Last Monday, President Obama announced his bid for re-election. Sadly, the pronouncement didn’t have us nearly as riled up as it did a few years ago—much of our “hope” has shriveled up into something far less glittery and optimistic—partially because the announcement came hot on the heels of his speech endorsing the U.S. going to war with Libya.
Some members of the Campanil Staff believe the words of his speech which promise Libya will be different than Iraq, and that U.S. actions in Libya are just going along with the wishes and mission of the U.N.
However, most of us feel the decision to attack Libya (an attack which happened 10 days before it was made known to the American public) is really the icing on top of the Obama disappointment cake.
Are we really supposed to believe there’s something new and different about funding an extremely expensive war (The Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments estimates the Libyan operation costs the US between $100 million and $300 million per week) with a country who is one of our oil suppliers under the guise of “ensuring democracy”?
That the U.S. attack on Libya took place exactly on the 8-year anniversary of the U.S. attack on Iraq (a war which we thought Obama would end, but he still hasn’t) may be a coincidence, but it certainly shows not much has changed.
We thought Obama would at least partially clean up Bush’s mess—instead, he has his own war to add to the heap. Unfortunately, no hip, glowing poster or single-word slogan is going to make us excited for the upcoming election season. As so many of Obama’s campaign platforms have gone unfulfilled, that single-word slogan now holds little, if any meaning.
Watch President Obama’s full speech on the U.S. Mission in Libya provided by PBS Newshour on Youtube:
