Libye et politique d'Obama: Is It Better to Save No One?

Je suis assez proche de cette interprétation... Je vous laisse un extrait, mais j'irais lire l'article au complet!

"It has been exceptionally rare for major powers to intervene militarily for predominantly humanitarian reasons. One rare example was the United States-led Kosovo campaign in 1999, and another was Britain’s dispatch of troops to Sierra Leone in 2000 to end the brutal civil war there. Both were successes, but came only after years of killings that gradually built up the political will to do something.

Critics argue that we are inconsistent, even hypocritical, in our military interventions. After all, we intervened promptly this time in a country with oil, while we have largely ignored Ivory Coast and Darfur — not to mention Yemen, Syria and Bahrain.

We may as well plead guilty. We are inconsistent. There’s no doubt that we cherry-pick our humanitarian interventions.

But just because we allowed Rwandans or Darfuris to be massacred, does it really follow that to be consistent we should allow Libyans to be massacred as well? Isn’t it better to inconsistently save some lives than to consistently save none?

If the Libya operation is successful, moreover, it may help put teeth into the emerging doctrine of the “responsibility to protect” — a landmark notion in international law that countries must intervene to prevent mass atrocities. And that might help avert the next Rwanda or the next Darfur.

After the Vietnam War, many Americans were traumatized by the very idea of using military force. As a result we were too slow to react to genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda, and hundreds of thousands died as a result. Then we recovered our moxie — and unfortunately barged into Iraq. The difficulties of Iraq and Afghanistan have again made many Americans — particularly on the left — allergic to any use of military force, even to save lives in a limited operation with very few civilian casualties, like the one in Libya.

I don’t think the United States should arm Libyan rebels, partly because that would require training them to use the weaponry, and we shouldn’t have military boots on the ground, for fear of a nationalist backlash among Libyans. But we can step up the bombing of Libyan military units (arguably necessary to protect civilians), making clear to those units that unless they stand down, they will be destroyed."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/opinion/03kristof.html?_r=1