Take Qaddafi. Please.

A provocative analysis from one of the unidentified readers of "The Daily Dish":

The Arab League has played us well. Our intervention in Libya is the perfect distraction.

Now that we're enmeshed in Libya, we will have far less attention to pay to Saudi intervention in Bahrain, or to the regimes' responses to protests in Jordan, Syria and Yemen. And what easy marks we are. We find it impossible to sit on the sidelines as critical events unfold in other nations, and we are desperately afraid that the Middle East, and its oil, is slipping away from our control. Libya, with a madman for a tyrant, is an easy intervention target. Here, the Arab League seemed to say, do you need to make a stand for human rights in the Middle East? Take Libya. We all hate him anyway.

We are gullible beyond belief. Did Obama, Clinton, Cameron and Sarkozy ever stop to ask themselves who really benefits from our intervention in Libya? No, a bottomless stockpile of missiles combined with a sincere, if narcissistic, belief in ourselves as a "force for good" in the world, made us ripe for the con.

You're Still Doing Fine, Mayor

Again the common-sense wisdom of Ed Koch:

What is occurring in Libya is not like Burundi or Rwanda, where nearly one million or more innocent men, women and children were slaughtered and the world stood by outraged but not intervening. It is not comparable to the Congo, where hundreds of civilians have been killed or raped, some reportedly by the very UN soldiers sent to protect them. It is not akin to Bosnia where Serbian generals were conducting a war of genocide against a Muslim population.

No, this is a civil war and the deservedly unpopular government of Qaddafi (unpopular with the U.S. and NATO) is currently winning that war with the rebels who, so far as I know, have not yet established that they are any better in their philosophy of government.

If a no-fly zone is desired, why don't the 22 states of the Arab League provide the military force to enforce it? Why should our young men and women be put at risk?