It seems inevitable: Each time the United States becomes even tangentially involved in an armed conflict in the Middle East, collegiate and other reliably liberal institutions emerge on the scene with the familiar “No blood for oil” rhetoric.

In the wake of Operation Odyssey Dawn — the bombing mission in Libya carried out Sunday — such prescripted rhetoric is bound to dominate the long series of sound bytes sure to follow, and we will be tempted to permit these hackneyed arguments to go in one ear and out the other.

Oversimplified and biased as such rhetoric may be, and indeed usually is, we would be remiss in dismissing the possibility that the current U.S. military involvement in Libya’s civil war is motivated primarily by economic interests.

The narrative of the day, the one propounded by President Obama as well as the U.N. Security Council, is that Odyssey Dawn is a humanitarian mission.

Muammar Qaddafi is inarguably a monstrous tyrant and unforgivable oppressor of the Libyan people, but his government is merely a single member in a sizable club of unapologetically inhumane regimes in the Middle East and Africa.

Were humanitarian intervention genuinely the principle aim of Sunday’s bombing in Libya, it stands to reason that a similarly severe policy would have been applied to the regimes in Dubai, Sierra Leone, Rwanda and the various other human rights offenders of recent vintage.

Moreover, until Qaddafi’s recent inability to guarantee a consistent output from Libya’s oil fields due to the rebel uprising, the Western world did not find him remotely as objectionable.

So, other than this hiccup in Libyan oil production, what has changed under the iron fist of Qaddafi’s rule? The shutting-off of utilities in rebel-held areas has been the toe over the line that apparently mandated a military response, but that action is entirely characteristic of a despot whose rule has spanned decades.

The chief difference between the previously tolerable Qaddafi regime and the currently intolerable one is opposition, i.e. the rebellion. This makes the “humanitarian mission” rationale difficult to swallow.

Perhaps the Western world’s economic interests in maintaining a reliable flow of oil from Libya are compelling enough to justify something like Odyssey Dawn, but that rationale is going to be impossible to gauge if it is not even examined by policymakers.

The last thing the U.S. needs right now is an obscure, open-ended involvement in Libya sold to us on dubious grounds. If it truly is in our best interest to be involved in yet another foreign conflict, so be it, but if we accept this “humanitarian mission” narrative at face-value, we may find ourselves collectively wondering why we ever injected ourselves into Libya in the first place as our involvement inexorably deepens.