NYtimes
April 3, 2011
By LAURA KASINOF and DAVID E. SANGER
SANA, Yemen — The United States, which long supported Yemen’s president, even in the face of recent widespread protests, has now quietly shifted positions and has concluded that he is unlikely to bring about the required reforms and must be eased out of office, according to American and Yemeni officials.
The Obama administration had maintained its support of President Ali Abdullah Saleh in private and refrained from directly criticizing him in public, even as his supporters fired on peaceful demonstrators, because he was considered a critical ally in fighting the Yemeni branch of Al Qaeda. This position has fueled criticism of the United States in some quarters for hypocrisy for rushing to oust a repressive autocrat in Libya but not in strategic allies like Yemen and Bahrain.
That position began to shift in the past week, administration officials said. While American officials have not publicly pressed Mr. Saleh to go, they have told allies that they now view his hold on office as untenable, and they believe he should leave.
A Yemeni official said that the American position changed when the negotiations with Mr. Saleh on the terms of his potential departure began a little over a week ago.
“The Americans have been pushing for transfer of power since the beginning” of those negotiations, the official said, but have not said so publicly because “they still were involved in the negotiations.”
Those negotiations now center on a proposal for Mr. Saleh to hand over power to a provisional government led by his vice president until new elections are held. That principle “is not in dispute,” the Yemeni official said, only the timing and mechanism for how he would depart.
It does remain in dispute among the student-led protesters, however, who have rejected any proposal that would give power to a leading official of the Saleh government.
Washington has long had a wary relationship of mutual dependence with Mr. Saleh. The United States has provided weapons, and the Yemeni leader has allowed the United States military and the C.I.A. to strike at Qaeda strongholds. The State Department cables released by WikiLeaks gave a close-up view of that uneasy interdependence: Mr. Saleh told Gen. David H. Petraeus, then the American commander in the Middle East, that the United States could continue missile strikes against Al Qaeda as long as the fiction was maintained that Yemen was conducting them.
“We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Mr. Saleh said, according to a cable sent by the American ambassador. At other times, however, Mr. Saleh resisted American requests. In a wry assessment of the United States, he told Daniel Benjamin, the State Department’s counterterrorism chief, that Americans are “hot-blooded and hasty when you need us,” but “cold-blooded and British when we need you.”
The negotiations in Sana began after government-linked gunmen killed more than 50 protesters at an antigovernment rally on March 18, prompting a wave of defections of high-level government officials the following week. The American and Yemeni officials who discussed the talks did so on the condition of anonymity because the talks are private and still in progress.
It is not clear whether the United States is discussing a safe passage for Mr. Saleh and his family to another country, but that appears to be the direction of the talks in Sana, the capital.
For Washington, the key to his departure would be arranging a transfer of power that would enable the counterterrorism operation in Yemen to continue.
One administration official referred to that concern last week, saying that the standoff between the president and the protesters “has had a direct adverse impact on the security situation throughout the country.”
“Groups of various stripes — Al Qaeda, Houthis, tribal elements, and secessionists — are exploiting the current political turbulence and emerging fissures within the military and security services for their own gain,” the official said. “Until President Saleh is able to resolve the current political impasse by announcing how and when he will follow through on his earlier commitment to take tangible steps to meet opposition demands, the security situation in Yemen is at risk of further deterioration.”
In recent days, American officials in Washington have hinted at the change in position.
Those “tangible steps,” another official said, could include giving in to the demand that he step down.
At a State Department briefing recently, a spokesman, Mark Toner, was questioned on whether there had been planning for a post-Saleh Yemen. While he did not answer the question directly, he said, in part, that counterterrorism in Yemen “goes beyond any one individual.”
In addition to the huge street demonstrations that have convulsed the country in the last two months, the deteriorating security situation in Yemen includes a Houthi rebellion in the north, a secessionist movement in the south and an active Qaeda operation in the southeast. Houthi rebels seized control of Saada Province a week ago, and armed militants have taken over a city in the southern province of Abyan where Al Qaeda is known to have set up a base.
Among Yemenis, there is a feeling that there is a race against the clock to resolve the political impasse before the country implodes. In addition to the security concerns, Yemen faces an economic crisis.
Food prices are rising; the value of the Yemeni currency, the rial, is dropping sharply; and dollars are disappearing from currency exchange shops. According to the World Food Program, the price of wheat flour has increased 45 percent since mid-March and rice by 22 percent.
Analysts have also expressed concern that Mr. Saleh is depleting the national reserves paying for promises to keep himself in power. Mr. Saleh has paid thousands of supporters to come to the capital to stage pro-government protests and given out money to tribal leaders to secure their loyalties. In February he promised to cut income taxes and raise salaries for civil servants and the military to try to tamp down discontent.
“It’s not a recession, it’s not a depression, it’s a mess,” said Mohammed Abulahom, a prominent member of Parliament for Mr. Saleh’s governing party who now supports the protesters.
The fact that the Americans are “seriously engaged in discussion on how to transfer power shows their willingness to figure out a way to transfer power,” he said.
He said the Americans “are doing what ought to be done, and we will see more pressure down the road.”
The criticism of the United States for failing to publicly support Yemen’s protesters has been loudest here, where the protesters insist the United States’ only concern is counterterrorism.
“We are really very, very angry because America until now didn’t help us similar to what Mr. Obama said that Mubarak has to leave now,” said Tawakul Karman, a leader of the antigovernment youth movement. “Obama says he appreciated the courage and dignity of Tunisian people. He didn’t say that for Yemeni people.”
“We feel that we have been betrayed,” she said.
Hamza Alkamaly, 23, a prominent student leader, agreed. “We students lost our trust in the United States,” he said. “We thought the United States would help us in the first time because we are calling for our freedom.”
Late Saturday night, Yemen’s opposition coalition, the Joint Meetings Parties, proposed an outline for a transfer of power that has become the new focus of the talks. The proposal calls for power to be transferred immediately to Vice President Abd al-Rab Mansur al-Hadi until presidential elections are held.
The young protesters have rejected the proposal, or any that would leave a leading Saleh official in charge.
Late Sunday, the Gulf Cooperation Council, an association of oil-rich countries in the Persian Gulf, added its backing to the talks, issuing a statement saying it would press the Yemeni government and opposition to work toward an agreement to “overcome the status quo.” The group called for a return to negotiations to “achieve the aspirations of the Yemeni people by means of reforms.”
So far the council, including Yemen’s largest international donor, Saudi Arabia, has not taken part in the negotiations, Yemeni officials said.
There were also more clashes between security forces and protesters on Sunday in the city of Taiz. Hundreds of people were injured by tear gas, rocks and gunfire, and there were conflicting reports as to whether a protester had been killed. Witnesses said security forces fired at the protesters and into the air.
Early Monday, security forces in Hodeidah, a western port city, used to tear gas to break up a protest march on the presidential palace there.
According to Amnesty International, at least 95 people have died during two months of antigovernment protests.
Laura Kasinof reported from Sana, Yemen, and David E. Sanger from Washington.
Sunday, April 3, 2011
The Larger Game in the Middle East: Iran
NYtimes
April 2, 2011
By DAVID E. SANGER
WASHINGTON — On a Tuesday afternoon in mid-March in the White House Situation Room, as President Obama heard the arguments of his security advisers about the pros and cons of using military force in Libya, the conversation soon veered into the impact in a far more strategically vital place: Iran.
The mullahs in Tehran, noted Thomas E. Donilon, the national security adviser, were watching Mr. Obama’s every move in the Arab world. They would interpret a failure to back up his declaration that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi had “lost the legitimacy to lead” as a sign of weakness — and perhaps as a signal that Mr. Obama was equally unwilling to back up his vow never to allow Iran to gain the ability to build a nuclear weapon.
“It shouldn’t be overstated that this was the deciding factor, or even a principal factor” in the decision to intervene in Libya, Benjamin J. Rhodes, a senior aide who joined in the meeting, said last week. But, he added, the effect on Iran was always included in the discussion. In this case, he said, “the ability to apply this kind of force in the region this quickly — even as we deal with other military deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan — combined with the nature of this broad coalition sends a very strong message to Iran about our capabilities, militarily and diplomatically.”
That afternoon in the Situation Room vividly demonstrates a rarely stated fact about the administration’s responses to the uprisings sweeping the region: The Obama team holds no illusions about Colonel Qaddafi’s long-term importance. Libya is a sideshow. Containing Iran’s power remains their central goal in the Middle East. Every decision — from Libya to Yemen to Bahrain to Syria — is being examined under the prism of how it will affect what was, until mid-January, the dominating calculus in the Obama administration’s regional strategy: how to slow Iran’s nuclear progress, and speed the arrival of opportunities for a successful uprising there.
In fact, the Iran debate makes every such chess move in the region more complicated. At the end of this era of upheaval, which the White House considers as sweeping as the changes that transformed Europe after the Berlin Wall fell, success or failure may well be judged by the question of whether Iran realizes its ambitions to become the region’s most powerful force.
Last week, the decisions being made at the White House were about how firmly to back the protesters being shot in the streets in Syria and Yemen, or being beaten in Bahrain. For each of those, White House aides were performing a mostly silent calculation about whether the Iranians would benefit, or at least feel more breathing room.
Only two and a half months ago, things seemed very different. In January, American officials were fairly confident that they had cornered Iran: new sanctions were biting, the Russians were cutting off sophisticated weaponry that Iran wanted to ward off any Israeli or American attack, and a deviously complex computer worm, called Stuxnet, was wreaking havoc with the Iranian effort to enrich uranium.
But that changed with the arrival of the Arab Spring. Suddenly the Arab authoritarians who had spent the last two years plotting with Washington to squeeze the Iranians — “Cut off the head of the snake,” King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was famously quoted as advising in the WikiLeaks cables — became more worried about their own streets than the Iranian centrifuges spinning out nuclear fuel at Natanz. And American and European citizens became distracted, even as oil at $108 a barrel undercut many of the sanctions that the White House had hoped would convince Iranian citizens that the nuclear program was not worth its rising cost.
So when the White House sees the region through a Persian lens, what does it look like?
THE LIBYA LESSON
Mr. Obama argued, in his speech on Monday night, that Libya presented a special case — an urgent moral responsibility to protect Libyans being hunted down by the Qaddafi forces and a moment of opportunity to make a difference with what the president called “unique” American capabilities. (Translation: a multitude of technologies, like Tomahawk missiles, reconnaissance and electronic jamming.) Those are the same capabilities that would be critical in any attack on Iranian nuclear sites. The administration’s top officials knew that a demonstration of that ability would not be lost on Iran. But it is anyone’s guess how Iran would react.
“You could argue it either way,” said one official who was involved in the Libya debate and spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Maybe it would encourage them to do what they have failed to do for years: come to the negotiating table. But you could also argue that it would play to the hard-liners, who say the only real protection against America and Israel is getting a bomb, and getting it fast.”
But at least in public, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates told members of Congress not to expect that Iran’s nuclear program would accelerate much because of the attack on Libya — or that Iran’s security forces would crack down even more vigorously on the protest movements they have all but strangled. “My view is that, in terms of what they want to try and achieve in their nuclear program, they’re going about as fast as they can,” he said on Thursday. “And it’s hard for me to imagine that regime being much harder than it already is.”
THE ARAB ALLY CARD
The problem gets more complex when dealing with Arab allies who have little compunction about shooting protesters in the streets, even as they seek to undermine Iran. Saudi Arabia and Bahrain are the prime examples. The Saudis see Iran as the biggest threat to their own regional ambitions, and have cooperated in many American-led efforts to hem in Tehran. Yet relations between Washington and Riyadh have rarely been as strained: To King Abdullah, President Obama’s decision to abandon President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt was a sign of weakness, and a warning that he might throw the Saudi leadership under the bus if democracy demonstrations took root there.
Perhaps that explains why there was barely a peep from the White House when the Saudis rolled troops into neighboring Bahrain to help put down the Shiite-majority protests there. Much as Mr. Obama wants to see the aspirations of democracy protesters fulfilled, and urged steps toward reform in Bahrain, he has no desire to see the toppling of the government that hosts the Fifth Fleet, right across the Persian Gulf from Iran.
THE SYRIAN PUZZLE
For years the United States has tried in vain to peel Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, away from Iran and to reconcile with Israel. It fears that if his government collapses, chaos will reign, making Syria unpredictable as well as dangerous. It’s a reasonable fear. But in recent weeks the White House has concluded that it has much less to lose than the Iranians do if Mr. Assad is swept away. And, as some in Mr. Obama’s war council have noted, if protesters succeed in Syria, Iran could be next.
ISRAEL’S OPTIONS
All the Arab turmoil has left many Israelis convinced that America and its Arab allies are too distracted to credibly threaten that they will stop the Iranian nuclear ambitions at all costs, even though Mr. Donilon has pledged that “we will not take our eye off the ball.” Inside Israel, a debate has resumed about how long the Israelis can afford to put off dealing with the problem themselves, fed by fears that Iran’s reaction to the region’s turmoil might be a race for the bomb. That could lead to the worst outcome for Mr. Obama — a war between Iran and Israel — and that consideration alone makes the case for the administration to see little room for error in handling the main act.
April 2, 2011
By DAVID E. SANGER
WASHINGTON — On a Tuesday afternoon in mid-March in the White House Situation Room, as President Obama heard the arguments of his security advisers about the pros and cons of using military force in Libya, the conversation soon veered into the impact in a far more strategically vital place: Iran.
The mullahs in Tehran, noted Thomas E. Donilon, the national security adviser, were watching Mr. Obama’s every move in the Arab world. They would interpret a failure to back up his declaration that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi had “lost the legitimacy to lead” as a sign of weakness — and perhaps as a signal that Mr. Obama was equally unwilling to back up his vow never to allow Iran to gain the ability to build a nuclear weapon.
“It shouldn’t be overstated that this was the deciding factor, or even a principal factor” in the decision to intervene in Libya, Benjamin J. Rhodes, a senior aide who joined in the meeting, said last week. But, he added, the effect on Iran was always included in the discussion. In this case, he said, “the ability to apply this kind of force in the region this quickly — even as we deal with other military deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan — combined with the nature of this broad coalition sends a very strong message to Iran about our capabilities, militarily and diplomatically.”
That afternoon in the Situation Room vividly demonstrates a rarely stated fact about the administration’s responses to the uprisings sweeping the region: The Obama team holds no illusions about Colonel Qaddafi’s long-term importance. Libya is a sideshow. Containing Iran’s power remains their central goal in the Middle East. Every decision — from Libya to Yemen to Bahrain to Syria — is being examined under the prism of how it will affect what was, until mid-January, the dominating calculus in the Obama administration’s regional strategy: how to slow Iran’s nuclear progress, and speed the arrival of opportunities for a successful uprising there.
In fact, the Iran debate makes every such chess move in the region more complicated. At the end of this era of upheaval, which the White House considers as sweeping as the changes that transformed Europe after the Berlin Wall fell, success or failure may well be judged by the question of whether Iran realizes its ambitions to become the region’s most powerful force.
Last week, the decisions being made at the White House were about how firmly to back the protesters being shot in the streets in Syria and Yemen, or being beaten in Bahrain. For each of those, White House aides were performing a mostly silent calculation about whether the Iranians would benefit, or at least feel more breathing room.
Only two and a half months ago, things seemed very different. In January, American officials were fairly confident that they had cornered Iran: new sanctions were biting, the Russians were cutting off sophisticated weaponry that Iran wanted to ward off any Israeli or American attack, and a deviously complex computer worm, called Stuxnet, was wreaking havoc with the Iranian effort to enrich uranium.
But that changed with the arrival of the Arab Spring. Suddenly the Arab authoritarians who had spent the last two years plotting with Washington to squeeze the Iranians — “Cut off the head of the snake,” King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was famously quoted as advising in the WikiLeaks cables — became more worried about their own streets than the Iranian centrifuges spinning out nuclear fuel at Natanz. And American and European citizens became distracted, even as oil at $108 a barrel undercut many of the sanctions that the White House had hoped would convince Iranian citizens that the nuclear program was not worth its rising cost.
So when the White House sees the region through a Persian lens, what does it look like?
THE LIBYA LESSON
Mr. Obama argued, in his speech on Monday night, that Libya presented a special case — an urgent moral responsibility to protect Libyans being hunted down by the Qaddafi forces and a moment of opportunity to make a difference with what the president called “unique” American capabilities. (Translation: a multitude of technologies, like Tomahawk missiles, reconnaissance and electronic jamming.) Those are the same capabilities that would be critical in any attack on Iranian nuclear sites. The administration’s top officials knew that a demonstration of that ability would not be lost on Iran. But it is anyone’s guess how Iran would react.
“You could argue it either way,” said one official who was involved in the Libya debate and spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Maybe it would encourage them to do what they have failed to do for years: come to the negotiating table. But you could also argue that it would play to the hard-liners, who say the only real protection against America and Israel is getting a bomb, and getting it fast.”
But at least in public, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates told members of Congress not to expect that Iran’s nuclear program would accelerate much because of the attack on Libya — or that Iran’s security forces would crack down even more vigorously on the protest movements they have all but strangled. “My view is that, in terms of what they want to try and achieve in their nuclear program, they’re going about as fast as they can,” he said on Thursday. “And it’s hard for me to imagine that regime being much harder than it already is.”
THE ARAB ALLY CARD
The problem gets more complex when dealing with Arab allies who have little compunction about shooting protesters in the streets, even as they seek to undermine Iran. Saudi Arabia and Bahrain are the prime examples. The Saudis see Iran as the biggest threat to their own regional ambitions, and have cooperated in many American-led efforts to hem in Tehran. Yet relations between Washington and Riyadh have rarely been as strained: To King Abdullah, President Obama’s decision to abandon President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt was a sign of weakness, and a warning that he might throw the Saudi leadership under the bus if democracy demonstrations took root there.
Perhaps that explains why there was barely a peep from the White House when the Saudis rolled troops into neighboring Bahrain to help put down the Shiite-majority protests there. Much as Mr. Obama wants to see the aspirations of democracy protesters fulfilled, and urged steps toward reform in Bahrain, he has no desire to see the toppling of the government that hosts the Fifth Fleet, right across the Persian Gulf from Iran.
THE SYRIAN PUZZLE
For years the United States has tried in vain to peel Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, away from Iran and to reconcile with Israel. It fears that if his government collapses, chaos will reign, making Syria unpredictable as well as dangerous. It’s a reasonable fear. But in recent weeks the White House has concluded that it has much less to lose than the Iranians do if Mr. Assad is swept away. And, as some in Mr. Obama’s war council have noted, if protesters succeed in Syria, Iran could be next.
ISRAEL’S OPTIONS
All the Arab turmoil has left many Israelis convinced that America and its Arab allies are too distracted to credibly threaten that they will stop the Iranian nuclear ambitions at all costs, even though Mr. Donilon has pledged that “we will not take our eye off the ball.” Inside Israel, a debate has resumed about how long the Israelis can afford to put off dealing with the problem themselves, fed by fears that Iran’s reaction to the region’s turmoil might be a race for the bomb. That could lead to the worst outcome for Mr. Obama — a war between Iran and Israel — and that consideration alone makes the case for the administration to see little room for error in handling the main act.
Saturday, April 2, 2011
Initial Libya Mission Complete, Successful, Gates Says
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.”
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.”
In Israel, Time for Peace Offer May Run Out
Washington Post
April 2, 2011
By ETHAN BRONNER
JERUSALEM — With revolutionary fervor sweeping the Middle East, Israel is under mounting pressure to make a far-reaching offer to the Palestinians or face a United Nations vote welcoming the State of Palestine as a member whose territory includes all of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.
The Palestinian Authority has been steadily building support for such a resolution in September, a move that could place Israel into a diplomatic vise. Israel would be occupying land belonging to a fellow United Nations member, land it has controlled and settled for more than four decades and some of which it expects to keep in any two-state solution.
“We are facing a diplomatic-political tsunami that the majority of the public is unaware of and that will peak in September,” said Ehud Barak, Israel’s defense minister, at a conference in Tel Aviv last month. “It is a very dangerous situation, one that requires action.” He added, “Paralysis, rhetoric, inaction will deepen the isolation of Israel.”
With aides to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thrashing out proposals to the Palestinians, President Shimon Peres is due at the White House on Tuesday to meet with President Obama and explore ways out of the bind. The United States is still uncertain how to move the process forward, according to diplomats here.
Israel’s offer is expected to include transfer of some West Bank territory outside its settlements to Palestinian control and may suggest a regional component — an international conference to serve as a response to the Arab League peace initiatives.
But Palestinian leaders, emboldened by support for their statehood bid, dismiss the expected offer as insufficient and continue to demand an end to settlement building before talks can begin.
“We want to generate pressure on Israel to make it feel isolated and help it understand that there can be no talks without a stop to settlements,” said Nabil Shaath, who leads the foreign affairs department of Fatah, the main party of the Palestinian Authority. “Without that, our goal is membership in the United Nations General Assembly in September.”
Israeli, Palestinian and Western officials interviewed on the current impasse, most of them requesting anonymity, expressed an unusual degree of pessimism about a peaceful resolution. All agreed that the turmoil across the Middle East had prompted opposing responses from Israel and much of the world.
Israel, seeing the prospect of even more hostile governments as its neighbors, is insisting on caution and time before taking any significant steps. It also wants to build in extensive long-term security guarantees in any two-state solution, but those inevitably infringe the sovereignty of a Palestinian state.
The international community tends to draw the opposite conclusion. Foreign Secretary William Hague of Britain, for example, said last week that one of the most important lessons to be learned from the Arab Spring was that “legitimate aspirations cannot be ignored and must be addressed.” He added, referring to Israeli-Palestinian talks, “It cannot be in anyone’s interests if the new order of the region is determined at a time of minimum hope in the peace process.”
The Palestinian focus on September stems not only from the fact that the General Assembly holds its annual meeting then. It is also because Prime Minister Salam Fayyad announced in September 2009 that his government would be ready for independent statehood in two years and that Mr. Obama said last September that he expected the framework for an independent Palestinian state to be declared in a year.
Mr. Obama did not indicate what the borders of that state would be, assuming they would be determined through direct negotiations. But with Israeli-Palestinian talks broken off months ago and the Middle East in the process of profound change, many argue that outside pressure is needed.
Germany, France and Britain say negotiations should be based on the 1967 lines with equivalent land swaps, exactly what the Netanyahu government rejects because it says it predetermines the outcome.
“Does the world think it is going to force Israel to declare the 1967 lines and giving up Jerusalem as a basis for negotiation?” asked a top Israeli official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “That will never happen.”
While the Obama administration has referred in the past to the 1967 lines as a basis for talks, it has not decided whether to back the European Union, the United Nations and Russia — the other members of the so-called quartet — in declaring them the starting point, diplomats said. The quartet meets on April 15 in Berlin.
Israel, which has settled hundreds of thousands of Jews inside the West Bank and East Jerusalem, acknowledges that it will have to withdraw from much of the land it now occupies there. But it hopes to hold onto the largest settlement blocs and much of East Jerusalem as well as the border to the east with Jordan and does not want to enter into talks with the other side’s position as the starting point.
That was true even before its closest ally in the Arab world, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, was driven from power, helping fuel protest movements that now roil other countries, including Jordan, which has its own peace agreement with Israel.
“Whatever we put forward has to be grounded in security arrangements because of what is going on regionally,” said Zalman Shoval, one of a handful of Netanyahu aides drawing up the Israeli proposal that may be delivered as a speech to the United States Congress in May. “We are facing the rebirth of the eastern front as Iran grows strong. We have to secure the Jordan Valley. And no Israeli government is going to move tens of thousands of Israelis from their homes quickly.”
Those Israelis live in West Bank settlements, the source of much of the disagreement not only with the Palestinians but with the world. Not a single government supports Israel’s settlements. The Palestinians say the settlements are proof that the Israelis do not really want a Palestinian state to arise since they are built on land that should go to that state.
“All these years, the main obstacle to peace has been the settlements,” Nimer Hammad, a political adviser to President Abbas, said. “They always say, ‘but you never made it a condition of negotiations before.’ And we say, ‘that was a mistake.’ ”
The Israelis counter that the real problem is Palestinian refusal to accept openly a Jewish state here and ongoing anti-Israeli incitement and praise of violence on Palestinian airwaves.
Another central obstacle to the establishment of a State of Palestine has been the division between the West Bank and Gaza, the first run by the Palestinian Authority and the second by Hamas. Lately, President Abbas has sought to bridge the gap, asking to go to Gaza to seek reconciliation through an agreed interim government that would set up parliamentary and presidential elections.
But Hamas, worried it would lose such elections and hopeful that the regional turmoil could work in its favor — that Egypt, for example, might be taken over by its ally, the Muslim Brotherhood — has reacted coolly.
Efforts are still under way to restart peace talks but if, as expected, negotiations do not resume, come September the Palestinian Authority seems set to go ahead with plans to ask the General Assembly to accept it as a member. Diplomats involved in the issue say most countries — more than 100 — are expected to vote yes, meaning it will pass. (There are no vetoes in the General Assembly so the United States cannot save Israel as it often has in the Security Council.)
What happens then?
Some Palestinian leaders say relations with Israel would change.
“We will re-examine our commitments toward Israel, especially our security commitments,” suggested Hanna Amireh, who is on the 18-member ruling board of the Palestine Liberation Organization, referring to cooperation between Palestinian and Israeli troops. “The main sense about Israel is that we are fed up.”
Mr. Shaath said Israel would then be in daily violation of the rights of a fellow member state and diplomatic and legal consequences could follow, all of which would be painful for Israel.
In the Haaretz newspaper on Thursday, Ari Shavit, who is a political centrist, drew a comparison between 2011 and the biggest military setback Israel ever faced, the 1973 war.
He wrote that “2011 is going to be a diplomatic 1973,” because a Palestinian state will be recognized internationally. “Every military base in the West Bank will be contravening the sovereignty of an independent U.N. member state.” He added, “A diplomatic siege from without and a civil uprising from within will grip Israel in a stranglehold.”
April 2, 2011
By ETHAN BRONNER
JERUSALEM — With revolutionary fervor sweeping the Middle East, Israel is under mounting pressure to make a far-reaching offer to the Palestinians or face a United Nations vote welcoming the State of Palestine as a member whose territory includes all of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.
The Palestinian Authority has been steadily building support for such a resolution in September, a move that could place Israel into a diplomatic vise. Israel would be occupying land belonging to a fellow United Nations member, land it has controlled and settled for more than four decades and some of which it expects to keep in any two-state solution.
“We are facing a diplomatic-political tsunami that the majority of the public is unaware of and that will peak in September,” said Ehud Barak, Israel’s defense minister, at a conference in Tel Aviv last month. “It is a very dangerous situation, one that requires action.” He added, “Paralysis, rhetoric, inaction will deepen the isolation of Israel.”
With aides to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thrashing out proposals to the Palestinians, President Shimon Peres is due at the White House on Tuesday to meet with President Obama and explore ways out of the bind. The United States is still uncertain how to move the process forward, according to diplomats here.
Israel’s offer is expected to include transfer of some West Bank territory outside its settlements to Palestinian control and may suggest a regional component — an international conference to serve as a response to the Arab League peace initiatives.
But Palestinian leaders, emboldened by support for their statehood bid, dismiss the expected offer as insufficient and continue to demand an end to settlement building before talks can begin.
“We want to generate pressure on Israel to make it feel isolated and help it understand that there can be no talks without a stop to settlements,” said Nabil Shaath, who leads the foreign affairs department of Fatah, the main party of the Palestinian Authority. “Without that, our goal is membership in the United Nations General Assembly in September.”
Israeli, Palestinian and Western officials interviewed on the current impasse, most of them requesting anonymity, expressed an unusual degree of pessimism about a peaceful resolution. All agreed that the turmoil across the Middle East had prompted opposing responses from Israel and much of the world.
Israel, seeing the prospect of even more hostile governments as its neighbors, is insisting on caution and time before taking any significant steps. It also wants to build in extensive long-term security guarantees in any two-state solution, but those inevitably infringe the sovereignty of a Palestinian state.
The international community tends to draw the opposite conclusion. Foreign Secretary William Hague of Britain, for example, said last week that one of the most important lessons to be learned from the Arab Spring was that “legitimate aspirations cannot be ignored and must be addressed.” He added, referring to Israeli-Palestinian talks, “It cannot be in anyone’s interests if the new order of the region is determined at a time of minimum hope in the peace process.”
The Palestinian focus on September stems not only from the fact that the General Assembly holds its annual meeting then. It is also because Prime Minister Salam Fayyad announced in September 2009 that his government would be ready for independent statehood in two years and that Mr. Obama said last September that he expected the framework for an independent Palestinian state to be declared in a year.
Mr. Obama did not indicate what the borders of that state would be, assuming they would be determined through direct negotiations. But with Israeli-Palestinian talks broken off months ago and the Middle East in the process of profound change, many argue that outside pressure is needed.
Germany, France and Britain say negotiations should be based on the 1967 lines with equivalent land swaps, exactly what the Netanyahu government rejects because it says it predetermines the outcome.
“Does the world think it is going to force Israel to declare the 1967 lines and giving up Jerusalem as a basis for negotiation?” asked a top Israeli official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “That will never happen.”
While the Obama administration has referred in the past to the 1967 lines as a basis for talks, it has not decided whether to back the European Union, the United Nations and Russia — the other members of the so-called quartet — in declaring them the starting point, diplomats said. The quartet meets on April 15 in Berlin.
Israel, which has settled hundreds of thousands of Jews inside the West Bank and East Jerusalem, acknowledges that it will have to withdraw from much of the land it now occupies there. But it hopes to hold onto the largest settlement blocs and much of East Jerusalem as well as the border to the east with Jordan and does not want to enter into talks with the other side’s position as the starting point.
That was true even before its closest ally in the Arab world, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, was driven from power, helping fuel protest movements that now roil other countries, including Jordan, which has its own peace agreement with Israel.
“Whatever we put forward has to be grounded in security arrangements because of what is going on regionally,” said Zalman Shoval, one of a handful of Netanyahu aides drawing up the Israeli proposal that may be delivered as a speech to the United States Congress in May. “We are facing the rebirth of the eastern front as Iran grows strong. We have to secure the Jordan Valley. And no Israeli government is going to move tens of thousands of Israelis from their homes quickly.”
Those Israelis live in West Bank settlements, the source of much of the disagreement not only with the Palestinians but with the world. Not a single government supports Israel’s settlements. The Palestinians say the settlements are proof that the Israelis do not really want a Palestinian state to arise since they are built on land that should go to that state.
“All these years, the main obstacle to peace has been the settlements,” Nimer Hammad, a political adviser to President Abbas, said. “They always say, ‘but you never made it a condition of negotiations before.’ And we say, ‘that was a mistake.’ ”
The Israelis counter that the real problem is Palestinian refusal to accept openly a Jewish state here and ongoing anti-Israeli incitement and praise of violence on Palestinian airwaves.
Another central obstacle to the establishment of a State of Palestine has been the division between the West Bank and Gaza, the first run by the Palestinian Authority and the second by Hamas. Lately, President Abbas has sought to bridge the gap, asking to go to Gaza to seek reconciliation through an agreed interim government that would set up parliamentary and presidential elections.
But Hamas, worried it would lose such elections and hopeful that the regional turmoil could work in its favor — that Egypt, for example, might be taken over by its ally, the Muslim Brotherhood — has reacted coolly.
Efforts are still under way to restart peace talks but if, as expected, negotiations do not resume, come September the Palestinian Authority seems set to go ahead with plans to ask the General Assembly to accept it as a member. Diplomats involved in the issue say most countries — more than 100 — are expected to vote yes, meaning it will pass. (There are no vetoes in the General Assembly so the United States cannot save Israel as it often has in the Security Council.)
What happens then?
Some Palestinian leaders say relations with Israel would change.
“We will re-examine our commitments toward Israel, especially our security commitments,” suggested Hanna Amireh, who is on the 18-member ruling board of the Palestine Liberation Organization, referring to cooperation between Palestinian and Israeli troops. “The main sense about Israel is that we are fed up.”
Mr. Shaath said Israel would then be in daily violation of the rights of a fellow member state and diplomatic and legal consequences could follow, all of which would be painful for Israel.
In the Haaretz newspaper on Thursday, Ari Shavit, who is a political centrist, drew a comparison between 2011 and the biggest military setback Israel ever faced, the 1973 war.
He wrote that “2011 is going to be a diplomatic 1973,” because a Palestinian state will be recognized internationally. “Every military base in the West Bank will be contravening the sovereignty of an independent U.N. member state.” He added, “A diplomatic siege from without and a civil uprising from within will grip Israel in a stranglehold.”
Remarks by the President on America's Energy Security
www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/03/30/remarks-president-americas-energy-security
Washington’s World: April 4th – April 10th, 2011
After a flurry of Congressional testimony on Libya by top State Department and Pentagon officials, the realities of US domestic politics are pushing the Administration toward a much lower profile inside NATO. President Obama has sought to refocus public attention away from Libya by highlighting some encouraging news on job creation and a major speech on energy. Secretary of Defense Gates who, opposed the intervention and, we are told privately, remains a reluctant convert, has repeated his view that Libya does not constitute a vital US interest and is on record as firmly opposing the deployment of US ground troops and arming the Libyan rebels. We are also hearing that some of the most influential advocates of intervention, for example US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice, no longer have the inside track. Nonetheless, President Obama’s prestige is firmly nailed to the enterprise. If he succeeds in removing Colonel Gadaffi and installing a reformist government, he will enjoy a triumph. The opposite is also true. A settlement – or a stalemate as many Pentagon officials fear – that sees Gadaffi continuing in office would represent a significant setback for him. For this reason, we expect US non-military efforts to secure Gadaffi’s departure to remain at a high level. In the meantime, tensions between the White House and US commanders in Afghanistan are rising. The issue is the pace of withdrawal due to start this summer, with the White House insisting on a higher number than the commanders are currently proposing. This will be an awkward issue for Obama. With popular support for the war continuing to ebb, Obama has the opportunity to gain political advantage by fulfilling his earlier undertaking to draw down in 2011. He will, however, face Republican criticism that he is not listening to his generals. Alongside the Middle East, it is worth noting that relations with China continue to occupy senior official attention. As mentioned in a speech by Treasury Secretary Geithner, US officials remain concerned by what they see as a constant: the undervaluation of the Yuan. On the domestic front, a tense week lies ahead as Congressional negotiators struggle to find a compromise that would avoid a partial government shut down on April 8th. Both sides want to avoid a crisis, but passions are running high and there is no guarantee that a compromise will be found. The consequences would be felt more on domestic programs than foreign policy.
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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