Was it morally right for Britain, Canada, France and the USA to airstrike Libya?

Yes. And it's not airstriking entire Libya as you put it. It's taking out Gaddafi's forces who are shelling civilians in Bangazi and reducing his power to hurt civilians. That's all there is

(PS: okay, there might be more to it, but I don't know)

RichieC wrote: »

I'm torn too, on the one hand I don't give a flying fk, on the other I don't want the yanks getting their grubby hands on another country.

Yes. Thats exactly what we want. You got us

:rolleyes:

I agree with the above post.
It's quite obvious that there's more to these strikes than just saving civilians from Gadaffi.

Well I'd certainly hope that an American citizen would know more about US foreign policy than your average Irish person

Jakkass wrote: »

I think it is hypocritical given that troops from Saudi Arabia / Qatar and UAE are currently in Bahrain suppressing protest.

If the coalition were genuinely consistent they would have advocated airstrikes here also. They are still more interested in keeping their main oil partners I would suspect.

Please don't tell me you didn't notice the difference in scale of the situation between Libya and rest of the countries? Saudi, UAE etc are what currently similar to what happenend in Egypt, it's awful and no doubt that the people should be given the choice to reform, but they are getting repression. However, there's a huge difference between that, to Gaddafi going on radio and tv making his intentions clear that he will conduct house-to-house searches in Bengazi and kill every single rebel - aka - anyone they wish - aka - ethnic cleansing. Not only that, he has the history of doing such insane things too. Already there's many 100s of thousands attempting to flee the situation, so it's a crisis in much larger scale than that of UAE / Yemen etc.

Ideally UN should be there everywhere protecting civilians, but, we don't live in an ideal world now, do we?

TheGodBen wrote: »

You do realise that the UN doesn't have an army, right? All the UN could do is request member nations to intervene to protect civilians, which they did in resolution 1973, explicitly saying that they can use "all necessary measures". The coalition are now acting on the behalf of the UN.

Yes I do. I don't believe that the coalition are acting on behalf of the UN. Who's pulling the strings?

RichieC wrote: »

He knows the same, what can be read on the internet or the papers, they don't have secret American news that only they can read.

I do however have American news that for the most part only Americans bother to read and view. We have no interest in deploying ground forces or occupying the county in any form. Admiral Mullen at the very least has even said the mission is only to protect the rebel citizens by any means necessary under the UN resolution. Some generals though seem to believe the end game should be Ghadaffi out of there, but they are unsure of how that will be accomplished, it would have to be through the acts of the rebel people, which with the removal of Ghadaffi's tanks and planes will be a much less of a one-ended slaughter. Ghaddafi cannot simply be bombed as a) it's not the mission or approved by the resolution and b) he's using innocent bystanders as his entourage, forming a human shield.

Financially there's little or nothing to gain from this except a thankful Libyan people who may repay the favor when they restore the country. As it is though I wager we've already burned through $1,000,000,000.00+ since the start of operations the other day, half of that cost in Tomahawk cruise missiles alone.