Landon Ross rails against no-fly-zone detractors

Over at The Rational Ape Landon Ross has written a great article: Action in Lybia is Way Overdue. In it, he admonishes from the get-go:

If the U.S. maintains its position miles behind the U.K., France, and even the Arab League, by continually vacillating and expressing “deep concern” at the slaughter of an Arab people fighting to emancipate themselves from the yoke of tyranny, it will be another stain on the history of American foreign policy serving to further drain the U.S. of what moral authority it retains.

I couldn't agree more. But one can already hear the invective voices of moral relativists  and a selected brand of spineless left-wing liberals suffused with indignation  at the very thought of another US intervention. Landon rightly anticipates their reaction and their banal use of a well known fallacy:

To those critics who predictably chime “Iraq War” at the very mention of a no-fly-zone over Libya: advocating one strategic blunder by reminding us of another does neither the U.S. nor the Libyans any good.

The fallacy of False Analogy, albeit an informal fallacy -given that its error lies in the validity of the content and not in the logical structure of the argument- is ultimately applicable in this case. If action X had Z consequences in place Y,  then action X must also have Z consequences in place W. It's really hard to overlook such blatant piece of intellectual sophistry.

Landon, of course, goes on to remind us that:

...the no-fly-zone over Iraq was something of an effective policy, at least after 1993 when Saddam's aggressions toward patrolling aircraft were met with effective reprisals.

So we know that the reasoning behind the analogy is extremely subtle. However, I think that the chief quandary behind whether there is a legitimate justification for our intrusion in foreign soil won't get settled until after the adjudication of and ethical dilemma. Given our current national budget deficit oscillating in the vicinity of the trillions of dollars, and the political uprising that is astir in our own country; do we really have the political and financial wherewithal to afford a worldwide display of kindness and empathy? Because if we do, I'd like to propose another country in need of military intervention. It is a closest neighbor in the south and is being ravaged by an internecine conflict between drug cartels and the national military.