Libya

I don’t feel well tonight-for a wide variety of reasons. So hunkered down on the couch and watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid. I was a whopping 14 years old when I saw that movie the first time in the theater.

And that movie and one of its opening scenes is probably a good analogy for our mistaken adventure in Libya:

“Think you used enough dynamite there, Obama?”

People who lecture in favor of intervention in Libya have lost all rights to complain about, in no random order:  the deficit, wasteful government spending, taxes that are too high, or the general no good that a neo colonial foreign policy accomplishes.

Lets cut to the chase-when we discard ideas about national soverignty and think we have a right intervene in the internal affairs of another soverign nation that is not threatening us in any way-then we are setting ourselves up for a much bigger disaster down the pike.

And as painful as it may be to admit, Khadaffi attacking his own people is an internal Libyan matter. Period end of statement. Just because the rebels did not win in a walk in the early innings-was no reason to impose the infield no- fly rule in order to prevent the other side from tying up the score.

It’s dumb-and mark my words-it is going to end up biting the US in the ass.

1) Khadaffi is not even a tenth rate threat to the United States.Maybe 20+ years ago when I was flying at or above the so-called line of death, participating in Operation “Taunt the MiGs to come out so we can shoot them down and get some air medals“-but he’s been pretty much in the box for the better part of ten years.

A guy writing for Fallows at the Atlantic sums it up well:

Up to 17 February 2011, we were perfectly happy with Muhammar Qaddafi. We bought his oil and gas, we did very good business with him, we sold him our goods. Most importantly, he had been tamed. The peccadilloes of his youth, such as downing passenger planes in the skies of Scotland, had been forgiven. What was important was that he had stopped ranting against the US and Israel and given up on providing help to their overenthusiastic foes. Everybody knew that he was a ruthless and violent dictator, but it was far more convenient to picture him as an eccentric Bedouin who loved sunglasses, tents, amazons and colorful clothes.

But after 17 February 2011, things changed radically. All of a sudden, it appeared that he could rapidly be swept away by huge Libyan crowds that had materialized out of nowhere. This was worrying, because it was not easy to imagine who exactly would end up taking over the country, its oil and gas, the revenues from its oil and gas, and more importantly, the weight that could be pulled with the revenues from its oil and gas. But the wave of enthusiasm that the media had spread about the New Arab Awakening was simply overpowering.

 

This is where naive idiots like Nicholas Kristof deserve a heaping round of scorn. A whole new generation of pilots and navigators will spend hours boring holes in the sky, burning dead dinosaurs, to accomplish very little. Thanks asshole-thanks a lot. ( Or getting shot down or having to bailout of Libya).

2) Airpower does not save civilian lives in the sense it is being presented in the papers.  There are only three things airpower does: 1)Drop bombs for the purpose of killing people and destroying buildings and things. 2) Move items and people from point a to point b (this includes moving JP-8 to a point in the sky so a Hornet can then suck on a hose). 3) Perform surveillance on some one you want to watch ( Visually or electronically).

Notice-“impressing dictators who want to stay in power” is not any where on that list. This is generally why No Fly zones don’t really work except in a limited sense in that given sufficient volumes of all three of the types of sorties listed above, you can keep the other side from flying aircraft. You can’t stop them from attacking people on the ground-unless you pick a side and then perform mission 1) on the other side. We can’t make up our minds if this is what we are doing or not.

3.  Humanitarian imperatives make a poor basis for foreign policy. Otherwise there  would have been a no fly zone over Myanmar long ago. Or Sri Lanka. Or Congo. Or……..   well there are a lot of names to fill in the list.

BTW-how much comfort is a no fly zone in Libya providing to the people of Bahrain right now? Or Yemen? Or even Egypt.

4. Even if Khadaffi goes, do we really know what we are getting in his place? I don’t think so.

And then there is the opportunity cost to consider. How much damage does this do to an already overstretched military, and how many Chinese, Russian, or Indian aircraft are participating? For that matter how many Arabs are playing? ZERO.  These folks however will reap the benefit of our spending money that we supposedly don’t have. They will also reap the benefit of the higher oil prices its going to cause. (For good and ill as they pay more for gas, but launder more of the money the rest of the world uses to pay for it).

The administration has not made a sufficient case that Libya’s situation is so unique that it required a massive Western intervention. Khadaffi may have been attacking his own people-but he was not attacking anyone else. He won’t be the first or the last Arab leader to do that. Certainly there are a lot more tragedies going on in the world that we simply do nothing about. So appeals to the moral high ground tend to have no affect on me.

This is wrong for the same reason that Iraq was wrong. The United States of America ended up pressing an military intervention into a sovereign country that had not attacked it. Or even participated with others in an attack on it.

Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of the GOP would never have stood for this. He would have had the CIA funnel arms to the rebels-and maybe even could have gotten into a scandal of where the secret money came from. But he certainly would have recognized, as he did in Lebanon, that prolonged involvement in an Arab country never leads anywhere good.

This intervention is bad foreign policy and its a bad precedent to set. We, the West, will really come to regret this.