Degrees Of War And War Is War

I just left a comment at Skeptical Eye's (here's your stinking link) recent post about protesters. I basically argued it's all in the degree (sometimes a matter of perception) to which America involves itself in war and how their leaders sell it.

Clinton and Obama in their wars - and let's be frank, Obama is now officially a war time president since he chose to stick around in Iraq and even escalate operations in Afghanistan and now has his own war in Libya - positioned it as wars of "limited" action. They're not invasions on an Iraq scale and are seen as less offensive.

But it's still war - by other means even.

Clinton and Obama were skillful at explaining their military interventionism is conducted within established international institutions whereas Bush and the neoconservtives did not wish to be subverted by international organisms. That rubbed some people the wrong way.

But it's still war.

The other thing is while Bush's war was seen as an illegal act of an aggression on a sovereign state - lots of grey area there - the word "altruism" has crept into Obama's actions in Libya as it was with Clinton in Kosovo.

Perhaps. Maybe there truly is a moral component to war. However, the mere fact of what we witnessed genocide and massacres in Ivory Coast, Sudan and Rwanda and other places where the West turned a blind eye, makes this assertion hypocritical and meek, if not laughable.