The NYT’s Ross Douthat eloquently catalogs three lessons learned from the Libyan kinetic military event that might have been gleaned from a trip to any used car salesman. Before buying a car, look under the hood. He writes, “First, judging by events on the battlefield, its fighters probably won’t be able to topple Qaddafi’s government unless we find a way to significantly step our support.”
Next, make sure the engine works and it’s not really being pushed by someone in back on the test drive. “Second, we’ve already offered them more support than anyone realized, since it turns out that the C.I.A. has been assisting the rebel leadership since well before the United Nations resolution that officially justifies our involvement in this conflict”.
Lastly, take reasonable precautions to ensure the car’s not hot before you buy it. Douthat writes, “and third, the jihadist presence within the rebellion, while not dominant by any means, may nonetheless be real and meaningful — and growing apace, perhaps, as the civil war drags on.” Otherwise you might have trouble down the pike. Like Secretary Robert Gates, who Wired says, may already be sensing something bad and edging towards the exit. Not that you’d blame him.
In an attempt to reassure skeptical legislators on the Libya war, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that the U.S. commitment to the conflict is already scaling down now that NATO has assumed command. When it actually ends, he left unsaid.
“Our role has already begun to recede,” Gates told the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Buck McKeon. “We will not be taking an active part in strike activities and we believe our allies can sustain this for some period of time.” He and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declined to estimate how long the war will last.
But Gates said that the U.S. is now in a “support role,” providing ships, planes and equipment for “electronic warfare, aerial refueling, lift, search and rescue and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance support” missions. Mullen added that “starting today” the U.S. contribution to the war will be “significantly reduced,” anticipating cuts in deployments to come “fairly dramatically over the next few days.”
Is Gates saying that whether the rebels need it or not, it’s time to ramp down, that losing is an option? That question is only important if winning was ever a goal. But it never was. The object of the kinetic military event, in case nobody remembers, was humanitarian assistance. Victory is not a word in that lexicon.
Other sources suggest that Gates may actually resign if forced to employ ground troops. The LA Times reports that “in his strongest language since the U.S. deployed warplanes to protect Libyan civilians, Gates ruled out sending any U.S. forces to Libya “as long as I’m in this job” — a viewpoint that he said President Obama shared. But he admitted that the rebels needed help to withstand the assault from Kadafi’s forces, even with NATO warplanes overhead.”
Hot Air writes of Gates, “he didn’t use the R-word but it’s easy to read between lines as broad as these. A vignette from this morning’s House hearings on Libya, in which a glum SecDef gamely tried to choke down the ‘turd sandwich’ currently being served by his boss”. But people of quality never eat anything of the sort. It’s probably the third sandwich of high quality pâté, one several delectable kinds, which we have neither the smarts nor the sophistication to degustate. For the uninitiated, there is the pâté de foie gras of France and the more earthy pâté en terrine. Gates is probably sampling the pâté en turdrine which is a Potomac specialty.
Ross Douthat notices a disturbing tendency among some rebels to go out and get medieval on the population. Quoting a Time report, Douthat observes that revenge can happen on the battlefield. This would not have been news to William Tecumseh Sherman who once said, “I confess, without shame, that I am sick and tired of fighting — its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands, and fathers … it is only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated … that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation.”
In other words, “war is hell”. But that word is not in the R2P lexicon either. Neverthless Time reported:
After pushing back into Bin Jawad on Tuesday afternoon, the rebels quickly set about searching the streets and homes of the town for hidden troops, mercenaries and traitors. “Alley to alley, house to house,” shouted one man at the fighters as trucks veered down Bin Jawad’s unpaved, bumpy side streets. He used Gaddafi’s own words — an infamous threat from an earlier speech that is often repeated in the rebel-held east. It’s meant to mock the Colonel; it’s even graffitied on the walls. But as the rebels tread into unwelcome territory, they seem to mean it in much the way Gaddafi did — in a kind of unrelenting and paranoid door-to-door campaign to rout their enemies.
Pretty soon it may be apparent to a fair number of people that civilians may actually die in the Libya operation; and said individuals will then forget they were for it before they were against it. The car they thought they were buying turned out to be something else. What was it supposed to be again? What is American policy in the Middle East again? Let’s ask Hillary.
On Sunday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – when asked about why we’re involving ourselves in Libya but not Syria – said this about Bashar Assad: “Many of the Members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer.” For understandable reasons – more about that in a moment– those comments didn’t fly very well. So it was time for a retake.
Yesterday, when asked about her statement at a press conference, Secretary Clinton said, “Well, first, Jay [Solomon], as you rightly pointed out, I referenced opinions of others. That was not speaking either for myself or for the administration.”
Poor SOS Clinton, unable to speak for herself or the administration, yet speaking all the same as if possessed. Who is she channeling? And what then should one make of her latest declaration, put forth in the same briefing where she expressed ignorance of the origin of her own words. She said that the administration had made no decision to arm the rebels and yet was preparing to do so.
MODERATOR: Our first question is from Andy Quinn of Reuters.
QUESTION: Madam Secretary, in your meeting today with Dr. Jibril, I was wondering, were you able to make any concrete offers of assistance to them, either through turning over the $33 billion in Libyan funds that have been frozen in the United States, or in discussing possible arms transfers?
And Admiral Stavridis told the Senate today that intelligence shows flickers – he called – he used the word “flickers” of al-Qaida in the Libyan opposition. How great a concern is that? And is that part of the U.S. debate over any potential arms transfers to the transitional council?
SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, Andy, first of all, we have not made any decision about arming the rebels or providing any arms transfers, so there has not been any need to discuss that at this point. We did discuss nonlethal assistance. We discussed ways of trying to enable the Transition National Council to meet a lot of their financial needs and how we could do that through the international community given the challenges that sanctions pose but recognizing that they obviously are going to need funds to keep themselves going. We discussed a broad range of matters and certainly their presentation, which some of you may have seen earlier today, as to what kind of civil society and political structure they are trying to build in Libya are exactly in line with what they have consistently said were their goals. Their commitment to democracy and to a very robust engagement with people from across the spectrum of Libyans is, I think, appropriate. We do not have any specific information about specific individuals from any organization who are part of this, but of course, we’re still getting to know those who are leading the Transitional National Council. And that will be a process that continues.
MODERATOR: Our next question is from Sam Coates of the Times of London.
QUESTION: Two things. First of all, is it your understanding that the UN Resolution 1973 makes it illegal to supply arms to the Libyan rebels, or do you think there could be some room for maneuver of that should it get to that?
And secondly, it’s quite striking when the rebels were talking earlier today, none of their names are public apart from three or four of the 30-odd of them, and they clearly have access – they have quite a lot of power and access to a lot of funds through oil money. Do you think that they should be more transparent in terms of declaring who they are, where they’re from, what kind of groupings they come from, and how they’re using the money?
SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, as to the first question, it is our interpretation that 1973 amended or overrode the absolute prohibition of arms to anyone in Libya so that there could be legitimate transfer of arms if a country were to choose to do that. As I said, we have not made that decision at this time.
The problems attending the Libyan operation were all straightforward and foreseeable. Khadaffi’s power rested on the road network, the water supply and the oil infrastructure. Take it from him and he fell. Let him keep them and he remained. But first you had to make up your mind about what you wanted to do. If you didn’t have a destination on the map, not the fastest car in the world would ever get you anywhere. Generations of ordinary military officers understood that kinetic military events were decided largely, if not primarily, by the superiority of conception; by setting the right objectives amid the chatter and confusion of the news.
The utter chaos which has overtaken the Libya operation proceeds primarily from the disorder in the leadership’s mind. The “smartest people in the world” haven’t got a clue what they are doing and that confusion reflects itself in the form of immense waste, gratuitous violence, aimless floundering and complete disorientation on the ground. America’s massive strength is dissipated in projects forgotten almost as soon as they are begun, in aimless marches and counter-marches, in flights of rhetoric no one takes seriously or even knows the provenance of.
“We are the people we’ve been waiting for.” Great. Now what?
The old Prussian Clausewitz argued that War was fundamentally an affair of the mind. You had to imagine where you wanted to go and to translate the political conception into the contours of the ground; into tons of supplies and into the faces of actual men. This first had to be clear in the leader’s mind before anything had a chance of happening. That is something that administration has signally failed to do. So now they are eating their pâté sandwich with great ceremony. And since Hillary doesn’t mind channeling others, maybe she can speak out the words of the long-dead contemporary of Clausewitz, Napoleon Bonaparte, who said: “If you are going to take Vienna, take Vienna”.
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