American Strategic Stupidity on Display Again — Short-Sighted U.S. Diplomacy in the United Nations Commits Americans to another Counterproductive Intervention — this Time in Libya

© 2011 Peter Free

 

18 March 2011

 

 

The inability to learn characterizes American policy — witness the short-sightedness of diplomatic efforts that put the U.S. in exactly the position it should not want to occupy in regard to Libya

 

By exerting diplomatic pressure on the United Nations to authorize a no-fly zone in Libya, the Administration compounded the strategic error it made in digging a deeper hole in Afghanistan.

 

Where the President inherited a war that he later escalated in Afghanistan, he now is now probably going to have to start one of his own in Libya.

 

Certainly, one can commiserate with President Obama, given the turbulence that his presidency has had thrust upon it.  But at the same time, one can criticize the Administration for escalating the scale of its problems with its demonstrated inability to reason strategically.

 

The case against intervention in Libya has been clear since day one:

 

(1) U.S. interests there are minimal.

 

(2) Results of intervention are profoundly uncertain.

 

(3) Success is impossible to define.

 

(4) The hostility likely to be gained probably outweighs that to be lost.

 

(5) American military forces are already grossly overextended.

 

We have only to look to the seemingly interminable fiasco in Afghanistan to recognize that military interventions that lack articulable and achievable strategic focus are counterproductive.

 

In Libya, the extent of our reasoning for intervention appears to be that Qaddafi is a bad man.  Analysis of the problematic elements related to intervening in a third Muslim country escapes many of our violence-prone leaders, Senators Kerry, Lieberman, and McCain prominently among them.

 

The President appears to have joined this group of eager, militaristic bumblers.

 

By authorizing Secretary of State Clinton and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to pressure the United Nations into authorizing a no-fly zone over Libya, the Administration has forced itself into a strategic corner from which the United States probably has no graceful escape but to intervene or appear to intervene.

 

Even a behind-the-scenes intervention (by letting coalition partners do all the flying) has the potential to reap the same enmity that actual intervention would.  Muslim nations’ anger toward perennial American manipulations of their affairs will not be deflected by a ruse.

 

For the United States, there are three practical problems that penetrate the camouflage a coalition approach gives us. Each of these weakens our ability to pretend that the United States is not the prime mover in intervening in yet another Muslim country:

 

(i) Only the United States has the resources to organize, coordinate, and implement a genuinely effective no-fly zone on such short notice.

 

(ii) A no-fly zone, by itself, is not likely to work any more effectively to prevent slaughter than it did in Iraq and Bosnia, where (as Secretary of State Clinton has already pointed out) the no-fly approach did not work.

 

(iii) If there is a moral interest in preventing Qaddafi from slaughtering his people, why would it end simply because a no-fly zone failed — would not ground intervention follow?

 

An intelligent strategist does not paint herself/himself into an option-less corner that sound geopolitical strategy would avoid.  Yet the Administration’s behind-the-scenes negotiations toward achieving the United Nations no-fly zone resolution has accomplished exactly that.

 

How strategically witless can one get?

 

 

A clue to the self-defeating nature of military intervention in Libya comes from China and Russia’s abstentions from the U.N. vote

 

Why did China and Russia abstain from the U.N. Security Council vote, when they could have killed the resolution with vetoes?

 

Answer:

 

China and Russia get two benefits:

 

(1) They may be perceived as pseudo-humanitarian countries, at no cost to themselves.

 

(2) They can watch the United States drain itself of blood and cash, while we eventually become still further burdened with the anger that will likely result from intervening in a region of the world filled with people who dislike or hate our policies.

 

When competing great powers get out of our way, we should surmise that we are on a self-destructive course.

 

 

Can we really be this stupid?

 

Apparently, it was not enough for President Obama to futilely bleed our soldiers and Marines in Afghanistan.

 

Now he wants to:

 

(a) potentially add Air Force and Navy personnel as a fertile source of more bodies;

 

(b) foreseeably (by logic of the morality that drew us into the no-fly resolution) provide our ground troops with another strategically pointless arena to die and be maimed in;

 

(c) divert attention and resources from already strapped Afghanistan;

 

and

 

(d) further escalate the budget deficit.

 

This is leadership?