Whose side are we on? Why I (for now) support Western military intervention in Libya

I remember very vividly the start of the second American invasion of Iraq. After months of protesting and rallying for peace, there was nothing to do but sit helplessly and cry while reports of death and destruction streamed in through the Internet. Since then, the long and drawn out military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan has led to a complete tarnishment of the United States’ reputation.

So now that the US and other Western powers have intervened in the conflict in Libya, how can we trust them? The short answer is that we don’t. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t judge the action on its own merits.

Return of the Super Spy: Macho Men now drink wine but Sexism and Islamophobia still rampant in Tom Clancy’s Dead or Alive.

After letting shoot-em-up video games keep his brand of political action alive for the better part of a decade, Tom Clancy has returned with Dead or Alive, a door-stopping behemoth of a book which sees the return of many familiar characters united in a struggle to stop a hideous terrorist villain The Emir, a thinly veiled stand-in for Osama bin Laden.

Clancy’s politics have always been so right as to be nearly fascist, but Dead or Alive takes his work to new levels of racist Islamophobia, sexism, and ra-ra Americana. If you like the idea of a world where “heroes” go around blowing the heads-off Arabs (sorry “bad guys”), treating women like objects (when they notice them at all that is), and fantasizing about their next Big Mac – then by all means this book is for you. All 950 pages of it (I only got to about page 300 – so please if there is a sudden reversal in the following 650 please correct me – but I thought the sample size was large enough)

It may seem redundant to look critically at a Tom Clancy novel for its characterization of Islam and women, but the fact that it’s sitting prominently in the bestseller section of bookstores deserves some sort of comment. This essary will look at how the book characterizes its heroes, it’s villains, and women characters. These characterization result in the creation of a circular relationship where the Islamophobic and sexist attitudes of the male heroes are confirmed and reflected through the way the book’  characterization of  Arabs and women. Essentially Tom Clancy creates a world where Islamophobia and sexism are justified by the action of its characters.