By Lisa Daniel
American Forces Press Service
http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=63392
WASHINGTON, April 1, 2011 – U.S. aircraft will remain on standby as NATO takes over multilateral operations in Libya and the coalition considers its future role there, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told a Senate committee yesterday.
U.S. military aircraft are still available to NATO in the next few days until the organization formally takes control of military operations over Libya, Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee. After that, the U.S. fighter jets will remain on standby in case they are needed again, he said.
Gates and Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, earlier appeared before the House Armed Services Committee in what was a full day of testimony about the U.S. role in Libya.
Coalition forces had to halt air operations over Libya due to bad weather for the past two days, causing rebel forces to retreat from areas they’d gained since operations began March 19, Mullen said.
Gates described the U.S. military mission in Libya as an emergency prompted by Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s intent to use his military against civilians protesting for his ouster. Without intervention, he said, the situation would have led to thousands of deaths, hundreds of thousands of refugees and destabilization across North Africa.
“That part of our mission is complete and successful,” Gates said.
More than 20 nations, including several Arab countries, are participating in the NATO coalition -- some publicly, some not -- in different ways to enforce U.N. Resolution 1973 that allows for the no-fly zone, Mullen said. The coalition, he said, was able to move fast to prevent a disaster because of U.S. relations with those European and Middle Eastern nations.
“No one military, no one nation, can or should take on a mission like this alone,” Mullen said. “This is not only a coalition of the willing -- it is a coalition of the able.”
The coalition has greatly diminished Gadhafi’s military air capabilities and many of his ground assets, the chairman said.
“My understanding is that focus will not diminish under NATO leadership,” he said.
The coalition continues to seize Libyan assets around the world, while signing on more partners, Mullen said. Swedish officials were the latest, having this week agreed to send eight aircraft to the effort, he said.
The coalition is considering whether and how to give more support to rebel forces, Gates said.
“A decision about support to the opposition is clearly the next step,” he said. “I think all members of the coalition are thinking about that at this point.”
A major consideration for the coalition is that not much is known about the rebels.
“We know a handful of the leaders,” Gates said. “But other than that, we really don’t know much about what I think is disparate, disaggregated opposition to Gadhafi.”
The issue is more complicated than simply arming the rebels. What the opposition really needs, Gates said, is organization, training, and command and control -- something he said likely requires coalition forces on the ground in Libya, which Gates and President Barack Obama said they are not willing to do.
“There really is no critical mass to work with” among the rebels, Gates added.
Gates and Mullen rejected the idea that the military mission should be broadened to include regime change, although they acknowledged that is a political goal.
“I very much believe that the mission as currently stated -- to prevent a humanitarian crisis -- is the right mission at the right time,” Mullen said. “My experience with regime change is that it can be long and very, very indeterminate in its outcome.”
It may be that Gadhafi will be forced from power, possibly by an internal military coup, Gates said. Coalition forces “will continue to attack [Gadhafi’s] ground forces with no opportunity for resupply,” he said. “His military is going to face the question of whether they are prepared to be destroyed by air attacks, or if it’s time for him to go.”
After being repeatedly asked about broadening the scope of the mission, Gates said Congress must also consider financial realities. Congress has yet to pass the fiscal 2011 budget and has forced the department to operate under continuing resolutions since Oct. 1. Besides operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, Gates noted there are 19 ships and 18,000 service members deployed on a humanitarian mission in Japan.
“I acknowledge that I’m preoccupied with avoiding mission creep” in Libya, the secretary said. “But … we are in serious budget trouble with the ongoing CR. At a time when we are asked to do so much, this brings this issue home. I need help from the Congress. The Defense Department needs help from the Congress.”
At the same time, the secretary noted, there “are others who can fulfill nearly all of the role” in Libya, referring to the coalition.
Asked to characterize the rebellion in Libya, Gates rejected calling the situation a civil war.
“I think it represents a fairly broad-based uprising against an oppressive government,” he said. “A civil war suggests there are two established governments that have some kind of structure and are in conflict for power.”
The rebels’ core objective seems to be “getting rid of the government they’ve got,” the secretary said. “The principal challenge we are all going to face is what happens after Gadhafi falls.”
The United States and NATO “shouldn’t exaggerate our ability to influence that decision,” Gates said, noting that would be better left to the Libyans and others in the region.
“There are a number of possible outcomes here, only one of which is some kind of democracy,” he said. “My view is that the future of Libya -- the U.S. ought not take responsibility for that, frankly. There are other countries in the region that can participate in that, particularly with non-lethal aid.”
Showing posts with label Lybia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lybia. Show all posts
Saturday, April 2, 2011
sources on lybia
U.S. deploys low-flying attack planes in Libya
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/us-deploys-low-flying-attack-planes-in-libya/2011/03/26/AF9grPqB_print.html
World powers tangle over rights, and risks, of arming Libya’s under-equipped rebel forces
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/world-powers-tangle-over-rights-and-risks-of-arming-libyas-under-equipped-rebel-forces/2011/03/30/AFD23k1B_print.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/us-deploys-low-flying-attack-planes-in-libya/2011/03/26/AF9grPqB_print.html
World powers tangle over rights, and risks, of arming Libya’s under-equipped rebel forces
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/world-powers-tangle-over-rights-and-risks-of-arming-libyas-under-equipped-rebel-forces/2011/03/30/AFD23k1B_print.html
Obama and Libya: The professor’s war
By Charles Krauthammer,
Washington Post
March 24, 2011
President Obama is proud of how he put together the Libyan operation. A model of international cooperation. All the necessary paperwork. Arab League backing. A Security Council resolution. (Everything but a resolution from the Congress of the United States, a minor inconvenience for a citizen of the world.) It’s war as designed by an Ivy League professor.
True, it took three weeks to put this together, during which time Moammar Gaddafi went from besieged, delusional (remember those youthful protesters on “hallucinogenic pills”) thug losing support by the hour — to resurgent tyrant who marshaled his forces, marched them to the gates of Benghazi and had the U.S. director of national intelligence predicting that “the regime will prevail.”
But what is military initiative and opportunity compared with paper?
Well, let’s see how that paper multilateralism is doing. The Arab League is already reversing itself, criticizing the use of force it had just authorized. Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League, is shocked — shocked! — to find that people are being killed by allied airstrikes. This reaction was dubbed mystifying by one commentator, apparently born yesterday and thus unaware that the Arab League has forever been a collection of cynical, warring, unreliable dictatorships of ever-shifting loyalties. A British soccer mob has more unity and moral purpose. Yet Obama deemed it a great diplomatic success that the league deigned to permit others to fight and die to save fellow Arabs for whom 19 of 21 Arab states have yet to lift a finger.
And what about that brilliant U.N. resolution?
l Russia’s Vladimir Putin is already calling the Libya operation a medieval crusade.
l China is calling for a cease-fire in place — which would completely undermine the allied effort by leaving Gaddafi in power, his people at his mercy and the country partitioned and condemned to ongoing civil war.
l Brazil joined China in that call for a cease-fire. This just hours after Obama ended his fawning two-day Brazil visit. Another triumph of presidential personal diplomacy.
And how about NATO? Let’s see. As of this writing, Britain wanted the operation to be led by NATO. France adamantly disagreed, citing Arab sensibilities. Germany wanted no part of anything, going so far as to pull four of its ships from NATO command in the Mediterranean. Italy hinted it might deny the allies the use of its air bases if NATO can’t get its act together. France and Germany walked out of a NATO meeting on Monday, while Norway had planes in Crete ready to go but refused to let them fly until it had some idea who the hell is running the operation. And Turkey, whose prime minister four months ago proudly accepted the Gaddafi International Prize for Human Rights, has been particularly resistant to the Libya operation from the beginning.
And as for the United States, who knows what American policy is. Administration officials insist we are not trying to bring down Gaddafi, even as the president insists that he must go. Although on Tuesday Obama did add “unless he changes his approach.” Approach, mind you.
In any case, for Obama, military objectives take a back seat to diplomatic appearances. The president is obsessed with pretending that we are not running the operation — a dismaying expression of Obama’s view that his country is so tainted by its various sins that it lacks the moral legitimacy to . . . what? Save Third World people from massacre?
Obama seems equally obsessed with handing off the lead role. Hand off to whom? NATO? Quarreling amid Turkish resistance (see above), NATO still can’t agree on taking over command of the airstrike campaign, which is what has kept the Libyan rebels alive.
This confusion is purely the result of Obama’s decision to get America into the war and then immediately relinquish American command. Never modest about himself, Obama is supremely modest about his country. America should be merely “one of the partners among many,” he said Monday. No primus inter pares for him. Even the Clinton administration spoke of America as the indispensable nation. And it remains so. Yet at a time when the world is hungry for America to lead — no one has anything near our capabilities, experience and resources — America is led by a man determined that it should not.
A man who dithers over parchment. Who starts a war from which he wants out right away. Good God. If you go to take Vienna, take Vienna. If you’re not prepared to do so, better then to stay home and do nothing.
Washington Post
March 24, 2011
President Obama is proud of how he put together the Libyan operation. A model of international cooperation. All the necessary paperwork. Arab League backing. A Security Council resolution. (Everything but a resolution from the Congress of the United States, a minor inconvenience for a citizen of the world.) It’s war as designed by an Ivy League professor.
True, it took three weeks to put this together, during which time Moammar Gaddafi went from besieged, delusional (remember those youthful protesters on “hallucinogenic pills”) thug losing support by the hour — to resurgent tyrant who marshaled his forces, marched them to the gates of Benghazi and had the U.S. director of national intelligence predicting that “the regime will prevail.”
But what is military initiative and opportunity compared with paper?
Well, let’s see how that paper multilateralism is doing. The Arab League is already reversing itself, criticizing the use of force it had just authorized. Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League, is shocked — shocked! — to find that people are being killed by allied airstrikes. This reaction was dubbed mystifying by one commentator, apparently born yesterday and thus unaware that the Arab League has forever been a collection of cynical, warring, unreliable dictatorships of ever-shifting loyalties. A British soccer mob has more unity and moral purpose. Yet Obama deemed it a great diplomatic success that the league deigned to permit others to fight and die to save fellow Arabs for whom 19 of 21 Arab states have yet to lift a finger.
And what about that brilliant U.N. resolution?
l Russia’s Vladimir Putin is already calling the Libya operation a medieval crusade.
l China is calling for a cease-fire in place — which would completely undermine the allied effort by leaving Gaddafi in power, his people at his mercy and the country partitioned and condemned to ongoing civil war.
l Brazil joined China in that call for a cease-fire. This just hours after Obama ended his fawning two-day Brazil visit. Another triumph of presidential personal diplomacy.
And how about NATO? Let’s see. As of this writing, Britain wanted the operation to be led by NATO. France adamantly disagreed, citing Arab sensibilities. Germany wanted no part of anything, going so far as to pull four of its ships from NATO command in the Mediterranean. Italy hinted it might deny the allies the use of its air bases if NATO can’t get its act together. France and Germany walked out of a NATO meeting on Monday, while Norway had planes in Crete ready to go but refused to let them fly until it had some idea who the hell is running the operation. And Turkey, whose prime minister four months ago proudly accepted the Gaddafi International Prize for Human Rights, has been particularly resistant to the Libya operation from the beginning.
And as for the United States, who knows what American policy is. Administration officials insist we are not trying to bring down Gaddafi, even as the president insists that he must go. Although on Tuesday Obama did add “unless he changes his approach.” Approach, mind you.
In any case, for Obama, military objectives take a back seat to diplomatic appearances. The president is obsessed with pretending that we are not running the operation — a dismaying expression of Obama’s view that his country is so tainted by its various sins that it lacks the moral legitimacy to . . . what? Save Third World people from massacre?
Obama seems equally obsessed with handing off the lead role. Hand off to whom? NATO? Quarreling amid Turkish resistance (see above), NATO still can’t agree on taking over command of the airstrike campaign, which is what has kept the Libyan rebels alive.
This confusion is purely the result of Obama’s decision to get America into the war and then immediately relinquish American command. Never modest about himself, Obama is supremely modest about his country. America should be merely “one of the partners among many,” he said Monday. No primus inter pares for him. Even the Clinton administration spoke of America as the indispensable nation. And it remains so. Yet at a time when the world is hungry for America to lead — no one has anything near our capabilities, experience and resources — America is led by a man determined that it should not.
A man who dithers over parchment. Who starts a war from which he wants out right away. Good God. If you go to take Vienna, take Vienna. If you’re not prepared to do so, better then to stay home and do nothing.
The Shores of Tripoli: Our Latest Wilsonian War
Walter Russell Mead
The American Interest
Walter Russell Mead
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/03/30/the-shores-of-tripoli-our-latest-wilsonian-war/
It’s still much too soon to tell how America’s Libya liberation venture will work out. The international coalition is shaky; the UN mandate is dubious; air power has frequently disappointed those who trusted that it alone can win wars; political support in the US is shaky; the Great Loon of Libya, a statesman in the hallowed tradition of Idi Amin, is as cunning as he is daffy; Libya’s fragile unity may crumble as the tribes and clans turn on one another; the rebels are poorly armed and poorly organized; some of them may in fact be experienced international terrorists.
For the record, I hope it all works out. I want the government to fall, the Great Loon to flap away into inglorious exile somewhere dismal and dull, and I want the rebels, with help from NATO and the Arab League, to set up a workable government that gives Libya’s people a chance to reinvent their country and spreads the oil wealth around. (I would also like a pony.) I think we are out on a limb here and I wish the president had found the time to get some congressional backing up front, but we are where we are and the best we can do now is to muddle on through.
We will, I very much hope, be lucky enough to come out of this Wilsonian war in Libya with a decent result. What follows, though, will not be a Wilsonian peace. The Libyan adventure is a lot of things: a noble effort to protect innocent civilians from horrifying goons, an experiment in a new kind of indirect American leadership, a last desperate throw of the dice by a hyperactive French president whose people increasingly loathe him, an attempt by flustered Arab establishmentarians to get on the right side of popular fury, a demonstration of Britain’s enduring if tortured moralism, a slugging match in the sand, and a nailbiting distraction for a White House that has repeatedly failed to convince voters that it is ‘focused like a laser’ on the economy and has much more to lose if this goes bad than it has to win if things work.
But there is one thing it won’t be, even if it “works”: the start of a new age of multilateral cooperation under the rule of law. The UN-blessed response to Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait failed to start the new age of peace, collective security and law; similarly the liberation of Libya is a fluke not a trend.
Let’s start with the UN Security Council resolution that set the whole thing up. Russia and China were unhappy enough with the idea that the UN could authorize an attack on a member government to challenge its domestic policy that they abstained. Hardly a surprise — both governments can easily imagine circumstances under which they would have to get down and dirty with domestic malcontents, and should Russia need to kill some more Chechens or China spill some more blood in Tienanmien Square some day, they don’t want a bunch of interfering busybodies poking around. But Qaddafi is such an unattractive figure, his threats were so blood curdling, and, perhaps not least, the prospect that the western powers might overreach and expose themselves was so deliciously attractive that they decided to sit back and let the West give war a chance.
They are probably not going to be this cooperative next time. By the time American, French and British lawyers and diplomats finished stretching the resolution, it was hard to see what activities were banned. NATO could not only impose a no fly zone and intervene to protect civilians under actual attack; it apparently believes it has a legal right to recognize rebels as the legitimate government, market their oil, sell them arms, and attack any Libyan forces anywhere in the country with any weapons they choose without regard to the danger those forces pose to civilians in the short term — and to continue the operation pretty much at will. Even ground forces might be permissible — as long as they don’t call themselves an occupying army. Having sold the resolution to the Russians and Chinese as a compromise measure that circumscribed their freedom of action, the allies have interpreted it to give them carte blanche for virtually any actions one can imagine.
All very well, and Gaddafi deserves everything he gets, but how willing will Russia and China be to let the next broadly worded resolution get through the Council? Will they be so awed by the western spirit of morality and law that they sit on their hands while new resolutions against anti-western tyrants sail through the Council? Or will they start insisting on much tougher safeguards and guarantees under threats of new vetoes?
France only came along on this ride for some special reasons, none of which were particularly idealistic. President Sarkozy is a riverboat gambler on a long losing streak; his party just got whacked in local elections, and polls show him failing to get into the second round of voting as his re-election campaign nears. France’s ongoing loss of power to Germany in the European Union and the accelerating decline of its global influence deeply worry the French. Libya is right on France’s door step — meaning both that France cares about what happens there and that it is close enough for France’s increasingly overstretched and underfunded military to reach. It is next door to Algeria, a country that as an economic partner and a major source of immigrants is of vital concern to the French; it is not, the French reason, a bad thing to show the North Africans that France remains a force to be reckoned with. Meanwhile, the French are still trying to recover the ground they lost early in the Arab revolutionary year, when French diplomacy unambigously backed the despots in Tunisia and Egypt.
France has not changed religions; it still prays at the shrine of Charles de Gaulle, not the temple of Woodrow Wilson. French national interest favors this particular intervention, but in future questions of this kind, France will be as prickly and as, well, selfish as ever. Note to all tyrants in French speaking Africa: relax. As long as you keep Paris sweet, the UN Security Council is not going to interfere with your ongoing programs of looting and dissident killing.
The Arab League and the African Union are also getting an education in just how freely the western powers will interpret a mandate — when they can get one. Give the old imperialists an inch of legal standing and they’ll take a mile of turf. They will say anything to get you to sign on, and then they will do exactly what they had planned all along. My guess is that this experience will not increase the appetite of Arab and African governments for new western mandates in new crises.
The Libyan effort is also not going to be the start of a new era of liberal internationalism in American politics. The dirty truth behind the Libyan campaign is that if only the Wilsonians supporting this war it wouldn’t be happening.
Human Rights Watch can’t start wars on its own. Wilsonian liberal internationalists need friends to start wars. Gaddifi, unlike most despots, has been generous enough to provide them. In particular, Gaddafi, like Saddam Hussein and the Iranian mullahs but unlike most other despots around the world, has become a dangerous enemy to millions of American Jacksonians who think liberal internationalism is just a synonym for clueless professors flapping their lips.
Attacking Gaddafi is a political possibility because Jacksonians see him as a terrorist, because they care about oil and because the COFKATGWOT (the currently nameless ‘conflict formerly known as the global war on terror’) has fixed their attention on the Middle East. Jacksonians have never forgiven Gaddafi for the Lockerbie bombing attack, and even before that there were plenty of people who thought that the only problem with Ronald Reagan’s airstrikes against the Great Loon (unsanctioned by the UN or any other international body and roundly denounced by many Wilsonians at the time) was that they didn’t kill him. Anger, fear and the conflation of Middle Easterners with terrorism also fuels public support for the Libyan operation. Without 9/11 and Lockerbie, the political resistance to this war would have been much stronger and the White House political calculations would have been very different.
On top of that is the oil question. While there are a lot of Americans who think war for oil is immoral, there are plenty more who think that oil, that necessary driver of our economy and the condition of our prosperity, is one of the few things worth fighting about — and a much better reason for war than helping to put one gang of thieves in while kicking another one out.
Gaddafi is a uniquely vulnerable target; few other despots have done as much to draw the ire of the average American as he has. Don’t expect many American bombers over Myanmar, Congo, Zimbabwe or Ivory Coast anytime soon.
The Wilsonians now have their war; they also now have their president. Barack Obama’s inner Woodrow Wilson has clearly won out; he has nailed his colors to the mast of a liberal international foreign policy. The cautious Jeffersonian realists have lost one policy battle after another in this administration. Colin Powell’s Pottery Barn law (“if you break it, you own it”) has been cast to the winds. A president who won his party’s nomination as the most consistent opponent of unpopular interventions abroad has become an apostle of liberal war. Not since Saul went to Damascus has there been such a dramatic conversion.
Liberal Wilsonians have a tough row to hoe in this wicked world. The kind of wars they support — humanitarian interventions blessed by the UN — are generally speaking deeply unpopular in the United States. Most non-Wilsonians (a substantial majority of the population) loathe the idea of American ground forces getting involved in these conflicts, and this political reality ties Wilsonians into knots.
Abroad, international support for these missions only rarely appears — like a January robin in Vermont. Even now Wilsonians can only get their way in Libya by stretching the meaning of the narrow UN resolution.
We have had Wilsonian wars before and I have no doubt we will have them again. You can, sometimes, wage Wilsonian war. What you cannot do, at least not yet and probably never, is build a Wilsonian peace.
Woodrow Wilson discovered this almost a century ago. He could fight a “war to end war” and make the world safe for democracy; but a fatal combination of American political resistance at home and the cold calculations of national self interest by leaders abroad thwarted his attempt at Versailles to create a new global order on Wilsonian lines.
Like Wilson, President Obama is going to find it easier to fight for humanitarian ideals than to make them prevail.
The American Interest
Walter Russell Mead
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/03/30/the-shores-of-tripoli-our-latest-wilsonian-war/
It’s still much too soon to tell how America’s Libya liberation venture will work out. The international coalition is shaky; the UN mandate is dubious; air power has frequently disappointed those who trusted that it alone can win wars; political support in the US is shaky; the Great Loon of Libya, a statesman in the hallowed tradition of Idi Amin, is as cunning as he is daffy; Libya’s fragile unity may crumble as the tribes and clans turn on one another; the rebels are poorly armed and poorly organized; some of them may in fact be experienced international terrorists.
For the record, I hope it all works out. I want the government to fall, the Great Loon to flap away into inglorious exile somewhere dismal and dull, and I want the rebels, with help from NATO and the Arab League, to set up a workable government that gives Libya’s people a chance to reinvent their country and spreads the oil wealth around. (I would also like a pony.) I think we are out on a limb here and I wish the president had found the time to get some congressional backing up front, but we are where we are and the best we can do now is to muddle on through.
We will, I very much hope, be lucky enough to come out of this Wilsonian war in Libya with a decent result. What follows, though, will not be a Wilsonian peace. The Libyan adventure is a lot of things: a noble effort to protect innocent civilians from horrifying goons, an experiment in a new kind of indirect American leadership, a last desperate throw of the dice by a hyperactive French president whose people increasingly loathe him, an attempt by flustered Arab establishmentarians to get on the right side of popular fury, a demonstration of Britain’s enduring if tortured moralism, a slugging match in the sand, and a nailbiting distraction for a White House that has repeatedly failed to convince voters that it is ‘focused like a laser’ on the economy and has much more to lose if this goes bad than it has to win if things work.
But there is one thing it won’t be, even if it “works”: the start of a new age of multilateral cooperation under the rule of law. The UN-blessed response to Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait failed to start the new age of peace, collective security and law; similarly the liberation of Libya is a fluke not a trend.
Let’s start with the UN Security Council resolution that set the whole thing up. Russia and China were unhappy enough with the idea that the UN could authorize an attack on a member government to challenge its domestic policy that they abstained. Hardly a surprise — both governments can easily imagine circumstances under which they would have to get down and dirty with domestic malcontents, and should Russia need to kill some more Chechens or China spill some more blood in Tienanmien Square some day, they don’t want a bunch of interfering busybodies poking around. But Qaddafi is such an unattractive figure, his threats were so blood curdling, and, perhaps not least, the prospect that the western powers might overreach and expose themselves was so deliciously attractive that they decided to sit back and let the West give war a chance.
They are probably not going to be this cooperative next time. By the time American, French and British lawyers and diplomats finished stretching the resolution, it was hard to see what activities were banned. NATO could not only impose a no fly zone and intervene to protect civilians under actual attack; it apparently believes it has a legal right to recognize rebels as the legitimate government, market their oil, sell them arms, and attack any Libyan forces anywhere in the country with any weapons they choose without regard to the danger those forces pose to civilians in the short term — and to continue the operation pretty much at will. Even ground forces might be permissible — as long as they don’t call themselves an occupying army. Having sold the resolution to the Russians and Chinese as a compromise measure that circumscribed their freedom of action, the allies have interpreted it to give them carte blanche for virtually any actions one can imagine.
All very well, and Gaddafi deserves everything he gets, but how willing will Russia and China be to let the next broadly worded resolution get through the Council? Will they be so awed by the western spirit of morality and law that they sit on their hands while new resolutions against anti-western tyrants sail through the Council? Or will they start insisting on much tougher safeguards and guarantees under threats of new vetoes?
France only came along on this ride for some special reasons, none of which were particularly idealistic. President Sarkozy is a riverboat gambler on a long losing streak; his party just got whacked in local elections, and polls show him failing to get into the second round of voting as his re-election campaign nears. France’s ongoing loss of power to Germany in the European Union and the accelerating decline of its global influence deeply worry the French. Libya is right on France’s door step — meaning both that France cares about what happens there and that it is close enough for France’s increasingly overstretched and underfunded military to reach. It is next door to Algeria, a country that as an economic partner and a major source of immigrants is of vital concern to the French; it is not, the French reason, a bad thing to show the North Africans that France remains a force to be reckoned with. Meanwhile, the French are still trying to recover the ground they lost early in the Arab revolutionary year, when French diplomacy unambigously backed the despots in Tunisia and Egypt.
France has not changed religions; it still prays at the shrine of Charles de Gaulle, not the temple of Woodrow Wilson. French national interest favors this particular intervention, but in future questions of this kind, France will be as prickly and as, well, selfish as ever. Note to all tyrants in French speaking Africa: relax. As long as you keep Paris sweet, the UN Security Council is not going to interfere with your ongoing programs of looting and dissident killing.
The Arab League and the African Union are also getting an education in just how freely the western powers will interpret a mandate — when they can get one. Give the old imperialists an inch of legal standing and they’ll take a mile of turf. They will say anything to get you to sign on, and then they will do exactly what they had planned all along. My guess is that this experience will not increase the appetite of Arab and African governments for new western mandates in new crises.
The Libyan effort is also not going to be the start of a new era of liberal internationalism in American politics. The dirty truth behind the Libyan campaign is that if only the Wilsonians supporting this war it wouldn’t be happening.
Human Rights Watch can’t start wars on its own. Wilsonian liberal internationalists need friends to start wars. Gaddifi, unlike most despots, has been generous enough to provide them. In particular, Gaddafi, like Saddam Hussein and the Iranian mullahs but unlike most other despots around the world, has become a dangerous enemy to millions of American Jacksonians who think liberal internationalism is just a synonym for clueless professors flapping their lips.
Attacking Gaddafi is a political possibility because Jacksonians see him as a terrorist, because they care about oil and because the COFKATGWOT (the currently nameless ‘conflict formerly known as the global war on terror’) has fixed their attention on the Middle East. Jacksonians have never forgiven Gaddafi for the Lockerbie bombing attack, and even before that there were plenty of people who thought that the only problem with Ronald Reagan’s airstrikes against the Great Loon (unsanctioned by the UN or any other international body and roundly denounced by many Wilsonians at the time) was that they didn’t kill him. Anger, fear and the conflation of Middle Easterners with terrorism also fuels public support for the Libyan operation. Without 9/11 and Lockerbie, the political resistance to this war would have been much stronger and the White House political calculations would have been very different.
On top of that is the oil question. While there are a lot of Americans who think war for oil is immoral, there are plenty more who think that oil, that necessary driver of our economy and the condition of our prosperity, is one of the few things worth fighting about — and a much better reason for war than helping to put one gang of thieves in while kicking another one out.
Gaddafi is a uniquely vulnerable target; few other despots have done as much to draw the ire of the average American as he has. Don’t expect many American bombers over Myanmar, Congo, Zimbabwe or Ivory Coast anytime soon.
The Wilsonians now have their war; they also now have their president. Barack Obama’s inner Woodrow Wilson has clearly won out; he has nailed his colors to the mast of a liberal international foreign policy. The cautious Jeffersonian realists have lost one policy battle after another in this administration. Colin Powell’s Pottery Barn law (“if you break it, you own it”) has been cast to the winds. A president who won his party’s nomination as the most consistent opponent of unpopular interventions abroad has become an apostle of liberal war. Not since Saul went to Damascus has there been such a dramatic conversion.
Liberal Wilsonians have a tough row to hoe in this wicked world. The kind of wars they support — humanitarian interventions blessed by the UN — are generally speaking deeply unpopular in the United States. Most non-Wilsonians (a substantial majority of the population) loathe the idea of American ground forces getting involved in these conflicts, and this political reality ties Wilsonians into knots.
Abroad, international support for these missions only rarely appears — like a January robin in Vermont. Even now Wilsonians can only get their way in Libya by stretching the meaning of the narrow UN resolution.
We have had Wilsonian wars before and I have no doubt we will have them again. You can, sometimes, wage Wilsonian war. What you cannot do, at least not yet and probably never, is build a Wilsonian peace.
Woodrow Wilson discovered this almost a century ago. He could fight a “war to end war” and make the world safe for democracy; but a fatal combination of American political resistance at home and the cold calculations of national self interest by leaders abroad thwarted his attempt at Versailles to create a new global order on Wilsonian lines.
Like Wilson, President Obama is going to find it easier to fight for humanitarian ideals than to make them prevail.
Does the U.S. really want to own Libya?
By Fareed Zakaria,
March 30,2011
President Obama launched America’s military intervention into Libya promising two distinctive features. First, this would be a genuinely international effort, with the United States as the lead player initially but then quickly moving into a supporting role (in “days and not weeks”). Second, the direct American operation would be carefully restricted, “ time-limited and scope-limited ” in the words of White House spokesman Jay Carney. But two weeks in, one can already see the pressures — mostly in Washington — pushing the president to abandon both courses. He is now taking broad ownership of Libya, and the U.S. military is engaging in a broader air campaign . This is mission creep, and it is a bad idea.
Notice the shift in rhetoric, from the president’s circumspect words at the start of the operation to his much more expansive speech on Monday, emphasizing America’s lead role, even when the facts didn’t quite warrant it. Notice that air attacks on Moammar Gaddafi’s forces now go well beyond protecting civilians and are clearly escalating in the hope of getting some kind of quick victory. If the administration is not careful, it will end up in a very different place than it initially intended.
The president made a powerful, well-reasoned case Monday night for America’s intervention in Libya, marshaling the best humanitarian, strategic and political arguments as to why the United States could not have stood by and done nothing while Gaddafi’s forces massacred Libyan rebels. Besides, America’s closest allies were pleading for our help. But Obama did little to address the central strategic gap in his policy on Libya between its expansive goals — chiefly the ouster of Gaddafi — and its tightly defined military means. There are only two ways to close the gap — escalate the means or scale back your goals.
American statesmen have always experimented with the use of limited military means to support foreign policy interests that are important, and worth engaging American power, but not vital. From the Barbary wars (fought against the Barbary States, which included parts of modern Libya) to gunboat diplomacy in Asia to the many military interventions over the past few decades (Grenada, Lebanon, Somalia, the no-fly zone over Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo), the United States has often tried to find ways to use its military yet not engage in all-out war. Some were more successful than others, but in all cases, the central task was to find the balance between the goals we sought and the means we were willing to deploy. The time we didn’t ask questions about the costs and simply escalated the means, we ended up in Vietnam.
The tendency for a president is to be pushed to achieve a decisive victory, no matter the costs, no matter whether the interests at stake are vital or secondary. Presidents want to be leaders of great causes, and the Libyan mission is certainly a good cause. But the more grandiose the rhetoric and the goals, the broader the military mission. And then the United States takes responsibility for the fate of Libya — a country riven with tribes, lacking strong institutions and a civil society, and destroyed by four decades of Gaddafi’s madness. Do we really want to own this, and largely alone? Is it such a bad idea that others should be involved? One liberal commentator noted ruefully that crowds in Benghazi were chanting “Sarkozy!” and not “Obama!” Apparently it is not enough that Libya is rescued; we must be the rescuers because ultimately this is about us, not them.
Washington is now hoping that a bit more military power will dislodge Gaddafi’s regime. My fingers are crossed. But it would be far more sensible, while hoping for the best, to plan for other likely outcomes. The military operation averted a massacre. Gaddafi can continue to be pressured, quarantined and contained by many means, including helping the Libyan opposition. The Clinton administration recognized in the Balkans that it was unwilling to pay the price that regime change in Serbia would have required. As a result, Slobodan Milosevic survived the actions in Bosnia and Kosovo, which were still regarded as successes, and was later dislodged by his own people. Limited interventions might have limited successes, but they can also avoid catastrophic failures.
This is not macho enough for some. “If you go to take Vienna, take Vienna,” thundered Post columnist Charles Krauthammer. The words are those of Napoleon, an egomaniacal dictator who invaded most of his neighbors and whose thirst for total victory led him to overreach, sacrifice hundreds of thousands of his soldiers, suffer ignominious defeat and end up in exile on an island. If I were Obama, I’d pass on that model.
March 30,2011
President Obama launched America’s military intervention into Libya promising two distinctive features. First, this would be a genuinely international effort, with the United States as the lead player initially but then quickly moving into a supporting role (in “days and not weeks”). Second, the direct American operation would be carefully restricted, “ time-limited and scope-limited ” in the words of White House spokesman Jay Carney. But two weeks in, one can already see the pressures — mostly in Washington — pushing the president to abandon both courses. He is now taking broad ownership of Libya, and the U.S. military is engaging in a broader air campaign . This is mission creep, and it is a bad idea.
Notice the shift in rhetoric, from the president’s circumspect words at the start of the operation to his much more expansive speech on Monday, emphasizing America’s lead role, even when the facts didn’t quite warrant it. Notice that air attacks on Moammar Gaddafi’s forces now go well beyond protecting civilians and are clearly escalating in the hope of getting some kind of quick victory. If the administration is not careful, it will end up in a very different place than it initially intended.
The president made a powerful, well-reasoned case Monday night for America’s intervention in Libya, marshaling the best humanitarian, strategic and political arguments as to why the United States could not have stood by and done nothing while Gaddafi’s forces massacred Libyan rebels. Besides, America’s closest allies were pleading for our help. But Obama did little to address the central strategic gap in his policy on Libya between its expansive goals — chiefly the ouster of Gaddafi — and its tightly defined military means. There are only two ways to close the gap — escalate the means or scale back your goals.
American statesmen have always experimented with the use of limited military means to support foreign policy interests that are important, and worth engaging American power, but not vital. From the Barbary wars (fought against the Barbary States, which included parts of modern Libya) to gunboat diplomacy in Asia to the many military interventions over the past few decades (Grenada, Lebanon, Somalia, the no-fly zone over Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo), the United States has often tried to find ways to use its military yet not engage in all-out war. Some were more successful than others, but in all cases, the central task was to find the balance between the goals we sought and the means we were willing to deploy. The time we didn’t ask questions about the costs and simply escalated the means, we ended up in Vietnam.
The tendency for a president is to be pushed to achieve a decisive victory, no matter the costs, no matter whether the interests at stake are vital or secondary. Presidents want to be leaders of great causes, and the Libyan mission is certainly a good cause. But the more grandiose the rhetoric and the goals, the broader the military mission. And then the United States takes responsibility for the fate of Libya — a country riven with tribes, lacking strong institutions and a civil society, and destroyed by four decades of Gaddafi’s madness. Do we really want to own this, and largely alone? Is it such a bad idea that others should be involved? One liberal commentator noted ruefully that crowds in Benghazi were chanting “Sarkozy!” and not “Obama!” Apparently it is not enough that Libya is rescued; we must be the rescuers because ultimately this is about us, not them.
Washington is now hoping that a bit more military power will dislodge Gaddafi’s regime. My fingers are crossed. But it would be far more sensible, while hoping for the best, to plan for other likely outcomes. The military operation averted a massacre. Gaddafi can continue to be pressured, quarantined and contained by many means, including helping the Libyan opposition. The Clinton administration recognized in the Balkans that it was unwilling to pay the price that regime change in Serbia would have required. As a result, Slobodan Milosevic survived the actions in Bosnia and Kosovo, which were still regarded as successes, and was later dislodged by his own people. Limited interventions might have limited successes, but they can also avoid catastrophic failures.
This is not macho enough for some. “If you go to take Vienna, take Vienna,” thundered Post columnist Charles Krauthammer. The words are those of Napoleon, an egomaniacal dictator who invaded most of his neighbors and whose thirst for total victory led him to overreach, sacrifice hundreds of thousands of his soldiers, suffer ignominious defeat and end up in exile on an island. If I were Obama, I’d pass on that model.
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