A few miles past the west gate of Ashdabiya, the crucial crossroads town about 100 miles west of the rebel stronghold city of Benghazi there is a grim reminder that war kills from every direction. It’s the scene of that friendly fire tragedy that happened late Friday night in which 13 rebel fighters were obliterated by one of our allied aircraft. The charred remains of several vehicles are just twisted wrecks standing guard over newly dug graves fifty feet from the road. The road is gouged as if with a giant pick axe and it is covered with a thick layer of carbon from the super-heated explosions of the precision missiles that sadly wasted those cars; but which have also saved the liberated parts of the country those drivers were fighting for by wasting 25% of Gaddafi’s entire armored corps so far. He can’t win now. That main coastal road connecting this country is a highway of death for anything armored.

In Libya after crossing the surreal Egyptian border. Between their arrival and departure buildings, a kind of No Man's Land has developed. Outside the buildings, crowded around the entrances scores of young black Africans push and scramble and yell for admittance. Wearing woolen caps, hoodies and soccer jerseys the mostly undocumented men are desperate for temporary travel papers. The bulk of them hail from the nation of Chad, which borders Libya to the south.

The further they are from the fighting, the more old men call energetically for war. It is as if they feel political bravado will make them seem brave. Now these armchair warriors are demanding that President Obama announce a plan to remove Colonel Muammar Gaddafi from power.

It is not enough that our forces, without suffering a single casualty prevented a massacre of "horrific scale" in the Libyan city of Benghazi.

Now the long-distance machos in Washington want the boogeyman boss dead or gone, without regard for what it might take to accomplish that admirable goal.

I saw this movie already in Iraq.

He didn't call it off. Despite partisan griping about the First Family's taking a ‘vacation' in Brazil, Chile and El Salvador at the same time the wheels were coming off in Japan and Libya, the president stuck to the plan: a five-day, three-nation Latin American trip just concluded. Any other weekend, it was the kind of trip that would decorate television news with extravagant scenery and tales of vast economic and social potential. But last Saturday and Sunday weren't any other weekend, not with our cruise missiles hitting Tripoli, and radiation being found in the milk and spinach of Tokyo. Still, he stuck it out when he had ample excuse to shut it down, gamely visiting iconic sites in Rio with his adorable family, including Copacabana Beach, a favela slum, and the Christ the Redeemer statue that always gets destroyed in disaster and alien invasion movies.