February 15^th

 

Today George Will’s column tells us that it’s “Time to curb your pessimism.” Maybe he should tell the folks at Fox News. (Then perhaps he should reread Candide.) He even claims that he agrees with the President on this issue, but have a care because he claims that Obama’s “pronouncements are grating even when they are sensible.” No bona fide right winger could possibly agree with both what the President says and the way he says it so Will keeps his chops.

Later he claims that in 2016 attention will be paid to Hillary Clinton’s role in the “humanitarian intervention” (his quotes) in Libya that reduced that country to a failed state. This intervention was by the UN and included nineteen nations actively participating in military action against Libya. Also, at that time Gadhafi had admitted to Libya’s role in the Pan Am bombing that killed 270 people. (More recently we have decided to blame our new villain, Iran, for this crime.) Gadhafi was producing 1.5 million barrels of oil a day then, so he had enormous amounts of cash with which to buy arms, secure his friends and stay in power. His ouster was no more the work of Secretary of State Clinton than it was of Secretary of Defense Gates, a Republican who was not mentioned by Will.

 Will had a great deal of company when he condemned Gadhafi’s military ouster: Castro in Cuba, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, and many others of similar ilk. George Will has here put himself in very unusual company. One is inclined to believe that Will thinks Hillary Clinton on her broomstick has flown over Libya singlehandedly destroying the country when in fact it was an effort of nineteen nations. Will surely hopes you don’t know that.

Then we have the following convoluted sentence: “In the annals of American blunders the Bay of Pigs may have been even more feckless and the invasion of Iraq more costly, but we cannot yet calculate the cost of teaching Iran and others by our role in the casual overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi, the peril of not having nuclear weapons.” Does he mean that only the overthrow of Gadhafi would cause Iran to want nuclear weapons? Overthrow of the other regimes are irrelevant? Hillary Clinton had a role only in the overthrow of Gadhafi so that is the action Will choses to claim encourages Iran to develop nuclear weapons. Nonsense! The answer is to do what? Perhaps Will can get together with his fellow conservative Pat Buchanan and push for an isolationist agenda. (See no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil.) In that fine conservative tradition George Will has continued to point out problems and failed to suggest any solutions.