“Perhaps you consider a skeptical pacifism childish; I say to you the moral life of children is superior in every way to a perpetual adolescence. Endorsing violence except at the uttermost end of need is monstrous; cheering it, even then, is evil.” (Updated)
“It is notable that the loudest cheerleaders of this war do not actually desire anything remotely resembling a revolution. ‘As much as possible of the current bureaucracy, police and army should be retained,’ says Juan Cole, which unintentionally illustrates the truth: that this was not a revolution, not from the Euro-American perspective; it was a hit. If Qaddafi were quite the Hitler he’s now supposed to be, or to have been, or whatever, then it would hardly do to keep his party apparatus in place.”
So says IOZ.
UPDATE: And how did I miss this?
I do not even admit to the occasional necessity of war, but even if I did, war would nevertheless and perhaps even more so always, always be wrong, always a failure, always a crime. If Hitler himself arises from the grave tomorrow and directs an immense army against all the other peoples of the world, we are nevertheless obliged not simply to lament the necessity of fighting him, but to atone for it. If necessity may sometimes suspend temporarily that which is actually right and just, it never abrogates it. And in any case, this is not the case. Hitler has not risen from his grave; our victims are no less human than we are; “those loyal to Qaddafi” are also people; it is not our place to determine that the average “Taliban fighter” deserves to die, less yet to go out and kill him.
(Read the whole thing for the full flavor.)