The wisdom of Islam

Deep inside me there has been a burning desire to find faith and find a purpose that is beyond myself, and which goes beyond the tainted lurid pursuit of money and personal satisfaction.

I have found it, in the wisdom of the Koran.

For years I have excoriated this religion, but have been quite wrong, indeed blasphemously insulting to those who have found the voice of God through his blessed prophet the most merciful Mohammed.

As such I have decided to resign from my employment and to plan a trip to Mecca, and pursue a new career to spread the word of Allah to those who have been misguided in their ways.  

For it was only the realisation of the pernicious toxin of our culture upon my heart and soul that caused me to recognise the wisdom of these teachings.  You may join me in my faith, and be my brothers (sisters you should listen to your father or find a husband who will keep you on the righteous path), or you will be my enemy until you convert and see the path to glorify our short time on earth before we enter paradise.

I see all in a new light, the aural pollution of so-called "music", the visual pollution of the totems of the abandonment of the soul through reason, and the dressing of women as whores and harpies to lure men to the path of satan and attract new converts to their lives of prostitution.   The relegation of the beautiful Arabic language to second place to that of the pagan languages of English, French and others, and the desecration of our holy lands by the peoples chosen to taunt us and betray us.   Those who read the first and second books of the Prophet but not the latest and greatest.  Their internecine wars told us all we needed to know - that there is nothing to be learned from Judaism, Christianity or atheism - except the means to defeat them all.

So on April 1 I beseech you all to read the Koran, visit a Mosque, sacrifice your mind, your life and dedicate it all to the worship of Allah, to the glory that comes from death and the celebration of the destruction of all the creations of the infidels.  For if it all fails, on April 2 things may just change back!

"Smartgrowth" is about trains

I've written extensively on this topic over the years - the crying waste of taxpayers' money being poured into little more than a dream, an ill-informed belief that Auckland's transport woes would be solved by an electric (now underground) railway.  It hooks into the same belief by planners that Auckland has to embrace the so-called "smartgrowth" or "new urbanism" philosophy, which is little more than a form of Soviet-style central planning and control upon the city - which has itself failed miserably in every New World city that has embraced it (and not delivered wonders for the old world ones either).

Not PC has been rightfully pointing out the fallacies behind this dogma, which at its essence is a belief that more people should fit into the same space, and that human aspirations for bigger homes, bigger gardens and more living space should be restricted ever increasingly, by stopping cities growing out, but encouraging them to grow up.  

I heard much propaganda around this when I was dealing with Ministry for the Environment and several planners in Auckland councils a few years ago.  They wanted in-fill development, they wanted high rise, they basically wanted less bedrooms and more people in residences.  Is that what you want?  It doesn't matter, because it is "good for the environment".  Why?  It almost entirely comes down to transport.

Planners in "new world cities" (cities outside Europe) have long bemoaned the predominance of the private car for most trips in cities and in particular most commuting trips.  Cars, you see, are bad because they clog up roads, emit nasty fumes and it is "unsustainable" to keep building new roads to meet demand (or new car parks).  (They ignore that cars today have the cleanest emissions than ever, but that is a diversion).   So do they ask questions as to why there is traffic congestion?  The simple fact that road use is priced the same regardless of demand, the fact that taxes collected from road users are frequently not allocated based on demand, but on politically driven imperatives?  No.  The planners are uninterested in economics, for they largely do not understand them.   They don't think that maybe peak time commuting would change if it cost more to drive then (and a lot less to drive at other times), they don't think that there could be innovative ways adopted by commercial road owners to get more capacity out of networks (e.g. intelligent systems for cars to operate in convoys in close formation).  No, they have a pet love affair with one thing only - mode shift - and it isn't to walking or cycling or even buses, it is trains.

You can see it in the Auckland Transport Blog, which has permeating throughout it this philosophy, a glorification of urban railways, a less interested concern in buses and a sneering hatred for the car and almost absent interest in roads at all or serious economics.   You see the blog administrator is a planner and he carries the philosophy he has been taught.

The main problem the railevangelists have is that one of the main reasons the car dominates is because with lots of people living in fully detached houses on sections, there aren't enough people within walking catchments to justify their pet dream - railways.   Railways need lots of people wanting to go to and from the same places at the same time.   New world cities don't have that, they have a lot of people heading in the same direction, but at both ends there are widely differing origins and destinations.   Urban rail projects in new world cities inevitably are not financially viable, because demand, especially off peak, isn't remotely enough to cover the costs of operating the services.

The planners want to change this.  They want you living on top of a railway station, or near it, or within walking distance at least.  With others.  So you might be in an apartment block, or in an adjoining block.  You see you need to live near lots of people doing that to make it "work" (not for you, the planners).   Want to build a new home outside urban limits? No.  That would be immoral, you might drive, you wont be supporting "your railway", and you never know where it might end, cities might sprawl forever!!

Of course it is nonsense.  The "smartgrowth" planners want you to have less living space, and consequently more noise, more shared spaces and to be near a railway so you drive less, then there will be less traffic, less pollution, less congestion and all will be better - except you wont be living where you want, because you can't afford the remaining low density homes (which are priced out of reach because supply is constrained), and traffic patterns wont have changed because you can't force businesses to locate where you want them.  They locate where it is best suited or they leave altogether or never start up.  Congestion wont have changed because the real issue is the price and supply of road space, which the planners have no interest in (other than a more recent interest in using road pricing to fund their rail fetish and penalise the bad cars). 

So yes, it is all about justifying the rail project.  It isn't about your needs at all.  If you want to see how effective it is in addressing transport needs you need look no further than Portland, the pin up city of the Smartgrowth evangelists, where public transport mode shares dropped.

So if it is about trains, wont they deliver wondrous dramatic improvements to travel around Auckland?

Well as I've said before:

- Only 12% of employment in Auckland is downtown.  The railway only exists on two main (plus one secondary and one small branch) corridors, more than half of those commuters wont be served.  On top of that the assumption is 28% of Aucklanders will live within 800m of a station by 2016, so maybe at best 4% of Auckland commuters will be served by the railway.  What about the other 96%?

- The average difference in travel time on roads will be less than 1km/h.  Whilst some rail users will transfer from cars, the effect will be hardly perceived by other road users. As a congestion busting strategy it will be an abject failure.  Largely because most people don't live near railway stations or work near them, which of course is why planners want to price you out of living away from them.

- Most of the trains will lie idle most of the time.  Over one billion in "assets" will be grossly under-utilised most of the day, and all weekends.  Only for two hours every rush hour will they all be used, mostly in one direction, for maybe three trips each, before being stabled to do nothing until a repeat performance in the evenings.

- Majority of rail users wont be motorists.  They will be existing rail users, existing bus users, people who rode with others in cars or people who wouldn't have travelled in the first place.  Maybe around a quarter would have driven, so it is a big subsidy to pay for people who would have used public transport anyway.

- Rail pushes out commercially viable buses.  Until the massive expenditure in rail, maybe half of bus  services in Auckland were unsubsidised and commercial.  Meeting the needs of those paying for them.  With heavily subsidised trains, these have been put out of business and the passengers ride trains without having to pay for more than a third of their operating costs.

- The money poured into the infrastructure can never be realised.  The Auckland rail network was valued by Treasury at a maximum of around NZ$20 million in 2001. It is having around NZ$1 billion poured into it.  Even if by some miracle it doubled in value, it is still a monumental destruction of wealth.  Even those who benefit directly from it are unwilling to pay fares to operate the trains, let alone contribute towards those mammoth fixed (and now sunk) costs.  

Right now, the railevangelists are demanding action on an underground rail loop because they believe Britomart will be congested after electrification, which hasn't even been completed yet.  They want planning for a North Shore railway when even the busway isn't remotely close to capacity.  

Electrification will happen, but it will prove to be a disappointment.  Yes rail patronage will go up, but so what?  Until rail passengers fully pay the operating costs of this dud, it will be a net economic drain on Auckland.  Parking, fuel and congestion charges shouldn't be used to prop it up.

However, roads do need to be treated differently.  The motorway network should be commercialised and sold, and the new owners allowed to charge whatever they like.  Then roads would not be so congested, money would be available to fix bottlenecks and maybe, just maybe, the rail network might prove some value.   Don't bet on the planners even considering this - for they are blinded by the lights of trains being good, not by achieving objectively determined results.

Vandals and thugs are children of the Labour philosophy

UK Uncut, a radical leftwing protest group, has been exposed for what it really is - a bunch of young angry violence prone thugs who, as usual, misuse the term "peaceful protest" for "vandalism, trespass and intimidation".

It is they that formed the backbone to the breakaway protests in London on Saturday, and the cover for the so-called anarchists who went on a vandalism and trespass spree across London's West End.  I say "so-called anarchists" because if they really were anarchists, they wouldn't have wanted the Police to step in had the owners of the premises they trashed used force to defend their properties.

UK Uncut are an odd bunch, you see they want more government (not exactly aligned with anarchists then) and want more tax, so the government can spend more money, presumably on them. UK Uncut is waging war on successful British businesses because it wants to strongarm them to pay more in tax - not that any of them are alleged to be breaking the law - but UK Uncut doesn't think these businesses should arrange their affairs to minimise tax.  The philosophy being that when businesses make profits, the state is entitled to take part of that.

I can't quite understand how anyone, particularly groups of students can get excited about getting businesses to pay more tax, like they worship the state as big mother, which has weaned them and gives them what they want.  It's so anti-aspirational as to be pathetically sad.

Tim Worstall of the Institute of Economic Affairs has fisked this lot with ease, showing the economic illiteracy of UK Uncut.   UK Uncut assumes bizarrely that British companies would remain if taxes were raised dramatically, it assumes that when companies pay more tax that somehow that means that "rich fatcats" lose - when many of the companies have shareholders which are pension funds and the like, with profits shared among thousands of shareholders.   Full details of the fisking here.

However, the mob who vandalised are more than just disenchanted idiots.  They vandalised the Ritz Hotel because they were "anti-rich", they occupied the exclusive department store Fortnum & Mason; Mason because it is upmarket (one wit said "Proper Tea is theft", as Fortnum & Mason has an excellent tea section).  Banks including ATMs were wrecked because they just oppose banks.  Didn't matter that the banks attacked in some cases were not bailed out.   In fact nothing mattered other than trashing the property of businesses they had an ill-conceived prejudice against.  Nice.

However desperate the TUC and Labour are to distance themselves from these thugs, there is a more fundamental underlying point.  Whilst neither entity provoked or encouraged the vandalism (and both are embarrassed by it), the simple truth is that they all share the same philosophy - a fundamental hatred of entrepreneurial success and a belief that the property of others is not sacrosanct.

Both Labour and the TUC perpetuate the myth that the recession is entirely the fault of "the banks" and that "the banks" must pay - they blame the budget deficit on the banks, when it is palpably not true.   Labour had been running large deficits for years, only the collapse in tax revenue has made it more rapidly unsustainable.   

Labour and the TUC want to tax banks more, vandalise them in a far more civilised way, without sticks and stones, and make Britain even less attractive for the financial sector.   They want more of your money, they want to give the money to those who haven't earned it, they want to spend it on monopoly state run health and education services, regardless of whether they meet your needs - because government is good, government always knows best.

They hold the same empty belief that capitalism doesn't really work, that the reason the world isn't the way they want it is because people trade, people make money, people produce goods and services and sell them to people who are willing to pay, employ people who are willing to work, and that life isn't fair!  They belief there aren't equal opportunities (there aren't, the Khmer Rouge tried to fix that), that everyone has a right to a job (a right provided by whom?) and that the "rich" make money off the back of the poor.

It is the same belief that other people owe you a living, an education or health care.  The idea that if other people have property or money, then you have a right to some of it.  It is moral cannibalism, the idea that the mere existence of someone gives them unchosen obligations to give the fruits of their labour, effort, exchanges and mind to others who demand them.   It is the Marxist myth - from each according to his ability to each according to his needs.  The cleverer you are the more of that is demanded from others, and what you get back is just 'what you need'.

The only way this can be imposed is by force, by violence.  The anarchist protestors are willing to do this directly, the politicians and unionists will use the state to do it (and already do).

The best response to this is an unashamed defence of capitalism.  A defence of the principle that people should be entitled to set up businesses, make money, hire who they wish and keep the proceeds, as long as they don't use force or fraud to do so.  It is more than just pointing out that waging war on capitalists means they will leave, with their money, Zimbabwe like, and the looters and vandals will have nothing left.

UK Uncut is ridiculously stupid - if it got its way, businesses would flee the UK and so would wealthy entrepreneurs rather than be taxed. 

Of course if you are weaned on a state education that teaches you how wonderful the things are government does, and to be envy and hate filled about those who have more than you, then you're going to concentrate on hating rather than creating.

That's what you saw on Saturday in London.

Give us more of your money

That was, effectively, the catchcry of the 150,000-250,000 people who protested in London on Saturday. They all opposed government spending less of other people’s money, largely because most of them are beneficiaries of it. The Trade Union Congress initially said 250,000 turned up, more independent accounts indicated the figure was between 150,000-250,000 before the TUC started claiming 750,000.

Labour leader Ed Miliband liked to claim the people opposing cuts are in the majority, a claim that seems more credible than him comparing the protestors to those who opposed apartheid in South Africa or fought for civil rights in the US in the 1960s. Yes Ed Mandela, Ed Luther King. How pathetic and vile it is for this pitiful privileged Primrose Hill living Oxford graduate son of a communist to compare himself to two of the notable historic figures of the 20th century, when he will be but a footnote in comparison.

However absurd and disgraceful that comparison, his claim that the protestors are in a majority is almost as fallacious. The leading leftwing paper in the UK - the Guardian – has a poll showing quite the opposite view. A Guardian/ICM poll showed 35% think the spending cuts go too far, 28% think they are about right, but another 29% think they don’t go far enough. Yet if you read the details behind the poll there is an even more interesting story (PDF).

For feminists who think women are hard hit, well 32% of women think cuts don’t go far enough, 25% think they are about right – so women want MORE cuts compared to men.

How about young people? Don’t they feel betrayed about past generations living it up large and now they have to pay? No. A staggering 43% think cuts have not gone far enough, 36% think they have gone too far and 17% think they are about right.

So isn’t this just a mob of taxpayer funded (or rather future taxpayer funded) beneficiaries demanding that taxes go up and borrowing increase to sustain their dependence on the money of others? Well yes.

Bearing in mind that the cuts themselves are rather pitiful when you look at the big picture. Allister Heath at City AM today points out that the Conservative Chancellor George Osborne is only cutting spending by 0.6% in 2011/2012, and peaking in 2013/2014 with a 1.3% cut in spending. In other words, he is undertaking the minimum necessary to avoid a cut in Britain’s credit rating and to maintain confidence. Of course spending is being most dramatically cut in a number of areas, notably tertiary education, local government provided services and defence, but not health nor foreign aid.

So these aren’t “savage cuts”, the size of the UK state as a proportion of GDP within five years will have dropped, from around 50% to just over 41%, largely because the private sector will have grown.

In addition, the socialists and planners always demand to know where the new jobs are coming from, no free market advocate can tell because free market economies are far too complex for anyone to have a handle on new innovations or entrepreneurial opportunities. Compared to the final quarter of 2009, public sector employment is down 123,000, but private sector employment is up 428,000. You see you can’t predict where or how these jobs appear, but they do.

Those marching are mindless that the road they want is the one to lead to where Greece and Portugal have now head – where government can’t borrow money anymore because those with money see it as too risky, and demand ever higher interest rates. The government then engages in the barely disguised theft of the elderly and those on low to middle incomes, of inflation. Inflating the currency so that debts are devalued, along with the cash savings of those with too little knowledge and too little money to protect themselves from inflation. It hurts them more than anyone.

No doubt many marching don’t even understand what a deficit is ( it is spending over income, NOT debt) and somehow think that government can borrow ad infinitem, or pillage more money from taxpayers who will sit back and take it.   The current government is being so meek it will only be breaking even by the next election, the massive public debt will have grown by then.  However, the TUC sees the people receiving this money as children as seen by this video - adults should get pocket money.   Given the TUC throughout much of its history has been more closely aligned to Moscow than anywhere else, it should be ignored as it has spent so long advocating an attitude of get paid more for doing less and hire more people doing less.  It is a dinosaur that serves no purpose other than to be a rallying point for those too stupid to know better (you can't be too bright to have your interests represented by people who couldn't create a business if they tried).

Fortunately a majority disagree, and either think the spending cuts are right or not courageous enough. I’m strongly in the latter category, although when it comes to policing the other story in London on Saturday shows a different story.  The more leftwing one gets the more violence is part of your bread and butter...

The West is always wrong

You have to hand it to the so-called "peace" movement and the left.  They are as adept in chicaning their way around principle and consistency in position in all but one way - the West is always wrong.

Throughout the Cold War, both the West and the Soviet bloc (and China as much as it acted independently) all acted uniformly under the principle of realpolitik.  Interests were at stake, and each side supported allies as a bullwark against the other.  For the USSR and China, this never presented domestic problems because domestic problems were always resolved with the barrel of a gun so to speak.  Neither had to deal with protest marches, civil disobedience, bad press or the like, for they were (China still is to an extent) totalitarian prison camps.  Both happily backed, armed, clapped, funded and facilitated mass murder, torture, starvation and grotesque inhumanities in their own and many other countries.  Both had plenty of supporters in Western academia and a few in politics who were either taken in by the propaganda or simply were so anti-Western they embraced the obvious alternative.

The West didn't have such luxuries, for it had (and has) freedom.  Defence and foreign policy would be challenged, not only at the ballot box and within the political sphere, but with protests, free press and open civil society, its action would alway be open to scrutiny.  Quite right too.  However, those who would point the finger at the West on foreign policy and defence could not do so in the Soviet bloc.  Moscow knew this of course and helped fund several branches of the peace movement, figuring it could weaken the West by helping promote popular opinion in the West to disarm and withdraw - knowing similar calls in the Soviet block could be eradicated forthwith.

So it was simple - the peace movement and the left would, by and large, focus on what the West did wrong, because it was easy to report, and in fact it was seen as easier to change.  It was always far easier to point out the hypocrisy of Western realpolitik.  Our "interests" were in having allies that fought the allies of the Soviet bloc, yet these were on more than a few occasions inconsistent with the values people in Western countries saw as being the hallmark of superiority of Western liberal capitalist democracies over Marxism-Leninism.   Suharto, Marcos, Pinochet, Rhee, Somoza, Mobutu and others were often as bloodthirsty with opponents and as uninterested in free speech as their opponents.  The left in the West jumped on these and damned Western support for them.  This was the right thing to do, but they also turned a blind eye to the Soviet alternatives.

However, this philosophy of damning Western intervention in other countries remained after the end of the Cold War, although few noticed that suddenly more than a few non-Marxist dictatorships fell in relatively quick succession.  The end of apartheid in South Africa was partly facilitated by the end of the civil wars in Angola and Mozambique as the West withdrew support in parallel to the Soviet Union withdrawing support for their sides.  Chile, Zaire, Taiwan and South Korea all saw significant reforms with mixed success.   Then came Saddam Hussein.

Saddam Hussein was undoubtedly one of the nastiest dictators of the post war era (and he has plenty of competition).  He became important to both the West and the USSR when Iran fell to Islamist clerics, and was itself sabre-rattling against the US, USSR and Israel, so Saddam gained support from both sides in the Cold War, to take on Iran.  Pure realpolitik against a threatening enemy.  Yet it achieved nothing, except the spilling of the blood of hundreds of thousands, and a convenient target for the left - the West had backed another bloodthirsty thug, and Iran had not been contained.

Then Saddam attacked Kuwait.  There was a near unanimous international consensus in favour of ejecting him from Kuwait, yet the leftwing "peace movement" with the likes of the odious hypocritical Janus-like George Galloway condemning how the West attacked Iraq, after cossetting it for so long.  

You see with the peace movement, you can't correct your previous bad behaviour.  So whilst Saddam was expelled from Kuwait, subjected to two no-fly zones and extensive economic sanctions, in fact that was all wrong.  Because he had had Western backing before, he shouldn't be attacked now - the West is to blame for him.

Then after that, Saddam's continued breaching of UN Security Council resolutions and failure to allow the IAEA full inspection of all facilities it requested access to meant nothing.  Saddam should be left alone, even though he murdered Iraqis on a daily basis.  In fact, economic sanctions on Iraq, which hurt Iraqis not Saddam, should be lifted - not because it was Saddam's fault, but the West's fault for "killing Iraqi children" as Saddam used his population as propaganda.  

Remember the left warmly embraced economic sanctions against the South African racist regime, but for Iraq Saddam was now to be appeased.  Iraq was to be "left alone", for this wasn't a dictatorship that should face sanctions or military action.

Then, 9/11 happened.  The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had barely caused a murmur in the "peace movement", but Western backing for the mujahideen did.  The Taliban winning power in Afghanistan also barely caused a murmur, except for its radical misogyny and destruction of some historic statues.  However, the attack against the Taliban regime, which had sheltered and supported Al Qaeda, was wrong.  It was wrong for the US to strike against those who harboured and supported those who attacked and killed thousands of people on its soil.   It was wrong to overthrow those who treated girls as chattels denying them education, banning music and executed anyone who didn't support their stone age theocracy.  

G.W. Bush attacked Iraq, in part because of Saddam's continued defiance of UN Security Council Resolutions, in part because of a belief that regime change and installation of a Western friendly democracy in Iraq would be positive for the region.  It was appallingly undertaken, but it gave backbone to the peace movement which saw it as death and destruction.  Saddam's overthrow was bemoaned by few, but the performance and behaviour of a few troops became a reason to damn the lot.  Furthermore, the rise of an Islamist insurgency, which at one point was peddling death on a daily basis through bombing, saw the peace movement attribute those deaths to the West.  After all, if Saddam hadn't been overthrown, Iraq would be peaceful (blank out Saddam's tendency to turn on his population randomly).   Little credit was given to overthrowing a tyrant the left had opposed in any case.   Less credit was given to fighting the Islamist insurgency with some even backing them.  

The Western leftwing "peace movement" support for Islamist terrorists in Iraq said so much about the belief in peace and human rights that they claimed - it was profoundly empty. What mattered was to oppose whoever the West supported, to oppose whatever the West did.

So Saddam was opposed when the West supported him.  Saddam was supported when the West opposed him.   The peace movement as hypocritical as the West it finger pointed at.   Note that never did the USSR or Russia get damned for their roles in any of it.

The recent revolutions in the Arab world have also had similar responses.  Tunisia and Egypt were both led by Western-friendly dictators, so the West was blamed for both of them.   Blamed for intervening to prop them up.  Except this time, the West did nothing of the sort.  It sat back and let things happen.

That was wrong though.   You see it should have "done more" to ensure the dictators it supported before were overthrown.  Um...

So along comes Gaddafi.  Avowedly anti-Western, a murdering tyrant if ever there was one.  Ronald Reagan bombed one of his palaces in the 80s after Gaddafi had a bomb go off in a West Berlin nightclub, but that wasn't acceptable to the left.   Gaddafi blew up an airliner, which certainly saw more opposition to him (George Galloway to be fair damned Gaddafi consistently after this).  However, beyond that his exploits were largely ignored by the left.   Then, after the overthrow of Saddam, Gaddafi put his hands up, said he was no longer pursuing WMDs, and sought friendly relations - which he got.

Now of course his own people, emboldened by events in neighbouring Tunisia and Egypt, have had enough.  Barack Obama has decided the US is now taking a largely isolationist stance, so it took France and the UK to lead efforts to introduce a no fly zone and undertake airstrikes against Libyan military targets that were threatening civilian.  Even the rather odious Arab League supported the No Fly Zone.  

So a popular revolution in Libya is being supported in the air, by Western forces.  No ground troops and no sense of occupation.  It is all about protecting civilians.  While the West was not taking action, it was criticised.  Now it is taking action.

It isn't good enough though.   The left is damning it because Libya has oil and gas, so a side effect of getting rid of Gaddafi will be to have a regime (hopefully) which is a democracy that will sell oil and gas.  That of course is a good thing, unless you are part of the left/peace-movement/environmentalist faction that thinks consumption of oil and gas kills babies, destroys trees and impoverishes continents.  Apparently the West shouldn't intervene when it suits its interests.

Beyond that, the intervention is damned by conspiracy theorist Robert Fisk because there can be no guarantee the replacement of Gaddafi will be squeaky clean.   Well yes.  If you don't want an invasion and occupation, that's the risk.  The intervention so far is just to protect Libyans from air and naval strikes, and major ground force attacks.   If it was more, the West would be wrong again.   Fisk also recalls a civilian victim of the US attack in 1986, but interestingly it is noted that the woman's mother supports Gaddafi being overthrown - not quite as simple as it first seemed.

George Galloway, who has long damned Gaddafi appeared on Sky News damning the attacks, not because of the effect on Libyans, but because the West hadn't also intervened in Bahrain, Yemen or Saudi Arabia.

Well no.  There is no obligation to intervene, at all.  However, the opportunity exists and it is in Western interests, so the decision is made to intervene.  That is quite morally justified.

It would be morally justified to intervene in Bahrain, Yemen and Saudi Arabia as well, although in Bahrain there is the issue of the US Navy Fifth Fleet being based there.  A major decision would need to be made on relocating it if it was decided to turn on Bahrain's murderous monarchy.   Yemen's insurgents include a substantial outpost of Al Qaeda.  Intervention there would be wholly justified, but the unintended consequences could be far worse.   Saudi Arabia is another story.  It would be a formidable foe, the economic impacts alone of Saudi turning off oil supplies would be catastrophic, and would directly harm millions in the West, it would not go down without a fight, and as the home of Mecca, a Western attack would undoubtedly instigate substantial Muslim support against it.

In short, intervention in Libya is low cost, relatively high gain and positive.  The other cases don't stack up.

However, that doesn't matter.  The West is always wrong.

It was wrong to damn Gaddafi for so long, despite his record for murder and terrorism. 

It was wrong to respond positively when Gaddafi stopped engaging in terrorism and pursuing WMDs - he is a tyrant.

It was wrong to sit by and do nothing while Libyans fought Gaddafi (because of the relatively positive relations the West had with Gaddafi since 2002).

It is now wrong to intervene to protect Libyans fighting Gaddafi - because it should intervene elsewhere.

No doubt if the West actually did intervene in Bahrain and Saudi, it would be bad because the claim would be it is about oil.  If it intervened in Yemen, the claim would be that it is the "war on terror", which the left rejects.

Which is why the so-called "peace movement" can and should be ignored.  It has only one principle, opposition to the West.  It isn't seriously interested in peace, or human rights, or democracy, or anything it claims.  

Watch them now defend Gaddafi - once more - and pretend it is about opposing war.