PHOTOS, PAGE 1

       Editor and prime reporter is Doug Terry, a veteran television and radio reporter in   Washington, DC, (details below)

ANOTHER WAR IN THE MID-EAST, THIS TIME FOR A GOOD CAUSE

Everyone knows this saying: be careful what you wish for, you just might get it. No one should ever cheer war, bombing and destruction. Things that start with high hopes often end in low realities and that is especially true of wars, which are ugly, brutal and always, I mean always, kill innocent people in the process. Yet, what other choice was there in regard to Ghadifi? We, the world, could sit on our hands and watch while he continued to slaughter his own country men in the name of keeping his power or we could act. There weren’t a lot of in between choices available. In fact, I don’t know of any.

Had these missile attacks come several weeks earlier, we might have seen a near immediate melting away of support for Ghadifi among his own core group and the military. As it was, they were about to win, to defeat the rebels totally, when the first attacks began in Tripoli today, Saturday. Some people will fight and die out of loyalty  to a ruler or to a presumed cause, other people will fight because they want to keep their position of power and relative wealth, but few will even considering doing that if there appears to be no hope of winning. Now, it might be too late to persuade the loyalists to put down their arms and join the rebels. So, the attacks of this weekend could be only the beginning.

What’s next? First, we have to wait and see how the attacks against air defense systems go. Then, we have to wait for the reaction of the Ghadifi troops. What we could win up with in short order is a kind of stalemate, with the rebels holding certain sections of the country and the loyalist another. Then what? If Ghadifi and his troops attack again, we, the world, would have to respond. This is not an easy situation, in other words.

The unstated hope of the military action is obviously that Ghadifi will fall into a trap, take up an active position as a fighter and meet the appropriate fate of a brutal dictator. When he’s gone, the battle is likely over. In a way, considering what is ahead of him if he loses and lives, going out that way would not be a bad alternative for someone who is losing choices by the minute.

We might as well face up to the fact that the US has a major responsibility to respond to this sort of situation almost anywhere in the world, like it or not. American military power is being used in the first phase because of the sophistication of the targeting we can bring to the battle and because we can launch more missiles, more quickly, than any other nation. Time was, dictators killed people, jailed and tortured them and did just about anything else they pleased because the world wouldn’t find out about it for days, week or even years. That time has passed. The alternative to acting was not very attractive and, in the minds of top decision makers, out weighed the risks.

Doug Terry, 3.19.11

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