Not saying oil is the only thing that is in our national interest, NCD, not the only thing that might motivate us to entertain military intervention. 

You note that Qaddafi was the dictator for 42 years, and that Libya had oil all of that time. It's true. Which is why Libya has always been one of the few very small countries we've actually paid attention to. I think you've got it right that NATO only intervened now because the rebellion presented a unique opportunity. I don't think the humanitarian motive, absent Libya's oil, would have been enough.

Interesting that you mention recent French military action in Ivory Coast. The French have a long and storied involvement there, not much of it benign. Here's a nice summary from the NYT:

"But [in Ivory Coast] France has not leaned heavily on this [the UN-sanctioned "responsibility to protect"] as justification for its actions; the messy reality of killing and collateral damage, the all-too-humanness of local allies and the allure of regime change combine to make doctrinal modesty the wisest choice.

"History, chance, national interests and presidential impetuousness seem to have played larger roles. Ivory Coast was a French colony, has a significant population of French citizens (and resident French troops) and has been important, together with its neighbors, as a resource base for French business, notably in oil. Libya was not a French colony — although France made a grab for the Fezzan, in southwest Libya, after World War II, briefly attaching it to French Algeria. France does, however, have a considerable interest in keeping Libyan oil flowing — and in keeping Libyan immigrants in Libya, or at least Italy. Just a few days ago, France expressed an interest in strengthening its border with Italy, which under European Union accords is supposed to be open.

"Finally, the government of President Nicolas Sarkozy was embarrassed by its late-in-the-day friendships with the governments of Hosni Mubarak and, especially, Ben Ali of Tunisia. It was bad for the political amour-propre.

Result? Two little wars, one regime down, one to go."

Gbagbo is the fellow who opened up Ivory Coast's traditionally France & America-friendly oil industry to bids from Russia and China. Now he's under arrest, held by the pro-French opposition, it is reported, and the French are very interested in promoting democracy. Sarkozy's re-election is a factor in all this, and one should never underestimate the influence of France's incomparable intellectual, Bernard-Henri Lévy.

By the way, I pointed out that we didn't intervene to save Cambodian citizens from the Holocaust, leading you to wonder whether I thought we should have 'won' in Vietnam and then gone on to invade Cambodia.

​No, actually, I think we should have left Vietnam long before the Kissinger-sponsored invasions of Cambodia. Let's go back earlier, long before we turned the Ho Chi Minh trail into a killing ground, driving the VC and the People's Army of NV into Cambodia. How about if we'd never invaded Vietnam in the first place? That would have been the best time to stop that war.

But since we did what we did, a convincing argument can be made that the Cambodian Holocaust resulted from our invasion of Vietnam and bombing of Cambodia, and that, if we ever owed a moral obligation to a foreign civilian population, we owed something to those hundreds of thousands of displaced, tortured and dying Cambodians. But, even under those circumstances, the humanitarian motive was not sufficient to spark an intervention by us or anyone else.