By Jason Ditz 
Most US Presidents have a single comment which winds up neatly summing up the entire theme of their administration. President Obama may well have delivered his today, when addressing the possibility of arming Libyan rebels.
“I’m not ruling it out. But I’m also not ruling it in,” Obama remarked, adding that it is his belief that the US “probably could” smuggle arms into Libya despite what was a fairly clear arms embargo supported by the administration just weeks prior.
But officials are now reimagining UN Resolution 1973, in particular the clause about preventing harm to civilians, as a blanket permission slip to funnel weapons to the combatants which NATO hopes will win the ongoing civil war.
Though the UN resolution was originally supposed to be about a no-fly zone, it quickly escalated into massive air strikes. Now, it seems, it is being used by the West as an excuse for not only meddling in the ongoing war, but escalating it by pouring arms into the nation.
This article first appeared on AntiWar.com.