The Real March Madness - Debra Dean Murphy - God's Politics Blog

The Real March Madness - Debra Dean Murphy - God's Politics Blog.

Would that President Obama just say the truth: that the decision to firebomb Libya with hundreds of Tomahawk cruise missiles cannot fit so easily into a tidy, moral narrative about freedom, dignity, and humanitarian need because it has to do fundamentally with imperial interests, American hegemony, and a global economy in which spiking oil prices and a destabilized OPEC nation could render us unable to fuel — literally — the American way of life. And it’s a decision complicated and compromised by the fact that the American military has not seen fit to intervene in a host of other dictatorial regimes (Sudan, Zimbabwe, Ivory Coast for starters) where the “conditions on the ground” are just as dire, if not more so, than those in Libya. President Obama, like every recent president before him, laments the violence we must undertake for the sake of “global security” and “human freedom.” Reluctantly, the United States must sometimes intervene in a world gone awry. The world, he suggests, is thus. No, Mr. President — thus have we made the world. Debra Dean Murphy is assistant professor of religion at West Virginia Wesleyan College. She blogs at Intersections: Thoughts on Religion, Culture and Politics and at ekklesiaproject.org.