So for this blog I chose to write about my essay I submitted. Now even thou I’m in the military, I’m not a very political person. In fact, I believe that we have lost sight on some things that made our nation great. Now I’m not saying we aren’t a great nation, just saying I do think a lot of views on local and national policy are a little blurry and we have slipped a little bit. To show my own little sign of disapproval on how our government has been running, when I changed my state of residency moving to Florida, I changed my voting party to the Wig Party. The lady of course gave me grief, I’m not sure if she even knew what the Wig Party was, so right there I went on a 10 min rant at the DMV, going on about the Republicans and Democrats, and how I was bringing it back to our roots. At that point my wife giving that “why do I go in public with this man look”, finally saying please just change his party to the Wig Party. I even got a applause from some of those sitting in the lobby, but that’s a blog for another day. So in short I wanted to challenge myself and write about a topic happening today.
Over the course of the last couple of weeks the U.S., has gotten involved in another conflict. As of right now our role is that of a humanitarian presence, enforcing a strict no-fly zone and attacking land units that are attacking innocent civilians. Well it appears that a new question is presenting itself, do we arm the rebellions and aide them rather in getting rid of Qaddafi? We as a nation has already seen this played out twice using both scenarios of aiding the rebels and only enforcing a no-fly zone. First scenario was when the U.S. secretly armed the Afghanistan people with numerous amounts of weapons that ultimately defeated the U.S.S.R., however this training and weaponry helped establish Al Qaeda and now we are dealing with dismantling that group as they turned their focus on Western Powers. The other scenario was with Iraq, we established a strict no-fly zone, but again we eventually needed to send in troops and remove Saddam.
As stated in my essay, by providing weapons and training to the rebels the U.S. could:
- End this conflict faster
- Enables a society as they strive for political change, providing a positive influence in the Middle East
- In this region we are already stretched very thin, using the rebels to remove their own leader, alleviates the U.S. from the burden of providing ground troops and restricting yet another Arab country.
- It could change the world perspective regarding the U.S. and Arab countries. As of right now we have the blessing of the major Arab leaders.
However, I do not believe that arming this rebellion is the best option. First, unlike Egypt, who takes over after Qaddafi is removed? Egypt already had a temporary government recognized by other nations, with Libya we do not. In fact, one of the leaders of the rebellion is one of Qaddafi’s former top aides. That’s great a man who up to last month was loyal to Qaddafi and all the policies he put in place with that country is now a leader of the rebellion. Who's to say he doesn't fall into power and do the exact same thing. Also there are some reports Al Qaeda may be showing up in some of the rebel groups. This makes perfect sense since the country is very unstable. Al Qaeda can use this to force their muscle and create another possible birthing ground for terrorist activity. If we arm the rebels who’s to say that Al Qaeda doesn’t use those resources to attack U.S. forces later. Lastly, thou removing Qaddafi is in the best interest of the Western world, this rebellion had nothing to do with us. When did the U.S. become responsible for rebuilding every country that decides it wants to remove its leader? We are already involved in two countries in the Middle East, and neither of those have an exit strategy in place. Getting involved with another would stretch our forces even more. The U.S. is already providing the bulk of air strikes as well; with this role we can be very “selective” on our targets. As long as we can say that unit was hurting innocent civilians, we can make them a target, if this so happens to open the road to Qaddafi oh well. I just don’t see the need for us to provide more support then we already are. Especially with the so much uncertain.
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