By Don DeBar

NEW YORK - In a move reminiscent of Senator Mike Mansfield's observation that "Only a Nixon could go to China," President Barack Obama has begun a US military invasion of Africa.

For those unaware, Libya is in Africa.

Ignoring the call of the African Union - the regional organization having jurisdiction which counts every African nation save Morocco among its members - and channeling the political ghost of George W. Bush on the eighth anniversary of the "Shock and Awe" attack on Iraq, "America's First Black President" ordered the launch of some 110 Tomahawk missiles on Libya Saturday, killing an unknown number of Africans for oil.

According to various media sources, Libyan authorities reported that 48 people were killed and more than 150 injured, most of them civilians, and that the missiles hit civilian targets, among them a hospital in Tripoli, in an attack that Obama claimed was intended to protect civilians from the Libyan government.

At present, as we saw during "Shock and Awe" and have seen pretty much every day since, the mainstream media tell the same story, if in different words - that Gadaffi is crazy, that he's a brutal dictator, that this is not about oil, and that we will be in and out quickly.

And this time again, as in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq (and more recently in Cote D'Ivoire), we have seen the so-called progressive media pile on in the demonization of the leadership that is a prerequisite to progressive acquiescence, if not outright acceptance, of imperial intervention.

However, facts are pesky little buggers, and have - and will - give the lie to the best conducted campaigns of obfuscation and misdirection, over time.

One example - do we still believe that the Iraqi people want to give us flowers for bombing, and then invading, invading their country - particularly after we had starved it for a decade prior?

Meanwhile one wonders here in New York how a former Senator from this state who helped sell the Iraq debacle and lost the presidency as a consequence is now apparently making war policy for the White House over the objections of the Secretary of Defense. Could it be that elections here matter as little as they are claimed to in those varied places around the globe that await our enlightened intervention?

One thing for certain - once again, the symbolism of the first-strike attack couldn't tell the story more clearly. The Tomahawk missile barrage features a weapon ostensibly named after a weapon of self-defense by the original inhabitants of this continent.

To those who value truth, however, it is known that, in the first act of nation-building by the bearers of the missiles, those original peoples suffered a genocide at the hands of these purported freedom-lovers so complete that it lacks historical analogy before or since. That these weapons are now being used on the people of Africa - the second stop for genocide in the building of that nation of hypocrites - simply makes the point for those too blind to see it in the first case. #