Free Republic

The supposed “responsibility to protect” has taken America into a war on the side of the ultimate killers of innocents. (See also "Rebel Libya: ‘Brothers who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, now is the time to defend your land!" on the Tatler.) In the absence of any evident national interest justification for bombing Libya, the Obama administration is said to have been motivated by the so-called responsibility to protect — or “R2P” per the wonkish English acronym. In American discussions, “R2P” has quickly come to be associated with Obama advisor Samantha Power. But “R2P” did not emerge full-grown from the...

Andrew Sullivan takes exception to my observations that we are on a fool’s errand in Libya and a dangerous one. The other day I took issue with neo-conservatives who had learned nothing from failed attempts to create Western-style democracies in Muslim cultures. I had pointed to recent experiences in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Gaza (let alone Turkey) and warned that our military invasion of Libya could lead to the creation of an al-Qaeda aligned totalitarian state. Here is how the Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan characterized these thoughts: “It looks as if David Horowitz has left the neocons and become an anti-Islam...