Libya has no US benefits

President Barack Obama announced last week that military operations in Libya would be primarily shifted to our NATO allies.

Yet we still pledged to support the mission to depose Colonel Muammar Gaddafi — a pledge that can and will cost billions of dollars if we continue our support.

Not only is this financially detrimental and irresponsible of our government, it will not accomplish anything that will benefit the American people.

According to the Associated Press, Abdel-Hafidh Ghoga, vice chairman of the National Provisional Council, said in a recent interview that “Libyans as a whole, and I am one of them, want a civilian democracy, not dictatorship, not tribalism and not one based on violence or terrorism.”

Obama himself admitted in an address to the nation last Monday the situation in Libya does not threaten the safety of Americans.

“There will be times, though, when our safety is not directly threatened, but our interests and values are,” Obama said.

It seems clear those interests and values are less about democracy and more about our dependence on finite resources.

True, Gaddafi does not necessarily exhibit the American values of democracy and freedom.

But there are countless other examples of nations even worse at espousing such values.

Take, for example, the genocide in the Sudan, Joseph Kony’s kidnapped child soldiers in Uganda. What about Iran or North Korea?

The sad fact is conflict is a part of human nature, and as long as this nature is coupled with corrupt political regimes it will continue to be an irremovable blight on humanity.

Ideally, we would have the resources and manpower to end all humanitarian crises and install democratic governments around the world. But we don’t.

Instead of extending our defense budget to areas where it will not aid in the actual defense of the American people, we need to allocate our resources more wisely.

A good start would be withdrawing support of NATO in Libya, paying our dues to the United Nations and letting actual humanitarian organizations take over.

Increased government spending in Libya does not benefit Americans in any tangible way, despite what Obama said about our “interests.”

For proponents of involvement in Libya, it all comes down to oil.

Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), a ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, summed it up best in an interview on MSNBC, saying, “We are in Libya because of the oil. It all goes back to the five million barrels of oil we import from OPEC on a daily basis.”

Libya produces 2 percent of the world’s oil supply, 16th among the world’s top oil producers. And since the conflict, the prices of oil have gone up.

Although oil is undoubtedly important to our economy, the expenditures involved in supporting NATO operations in Libya will likely cost us more money than our lack of Libyan oil would.

We have no sure way of knowing when stability might be restored in Libya.

For all we know, it could extend as long as the war in Vietnam did.

By no means am I antiwar. War is absolutely necessary for the protection of the American people in some cases. But this is not one of those cases.

Obama is handling this crisis relatively well in transitioning power to the NATO coalition and asserting he will not order ground troops to intervene.

But continuing to spend money we don’t have for gain we are unsure of in the first place cannot be a wise move.

Right now, the budget deficit and guarding the safety of American citizens is more important and this pork barrel spending will only serve to increase the deficit.

Despite the president’s statement that our involvement with Libya supports American “interests and values,” it seems to do quite the opposite.

Sarah Cueva is a freshman majoring in political science.