the capacity to act as guardians for a people who cannot protect themselves, and face imminent annihilation, isn’t that the moment that all other concerns must be cast aside? If we can do what’s morally right, is there any way that we cannot?
Robert S. Nussbaum
Fort Lee, N.J., March 21, 2011
To the Editor:
We need to regroup. How does our moral obligation to save the world affect us these days, in these times?
I believe that there is something archaic about America’s being the policeman for the wrongs in the world. And in some important way there is something very odd, as we bomb Libya. I think that we seriously need to rethink the boundaries of our responsibilities and obligations to our allies and other nations.
I am definitely not for isolationism, but I do not think that what is going on in Libya is our obligation or responsibility. And I wish, just once, that someone would ask us, the average citizens of this country, what we think. Please.
Suzy Lowinger
New York, March 21, 2011
To the Editor:
It is astounding to see so many Americans who have criticized our involvement in Iraq now enthusiastically supporting military action in Libya. If the justification is to save innocent civilian lives, Saddam Hussein was far more murderous.
Saddam Hussein had attacked Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia. Surely those actions threatened our own interests more than Libya’s actions.
I support both military actions, though it is clear to me that many supporting President Obama now who vehemently opposed President Bush’s Iraq offensive have taken those positions based purely on who was in the Oval Office.
Andrew O. Watson
Amelia Island, Fla., March 21, 2011
To the Editor:
Attacks against the armed forces of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi will only intensify the desire of other nations to develop weapons of mass destruction to prevent an attack on their soil.
Does anyone seriously think that the bellicose and bombastic President Nicolas Sarkozy of France would have favored military intervention in Libya if Colonel Qaddafi had developed a nuclear deterrent with missiles targeted on Paris?
Larry Vigon
Chicago, March 21, 2011
To the Editor:
Western support for the popular eruptions in the Middle East is rooted in a hope that something genuinely singular is happening, that young idealists, having experienced the borderless freedom of the Internet, will lead their homelands away from corrupt tyrannies and toward pluralistic democracies.
If these reformers are overwhelmed by the malignant orthodoxies of the region, and tyrannies are replaced by other tyrannies, then the Western support will have proved naïve. But it will have been worth the risk, given the stakes, and it might plant a seed of good will that germinates unexpectedly in some future Arab Spring.
Bob Brussack
Athens, Ga., March 21, 2011
Note from KBJ: Is it too much to ask for consistency? Unless you can cite a relevant difference between Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011, you must either (1) support both military interventions or (2) oppose both military interventions.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 