Last week during my vacation in Costa Rica, I was quite saddened to see our Nobel Peace Prize winning president launching air strikes against Libya. Of course Gaddafi is a horrible dictator and the world would be a better place without him, but the same was true for Saddam Hussein. That being said, I doubt most Americans want a repeat of the Iraq War. While the Obama Administration is trying to market this as more of a “Kosovo” than an “Iraq”, we truly do not know who we are supporting. There are already rumblings that Al Qaeda is participating in the rebel forces, but who really knows? We don’t know if we’ll have a new dictator that is worse than the old one, or whether the new Libyan government will be more like Iran or Turkey.
In addition, all of this is happening with the backdrop of another government shutdown just around the corner. Unfortunately, while the Pentagon is estimating the cost of Operation Odyssey Dawn for the first week at $600M, Congress can’t agree on cutting more than a few billion when they need to cut over a trillion. Since we are freezing over $30B of Gaddafi’s assets, why not take that money to pay for the no-fly zone and help us pass a budget for FY2010?!?!
