Quote Originally Posted by Pete View Post
I believe I was the first one to mention Hungary in this thread and that was more than a month ago. "Defending Freedom" in the abstract and starting World War III are two different kettles of fish entirely. After Hungary the Eisenhower administration and the Dulles brothers considerably toned down the bold rhetoric about "rolling back Communism."
They were obviously dithering pant-wetters.

Europe knows they can't trust the US government. What Europe, especially France and Britain who jumped into this first, are concerned about is that the US will jump ship when the going gets tough and they will be left holding the baby (so to speak)... which appears to be in the process of happening.
Which explains why we bailed out of Iraq in 2007, Vietnam in 1968, Afghanistan in 2005, Korea in August 1950 - oh wait....

If anything, the US has the opposite problem. Besides, the Europeans are more than capable of taking out Qaddafi if they want to bad enough. Why should we do it for them? Britian, France and many other countries have qualified JTAC and combat controllers who could embed with the rebels to really enable air-based fire support. Why haven't they done so?