This is a quote from the speech that President Obama gave to the American People last week:
"Rather than stand down, [Qaddafi's] forces continued their advance, bearing down on the city of Benghazi, home to nearly 700,000 men, women and children who sought their freedom from fear.
"At this point, the United States and the world faced a choice. Qaddafi declared he would show 'no mercy' to his own people. He compared them to rats, and threatened to go door to door to inflict punishment. In the past, we have seen him hang civilians in the streets, and kill over a thousand people in a single day. Now we saw regime forces on the outskirts of the city. We knew that if we wanted -- if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city nearly the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.
It was not in our national interest to let that happen. I refused to let that happen."
I am left with a DAUNTING question. When IS it in our national interest to allow a leader to massacre his own people? And how do we define "national interest" so that we can know when to step in?
Presumably President Franklin Roosevelt determined it was not in our national interest as Jozef Stalin massacred between 20 and 30 million of his people in Russia;
Presumably President Harry Truman and then Dwight Eisenhower determined it was not in our national interest as Mao-tse-Dong slaughtered more than 50 million Chinese;
And what about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia?
And why haven't we Americans intervened in Zimbabwe, or the Congo in the past years as their governments have tortured and murdered people?
Surely we would not argue that a Libyan's life is more valuable than a Zimbabweans! Or would we?
I think Jon Stewart got it right in this commentary:
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