The Libya Mission
Is
Confusing
Gary Gerard,
dumbhoosier.com
I think Defense Secretary Robert Gates may have unwittingly
summed up
the Obama administration's Libya policy earlier this week
when he was
talking to reporters.
"This command-and-control business is complicated, and we
haven't done
something like this, kind of, on-the-fly before,” he said.
He was talking specifically about turning over command of
the operation
to NATO, but I think it's a pretty good representation of
the policy as
a whole. Basically, I get the sense that they really don't
know for
sure exactly what they're doing.
President Obama says our mission is not to remove Gadhafi.
But at the
same time he says that Gadhafi has got to go. And at the
same time
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says Gadhafi has to be
removed.
Further, President Obama says ground troops will never
be
deployed in Libya, even though there already are reports of
U.S.
Special Forces units and CIA operatives on the ground
identifying
targets advising the rebels.
President Obama also says our mission is to protect
civilians and
rebels from Gadhafi's forces. But reports indicate Gadhafi's
forces are
making house-to-house sweeps in Benghazi and rounding up
suspected
rebel sympathizers. How can it be our mission to stop that
type of
activity with no troops on the ground? That's just not
possible.
The mission in Libya started out as a means to disable
Gadhafi's air
force – which, at the outset was pretty weak – and establish
a no-fly
zone. We pretty much accomplished that in the first few
hours of our
entry in this mess.
Now, apparently, the mission has shifted to hitting targets
like
airports and army bases and providing close air support for
the rebels.
And simultaneously, President Obama is talking about how
eager he is to
end our involvement. I hope I am dead wrong when I say this
and I may
well be, but it seems to me our involvement isn't close to
ending.
If Gadhafi isn't taken out of power, if he hunkers down,
weakened, but
not broken, we could wind up with a standoff between his
forces and the
rebels. That could potentially become a long, drawn-out
affair.
Under an agreement struck Thursday, according to CNN.com,
"NATO forces
will be able to close air space to all flights except for
humanitarian
ones and will be able to use force in self-defense." Also,
"NATO would
be given more robust rules of engagement to ensure that
civilians are
protected."
Can we be honest about this NATO "coalition" for a moment?
Who's going to pull all this off? The French? The Brits?
None of them
have the capacity to run Gadhafi and his army out of Libya.
Not to
mention all the tribal and mercenary fighters that remain
Gadhafi
loyalists.
Remember, he U.S. accounts for 47 percent of the world's
military
spending. In second place is China, at 6 percent. We're the
ones with
all the bombs and planes. If you added up the military
spending of all
our coalition partners, it wouldn't reach 10 percent of
ours.
Again, I don't purport to be some expert on geopolitics and
military
strategy and I could be wrong. But it just seems far-fetched
to me that
we can fire a few missiles, drop a few bombs and then hand
the whole
mess off to the "coalition."
And can we talk about the notion that the U.S. has to be the
"world's
peacekeeper?" When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, I
supported us
pushing him back out. I recall writing a column advising the
younger
Bush against invading Iraq. And that was before we knew
there were no
weapons of mass destruction.
Comes now 2011. Have we learned nothing from our experiences
in places
like Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan? I understand the
desire to
protect the downtrodden, but seriously, don't we need to
draw the line
somewhere?
Right now, innocent civilians are being killed by the
governments of
Jordan, Yemen, Nepal, Syria, Morocco and Bahrain.
Even worse are situations in places like Ivory Coast,
Darfur, Uganda,
Rwanda, Sudan, the Congo and the Central African Republic.
I realize Gadhafi is kind of the poster boy for nutty,
ruthless
dictators, but what about that Kim character with the nukes
in North
Korea? What about that Ahmadinijad guy in Iran? For cryin'
out loud,
they cut your head off for being gay in that country.
Too many ruthless dictators, too few bombs, I guess.
Bottom line in all this is sometimes I wish our policy fell
more in
line with the doctrine expressed by a certain U.S. Senator
in March,
2007.
During an interview with the New York Times back then the
Senator was
asked whether American troops on the ground should intervene
if
sectarian fighting broke out in Iraq. The whole interview
was posted on
hotair.com last week.
“No one wants to sit by and see mass killings, but it’s
going on every
day. Thousands of people are dying every month in Iraq. Our
presence
there is not stopping it and there is no potential
opportunity that I
can image where it could. This is an Iraqi problem. We
cannot save the
Iraqis from themselves. … You can talk to a lot of military
experts and
they will tell you that if the parties have not decided to
stop killing
each other, there’s very little you can do and do we want to
be
basically in the middle of that? And I think the answer is
no, for both
miliary and political reasons.”
The Senator? Then presidential candidate and current
Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton. Of course, at that time there was a
Republican in the
White House and she vying for his job. Ironically, I agreed
with her
back then. But now that she's working for President Obama,
it's a
different story.
“Let me just underscore the key point. This is a broad
international
effort. The world will not sit idly by while more innocent
civilians
are killed. ... We are standing with the people of Libya,
and we will
not waver in our efforts to protect them,“ she said this
week.
I think this might be the most troubling part of all this
for me. It
appears decisions regarding who we protect are not so much a
matter of
morality or humanitarianism.
They're more a matter of political expedience.
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