Liberals tell Neocons that in wars "anything you do, I can do better" :(

A long, long, time ago, in my first year of graduate school, which is when I began the transition from electrical engineering to the social sciences, Jennifer Wolch, now a dean at Berkeley, remarked in her lecture that external wars are often used to legitimize the state.  Yes, a standard poli.sci. argument, but it was new to me then.  And, as I started getting more and more into understanding such issues, I could get a sense of why a Burkean-conservatives might not want to poke their noses into places where they don't belong, but that otherwise we could have interventionist arguments made from the conservative side of the political spectrum as well as from the liberals.  It is then a harsh reality that there aren't very many people around who would not want to initiate conflicts.  As in conflicts that are not a result of self-defence.

Thus, under the previous presidency, the (neo)conservatives got to wage wars, and now it is the liberals' turn.  Anything you can do, I can do better!  So, while the neoconservatives made fun of the French while singing "bomb, bomb, bomb; bomb, bomb Iran," the liberals are bombing now with active assistance from those who supposedly would rather spend their evenings with cheese and wine while listening to Edith Piaff!

Does Sarkozy have any special interest in this?  Of course, it is a wag-the-dog story, writes Anne Applebaum:

Sarkozy clearly hopes the Libyan adventure will make him popular, too. Nobody finds this surprising. At a conference in Brussels over the weekend, I watched a French participant boast of France's leading role in the Libyan air campaign. A minute later, he heartily agreed that the war was a ploy to help Sarkozy get re-elected. The two emotions—pride in French leadership and cynicism about Sarkozy's real motives—were not, it seems, mutually exclusive.

See--external wars and legitimation strategies.

But, haven't we learnt any damn thing from the three-trillion-dollar fiasco that the Iraq War is?  Apparently not:

while this intervention has been couched in the language of humanitarianism and of the global good deed, invoking the so-called Responsibility to Protect (R2P), the U.N.’s new doctrine that is supposed to govern those instances when outside powers must step in militarily to prevent tyrants from killing their own people, the more important goal has been to support the insurgency, which is to say, to bring about regime change. Had it been otherwise, the bombing could have been halted once the Libyan government attack on Benghazi had been halted. Instead, it goes on, with various French, British, and American politicians and military officials at odds mainly about how much (not whether) the bombing campaign should be widened, and whether Colonel Qaddafi is himself a legitimate target for assassination from the air.
...
This war—let us call it by its right name, for once—will be remembered to a considerable extent as a war made by intellectuals, and cheered on by intellectuals. The main difference this time is that, particularly in the United States, these intellectuals largely come from the liberal rather than the conservative side. Presumably, when the war goes wrong, they will disown it, blaming the Obama administration for having botched it, in much the same way that many neoconservatives blamed Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld for his strategic errors, rather than blaming themselves for urging a war that never had a chance of transforming Iraq in the way that they hoped. The judgment of history will almost certainly be that it was Iran, not the United States, which won that war. And Libya? Anything is possible, of course, but the odds of this war, so grandiose in terms of the moral claims made for its necessity and so incoherent in its tactics, turning out in the way its advocates are promising seem remarkably small.

Holy crap, is all I want to say! 

Meanwhile, over at the other party ....

Ironic, isn't it, that the "progressive" Democrats are often caricatured as anti-war peaceniks?  It is all bloody tweedledum and tweedledee :(