Libya Rebels Win

It's nice to have some good news, and it looks like Gadafi is finished today.  It's hard to see how that could be bad.

I've used this blog to go on record with various predictions, though, so here's one with respect to Libya: The place will be a horrible mess, with lots of violence and perhaps ongoing civil war between factions of the currently victorious rebels.  Lots more innocent people will die.  There may be a massacre of civilians who were seen as loyal to the former dictator.

.....and I don't see how Western forces or support can change that outcome.  The NATO strategy of bombing and supporting the rebels without sending troops in has been a success.  But there remain limits to what can be done without lots of boots on the ground.  We have to stay out of there and leave the results to the Libyans, come what may.  I previously thought that US and European involvement would necessarily escalate, or that a bloodbath would occur in any case and we were only postponing it.  It's looking like I might have been wrong there, and I'm glad I was!  But I think it's really key to get out fast and declare victory now- don't get bogged down again.

Two Quick Hitters on Foreign Policy

• Gleen Greenwald is always good for exposing the outrages of the pro-torture, pro-invasion establishment.  This post is no exception.  It makes the point that the Libya operation is illegal on many levels, and that President Obama is going further than President Bush did in asserting war-making powers.  I don't see any reasonable argument that this is a legal military operation- it's not.  On top of that, it's bad policy and shouldn't be approved even if proposed legally (of course I think it would be approved if the President tried, or at least would have been at the start of the conflict).  It's just impossible to picture any good outcome in Libya- either Qadafi survives and stays in power and massacres lots of people anyway, meaning we just gave them a brief reprieve; or the rebels win/ we kill Qadafi, in which case he'll be replaced by a regime that will likely be no different.
• I heard Andrew Ross Sorkin on Morning Joe today off-handedly call the President's decision to greenlight the killing of Osama Bin Laden "the most courageous decision of his presidency" on the way to making another point.  Just how can that decision be characterized as courageous?  I'm not criticizing the decision, mind you, and I'm fine with the assassination of Bin Laden, but it seemed like a kind of obvious call and not particularly controversial even.  Courageous decisions are those that carry huge downside risk or are generally unpopular but the "right thing to do" anyway.  In the Bin Laden case, the soldeirs involved were certainly courageous, as the downside risk for them was death, but Obama's call was pretty easy.  I know it's a minor point, but we shouldn't cheapen the concept of courage in politics like that.  For Obama to be courageous he could do something like close Guantanamo in spite of public opposition, or draw tough lines in the sand with Republicans on the Debt Ceiling negotiations (the downside risk being a default by the US government- maybe not the right thing to do, but courageous anyway- sometimes courageous decisions are still stupid).

Libya Revisited- UPDATED

I find I've almost forgotten about the Libya war, which I addressed early on a bit but haven't touched since then.  Now I read this from Andrew Sullivan, an Obama supporter like me, and find myself in complete agreement.  This is a process worry- the president has gone to war without getting any kind of vote from the Congress.  This seems to be illegal, but like Bush II Obama has found lawyers who tell him there's no problem.  If other lawyers have warned otherwise, he's just ignored them.

It's not like the presidency wasn't already a pretty powerful office before 2000.  The president has lots of power to defend the country.  But the congress has to declare war, and the congress has to fund it.  We're at war in Libya; this gets forgotten because we don't have troops on the ground sustaining casualties, but the US military is nevertheless engaged dropping bombs on a sovereign country with the clear purpose of regime change.  A country that was not threatening the US (at this time anyway).

Obama has joined George W. Bush in completely eviscerating the War Powers Act, and the congress under both presidents, in both parties, has gone along like lambs to the slaughter.  It seems the congress doesn't want to act- they'd rather be on the sidelines so they can't be blamed for the quagmire many of them see coming.

As I've said before, this won't end well.

UPDATE: I was thinking more about this, and want to point out the other big problem with the Libya operation, similar to the problem with Operation Iraqi Freedom.  Nuclear proliferation.  Why is it that we're not considering any military action against North Korea, which is as brutal as anyone in the Middle East and run by a dictator even crazier?  Maybe it's because oil isn't involved.  Or maybe it's because they have nukes.  If I were running Iran, listening to the US rattle sabers constantly, I'd be working like hell to get the Bomb- it's the only way to guarantee the Marines stay out.

Also, see Kevin Drum for more discussion about Obama's refusal to take the advice of the White House Office of Legal Counsel.  The Left blogosphere is not behind him here.

Libya Update

So it seems that NATO bombs have killed one of Qaddafi's sons and a few of his grandchildren.  There are denials from NATO that civilians or the Qaddafi family are targeted, so maybe the whole thing is propaganda.  But at least we're keeping the bombing of Libya in the news a bit, now that the Royal Wedding is over (oops, sorry, no blog post coming on that one).

One of my conservative correspondents over email has criticized the government for failing to just "take him out", i.e. kill Qaddafi and be done with the whole thing.  He wrote to our group:

You may recall a few weeks back I said "go after Qaddafi". The civil war that has killed and maimed countless innocent men, women and children since then would likely have ended as soon as he was killed.

Now this is just stupid.  Killing the leader there would be the start of our problems, not the end.  Do people think about what would happen next?  Haven't we learned anything from our Iraq and Afghanistan experiences?  Look, I'm not saying we should never intervene anywhere internationally, but we certainly need to have a clear-eyed sense of what we're getting into.  It's been proven over and over and over again that a targeted killing or a well-placed bomb is not going to offer a simple solution to an international problem.

Qaddafi looks like he's not going away quietly.  We're not going to bomb him into submission.  The rebels don't look like they're organized enough to take him down.  Even if they can take him down, the next likely stage would be a civil war for power, not an easy transition to Democracy.  The USA has no stomach for another long occupation ending in another few million people hating us.

Sorry, the only option is to leave them alone.  That stinks too, by the way, and leaves Qaddafi in power wiping out the rebels and committing atrocities.  But that outcome isn't on us- we're not doing it.  And we can only postpone the bloodbath, not stop it.  Time to get out.

Quick Hit on Libya

The more I read about Libya, the more I get the creeping suspicion that the rebels there are a rag-tag group with little chance of winning a civil war against Qadafi.  It seems like the massacre of their strongholds is coming one way or another, unless we intervene with much more force.  Which will in turn lead to a lengthy quagmire.

Never should have gone in.  This is going to be bad.

Hemming and Hawing on Libya

Wow, I'm having a tough time with the Libya attack.  I read about how great it is that we're going in like we are.  Then I read about how disastrously this is all going to end.  It seems increasingly like we've got a choice between bad and worse.

First of all, not that this is a surprise, but President Obama is acting unconstitutionally by launching military action without a congressional vote.  Of course presidents do this all the time now, and there's no reason to believe a liberal president will be any different from a conservative one in holding on to increases in his power established by his predecessors.  Of course congress is free to take up the issue and either declare war, support the action, or even withdraw funding.  They won't do any of those things, of course, ceding this ground to this president.  Can't see how this will change.

But that aside, is it the right policy?  I think it's clear that we've forestalled the massacre of hundreds or thousands of protesters along with lots of innocent bystanders.  That's certainly a good thing. 

But Qadafi doesn't appear to be going anywhere.  The rebels are completely disorganized, fractured, leaderless, and untrained.  If this is a civil war, I don't see how the rebels win unless the army defects, and there's no sign of that happening.  Qadafi is willing to do what some other leaders in the Arab Spring were not- get really brutal.  So that's why I used the word "forestalled" in the paragraph above- I don't think we've secured the populace from a massacre that's still in their future.  How do we do that?  I don't see any way other than conquest.  And when western countries conquer Muslim ones, the inevitable result is that they hate us eventually.  It's a quagmire we're not going to get out of.

Now I thought at the time that Clinton's failure to intervene in Rwanda in the 1990s was a terrible abdication of basic human values.  But in that case we wouldn't have had to worry about the reaction of the whole Arab world.  They don't want our troops around. 
So here I am.  The No-Fly Zone in and of itself is OK, but soon we're going to have two choices:

1. Escalate our involvement and eventually occupy a 3rd Muslim country
2. Leave the country after inadequately downgrading Qadafi's forces, and then watch him brutally retake the country

It's no good.  We have to disengage.  It's going to be horrible, and many will accuse the US of failing to do enough to promote Democracy.  The problem is that the alternative is even worse.  I'll take #2.

I really hope I'm wrong about this one.

Libyan Indecision

I'm finding myself in the same frame of mind that I was in sometime in 2002 during the runup to the Iraq War. I find it hard to take a strong stand on these types of foreign intervention.

On one hand, we have a humanitarian crisis brewing, with Qadafi using American-made weapons to kill his own people who are making legitimate democratic claims.  On top of that, the guy is a certified nut-case, responsible for a great deal of terrorism back in the day including the downing of Pan AM 103 over Lockerbie.  Although he has come back to the community of nations a bit since then, he's obviously not one of the Good Guys.

On the other hand, bringing ground troops into Muslim countries hasn't been going so well lately, and it's really not clear what sort of strategy we'd have.  We could just do the No-Fly Zone, but Qadafi could still defeat the rebels with ground troops.  Or there could be a stalemate and long civil war.  If we put boots on the ground in a really big country, I don't see how we get out.

On the other other hand, the Arab League has asked the UN to do something, so there's much more legitimacy this time than there was in Iraq.

On the othe other other hand, there's no guarantee that Qadafi's replacement will be any less crazy than he is.

I'm out of hands, and I still don't know what to do.  I guess this is why governments tend to dither sometimes- none of the options look appealing.