LETTER: Staff editorial on Libya lacked refinement

Dear Editor,

The staff editorial entitled, “Military Actions Demand Transparency,” does a disservice to the Mary Washington community and undermines your staff’s role, interests and credibility. The staff of the Bullet are individuals who have chosen to spend their time thinking about and crafting ideas into articles, articles that they feel are beneficial to the community; but this article lacks refinement, analysis and purpose. The article is an opinion piece, but ought to attempt to present an educated, well analyzed opinion, especially since it comes from the staff of the paper.

The involvement of the US in the conflict in Libya is not the U.S. entering another war; if that is being asserted, then the case for that should be explained.  The U.S. has not declared war and the President authorized involvement to prevent “a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world,” and “to stop the killing and enforce U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973,” neither of these points suggesting that the President intends for this to result in us entering a war.

It is in fact reasonable to claim that this is a ‘solely benevolent gesture to halt the oppression,’ since we have time and again berated ourselves after the fact for not acting sooner to stop genocide. In Libya we are not waiting to find mass graves, we are acting as we should.

Perhaps they do not pose a direct, immediate threat to our nation, but we would be amiss if we were not working to uphold the treaties, laws and agreements we have given our signature to.

The U.S. has joined with other nations, in this and other efforts around the world, to promote democracy, not western democracy, but the inherent principle of democracy, that people have inalienable rights, which include the right to self-governance.

While there will always be those who question our motives, we must remember, as former Massachusetts  Gov. Mitt Romney said, “America is unique in the history of the world. In the history of the world, whenever there has been war, the nation that is victorious has taken land from the nation that has been defeated – land has always been the basis of wealth on our planet. Only one nation in history, and this during the last century, was willing to lay down hundreds of thousands of lives and take no land in its victory – no land from Germany, no land from Japan. America. America is unique in the history of the world for its willingness to sacrifice so many of its precious sons and daughters for liberty, not solely for itself but also for its friends.”

Leah Kieff is a Senior.