Down with the so-called rebels!

I'm not saying there aren't any good arguments against intervention in Libya, but here, the author's self-identification with the left seems to me misplaced. This is because the "our-poor-vs-their-oppressed" routine tends to be the standard, unprincipled line of a nationalist reactionary. If only the West had allowed Gadaffi to kill a few more Libyans, a few more Americans could have had their teeth pulled for free—such is the noble logic of this article, only slightly exaggerated.
Posing as clued-up and streetwise, the argument simply reinforces the conventions of a system of production and distribution in which we are told that we can't have both—in this case, help foreigners and help ourselves—but must choose between them. In a world of great material abundance, however, in which economic textbook "scarcity" is, in some sense, socially created and imposed (which is one of the things that Marx means when he says that capitalist social relations have become a fetter on social progress), this appeal to greed and selfishness—exactly the human traits that capitalist social relations tap into and amplify—merely binds us more closely to that system. At the same time, it conspicuously fails to point the finger at a ruling ideology that carefully places outside of the jurisdiction of social policy the vastly lopsided income distributions which it conceals and protects, portraying them instead as an unalterable feature of the natural landscape, unquestionable, dangerous to tinker with, beyond choice. And this is the crux of the problem.
Also: nice scare-quotes sneer at the Libyan "rebels" (=not really rebels, not really worthy of our solidarity?) fighting for their freedom.