The US has a whopping national debt of 14 trillion dollars. Considering Iraq and Afghanistan, one might expect there to be war fatigue among the taxpayers. Yet, the US government has chosen to drag them into another financial hole. This time in Libya.
Medea Benjamin, the co-founder of the US anti-war group Code Pink, agrees that in the case of interventions, like the one in Libya, public opinion immediately turns sour as soon as people realize this is not something that will end in a few days.
“People start recognizing that this is starting to look like the wars that we have been in now for years,” she told RT. “There’s also an extreme fight going on on Capitol Hill about where to make budget cuts. And we see cuts coming out of key services to our communities: to teachers, fire fighters, police.
“And at some level we have to be asking ourselves: ‘Can we afford yet another war?’ And I think if it was posed like that to the American people, the majority would say ‘no’,” Benjamin added.
According to some reports, more than 4,000 American sailors and marines are being deployed to the area. Medea Benjamin agrees that, should a ground operation unfold in Libya, Americans may witness their military getting bogged down in another never-ending campaign with financial consequences that are all too predictable.
She finds it symbolic that the US dropped its first bombs on the forces of Gaddafi on the eighth anniversary of the US intervention in Iraq.
“That was posed to the American people as something that would take five days, five weeks, five months at the latest,” Benjamin said. “We are now into years. So, I don’t think the American people have the stomach for another long war that is costing us hundreds of millions of dollars.”
NATO envisages a three-month stint in command of the no-fly zone, yet Medea Benjamin reminds us that we were promised a short war in Iraq to liberate the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein eight years ago.
“And I don’t think the Iraqi people would really say they have been liberated,” she said. “And so, to me, it looks like a bad precedent in the case of Libya.
“The Libyan people have to liberate themselves, as people are doing all over the Arab world. The best thing that the outside forces, and particularly the West, can do is stop selling so many weapons to dictators all over the Arab world,” Medea Benjamin concluded.