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Position: United States should not have intervened
This position addresses the topic 2011 Libyan uprising.
For this position
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By some measures, Obama's war was less excusable. In going after Saddam, Bush at least could claim to be defusing an ongoing threat to our allies, in a vital region. But Gadhafi had stopped his sponsorship of terrorism, abandoned his nuclear quest and generally tried to become a respectable world citizen. That raises a point Obama may not want to stress. If you're a merciless despot, pondering the fate of your colleagues, there is only one conclusion to draw: Get nukes, and get them now.
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Against this position
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President Obama took a huge political risk, averted a massacre and helped topple an odious regime. To me, the lesson is not that we should barge into Syria or Yemen — I don’t think we should — but that on rare occasions military force can advance human rights. Libya has so far been a model of such an intervention.
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The brave rebels who bucked the odds and took on Khadafy's troops deserve the major credit for victory, of course, but they could not have succeeded without the air support they received from Western powers. President Obama can justly claim a foreign policy triumph in the face of considerable skepticism from critics, which included this editorial page.
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The U.S. intervention, in concert with NATO and the Arab League, prevented a civilian massacre in March in the eastern city of Benghazi, allowed the rebels to regroup, and helped turn the tide of the standoff. The intervention was a high-stakes gamble about which we've been skeptical, but if ultimately successful, it can be an important step in what stands to be a long, difficult process of rebooting U.S. policy away from support for dictators and toward support for the people's democratic aspirations.
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Mixed on this position
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Libya was the classic "far-off country of which we know little". Except that this time, of course in very different circumstances, we decided to do our bit. Because it was a close argument, there should be no point-scoring now. Critics and supporters of the intervention should be able to join in agreeing that it was a close-run thing, that we are lucky it has turned out, so far, reasonably well, and that the story is far from over.
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