On March 19, military operations against Libya commenced.  Operation Odyssey Dawn fired a hundred Tomahawk cruise missiles at $1 million a pop.  That alone would cover the average salaries of 2,000 school teachers for a whole year.  Since then, numerous sorties, another hundred or so missiles — let's say about 6000 teachers' salaries in the first week alone.  Reliable witnesses and hospital reports indicate at least a hundred civilians killed.  And the charred remains of young soldiers doing only what they were ordered to do represent victory. 

Our rubberized constitution is stretched again denying the Congressional prerogative to declare war.  The founding fathers, wary of European rulers and their war-mongering, wanted the people, or next best, their closet representatives to proxy for them in an enterprise fraught with peril, but nobody even talks about that right —  long gone behind carefully parsed phrases conjured by legal advisors hopping freely between academia and government, and getting away with murder even torture.

Libya is in civil war.  Benghazi and the eastern tribes have never been happy with the government in Tripoli, but the majority in the large western part support the government.  Government forces had come to a stop outside Benghazi.  There is no evidence of massacres in the towns retaken by Gaddafi's troops.  In Benghazi, too, heavy weaponry was not deployed against the city or its residents.  Cooler heads had prevailed and feelers were out for talks.

If the bombing campaign continues with more casualties, will Gaddafi make true the threat to attack beyond his borders?  If so, one can visualize a scenario where we feel obliged to send in troops to break the stalemate.  Then a defeated Libyan army goes underground starting an insurgency.  If the "known-unknowns" can be this worrying, one can only look upon the "unknown-unknowns" awaiting us with greater trepidation.

And white and blue collar workers, teachers, firefighters, police and others continue, overextended and underpaid with rising income inequality, to keep this country going.

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