Hanson makes an interesting point, even though it was a stupid decision to go to war in Libya, the consequences of failing to win it might be worse. This whole Libyan misadventure was a lose-lose proposition from the very beginning. Shame of the feckless and attention mongering John McCain for referring to the motley bunch of rebels as being his “heroes”. Funny how France which instigated this war (and was violently opposed to the Iraq war), now wants to bail.
by Victor Davis Hanson
Almost daily over the last four months we were told that Muammar Gadhafi was about ready to throw in the towel and give up.
Libya, after all, is not a distant Afghanistan or Iraq with a population of some 30 million. Yet this tiny police state of less than 7 million people, conveniently located on the Mediterranean Sea opposite nearby Europe, continues to thwart the three great powers of the NATO alliance and thousands of “Arab Spring” rebels.
In March, President Obama ordered the use of American bombers and cruise missiles to join in with the French and British to finish off the tottering Gadhafi regime. Obama was apparently stung by liberal criticism that the U.S. had done little to help rebels in their weeks-long effort to remove Gadhafi — after only belatedly supporting the successful revolutionaries in Tunisia and Egypt.
Months ago, intervention to the Obama administration seemed a short, painless way of ridding the world of a decades-long international menace while gaining praise for helping “democratic” reformers. Oil, of course, is always a subtext in any Middle Eastern war.
[…….]
The more NATO forces destroyed Gadhafi’s tanks, artillery, planes and boats, the more the unhinged dictator seemed to cling to power. Western leaders had forgotten that Gadhafi lost a war with Egypt in 1977, lost a war with Chad in 1987, and came out on the losing end of Ronald Reagan’s bombing campaign in 1986 — and yet clung to power and remains the planet’s longest-ruling dictator. Terror, oil, cash reserves and a loyal mercenary army are a potent combination.
The Obama administration asked for legal authorization from the Arab League — the majority of whose member states are not democratic — and the U.N., but to this day strangely has not requested authorization from Congress. As Obama sought legitimacy within international authorizations, he failed to note that no U.N. or Arab League resolution actually had allowed him to conduct a full-scale air war against Gadhafi’s ruling clique. The Chinese and Russians are both happy to keep pointing that out.
Both conservatives and liberals were flabbergasted by the sudden preemptive war. Conservatives who supported the messy efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq were reluctant to champion a third one in Libya without congressional authority and with no clearly stated mission or methodology. When we entered an on-again/off-again cycle of operations, Republicans charged that a weakened, fiscally insolvent America was sort of “leading from behind.”
[…..]
The left had also decried Western attacks on oil-exporting Muslim countries, but now liberal-in-chief Barack Obama was doing just that. Indeed, the antiwar president who promised to end the Bush Mideast wars had suddenly expanded them into a third theater. The more the war dragged on, the more the Arab world was torn between hating Gadhafi and hating Obama’s bombs.
The odious Gadhafi has been an international pariah for most of his tenure, funding terrorists, killing Americans and murdering dissidents. But even as the bombs were dropped, he was a monster in the midst of rehab. By late 2010 his jet-setting family was being courted by Western intellectuals, reestablishing diplomatic relations with the United States, offering oil concessions to the West, and being praised as a partner in the war against radical Islamic terrorism.
Then, with a snap of the fingers, in early 2011 Gadhafi was suddenly reinvented as a Saddam Hussein-like ogre and dodging Western cruise missiles and bombs targeted at his person.
What is next?
The general consensus, from both left and right, is that we should finish the misadventure as quickly as possible. Apparently, the only thing worse than starting a stupid, unnecessary war against a madman is losing it.
