Change for a dollar, maybe, but not a change in our use of force

The last few decades offer a depressing fact: We are addicted to military force. Presidents of both political parties have shown they’re unwillingness to take the military option off the table. Hell, they won’t even relegate the use of force to a last-resort option.

Even Barack Obama, who won the peace vote based on one speech made in opposition to the Iraq War back in 2002, has proven to be just as addicted to the military option as his predecessors.

The Iraq War has been declared over, but we’re still there. Afghanistan has been amped up and now we are fighting with the French and British in Libya in an ill-defined mission — we talk about protecting civilians but are most likely engaged in an effort to remove the despicable and murderous Qaddafi regime from power.

Protection of civilians, of course, is a ruse — if it were our primary objective, we would have gone into the Ivory Coast to back a legally elected president and end a civil war that has seen atrocities committed on both sides.

So why Libya? The only reason I can come up with is that Qaddafi’s hold on the western imagination was on a par with Saddam Hussein’s — unstable, violent and brutal with a long history of thumbing his nose at the west.

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• Read poetry at The Subterranean.
• Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie. View all posts by hankkalet