Libya And Strategic Deficits

Blake Hounshell’s (remember praktike? he’s a genuine Big Deal now…they grow up so damn fast…) Twitter stream, I’m sent (approvingly) to Dan Nexon’s ‘The Duck of Minerva’ blog, where he writes (approvingly) about the lack of a doctrinal cover for Obama’s intervention in Libya.

Now I have mixed feelings about this intervention; on one hand the lid is coming off the Arab kleptocracies as I discussed back in ’03 – which is a Good Thing. But we have no plans or capabilities in place to compete for the allegiance and affection of the lately-oppressed people whose dictators we supported for a generation – which is a Really Bad Thing.

But here’s Nexon:

That kind of thing makes liberal hawks get all starry eyed. But what makes Libya different than most of the other places where tyrannical governments do nasty things to their citizens isn’t terribly Wilsonsian:

* Qaddafi’s rule over Libya is, on balance, a net negative for US interests;

* The US doesn’t care much for most of his friends either;

* He’s sitting on not insignificant fossil fuel deposits;

* He has no real support among the great powers; and

* The UK, US, and France really, really, really don’t like the guy.

Well, gosh, that’s not very useful. because if that’s good policy, then invading Iraq made perfect sense – and as we all know, the smart kids have all determined that it made no sense (I’m remaining on the fence myself, but I’m neither smart nor a kid).

Here’s the issue; in my work I’m talking to people all the time about the difference between a strategy and a platitude. Platitudes sound a lot like strategies, but there’s a key difference – they don’t help shape action in a meaningful way. So just as science requires that a theory be falsifiable in order to be scientific, strategy has to cover certain actions and not others, and group actions into necessary, good, unnecessary and bad.

And unless the modern foreign-policy commentariat can a) make up a strategy that distinguishes Libya from Iraq (except by saying that for the fact that one is the product of a good president, and one the product of a bad one), or b) determine that Iraq was just as good a strategic idea as Libya – we’re flat out of strategies.

And that’s a Bad Thing. It’s a bad thing first because being able to articulate a strategy is the way that we – the American polity – buy in, and buy in is needed if we’re going to spend $600M/week in these parlous times. It’s also the way that we have a chance to attract all those struggling for liberation – for ideals. What ideals are we trying to project, and how? What are we asking of them to defend those ideals, and what are we prepared to spend in turn?

Like it or not, those are strategic questions. And simply saying that good interventions, like p0rn, are something we know when we see, is nowhere near enough.

Do-over, Nexon? prak?

22 thoughts on “Libya And Strategic Deficits”

  1. bq. _It’s a bad thing first because being able to articulate a strategy is the way that we – the American polity – buy in, and buy in is needed if we’re going to spend $600M/week in these parlous times._

    It also matters if the POTUS wants the American polity to buy in. As far as I’m concerned he doesn’t. It’s not a war; it doesn’t need Congress involved; it doesn’t need me to understand anything other than the decider’s good intentions. Don’t need to know much because by the time the public understands, we’ll be out of there and you’ll wonder why you worried your pretty little heads about it.

  2. Well the obvious response you will here is that we have no boots on the ground in Libya. This, however, reveals an even deeper naivety regarding being able to control just how much or how little of a war you end up in.

    I don’t think many people have taken into account just how far Ghadafi is willing to go- this is a man that engineered the destruction of a passenger airliner and bombing of a nightclub. What happens if he manages something similar in the near future?

  3. What huge historical opportunities are squandered here, when intelligent and determined diplomatic action might have accomplished the work of many wars, and prevented many wars. Why now?

    It’s instructive that the pseudo-pacifists, when their arrogant assumption of diplomatic prowess proves false, can think of nothing except to lash out with no plan or purpose. Maybe it was no accident that Gandhi plunged India into war, and Nehru did the same after him.

    There may not be enough gold to mint the peace prizes they’ll be handing out after this fucking fiasco.

  4. Mark,
    That’s my basic fear as well. One way to distinguish Libya and Iraq is that unlike Saddam, Ghadafi has a proven track record of killing bunches of civilians in other countries, not just his own. It’s his method of doing business.

    Also, this appears to be a guy who, if he wanted to retire to a life of exiled luxury, could have done it at many points over the last 20 years or so.

    My prediction is a basic stalemate. The rebels seem entrenched in the eastern half of the country, but apparently got their asses kicked over the last couple days when they tried to move West. Legally (as in… operating through the UN) I picture moves eventually happening to break up Libya. If emerging international legal norms exist for breaking of Kosovo or East Timor along historical lines, why not an independent Cyrenaica?

    This probably sets up enough of an international firewall around these folks that Ghadafi can’t get to them. Unfortunately, if he stays in power and can’t get to them, his MO suggests he’ll go back to blowing up Westerners. So really, the only way to “win” is to kill him, and quickly.

  5. _And simply saying that good interventions, like p0rn, are something we know when we see, is nowhere near enough._

    Yes, but it’s been true for 30 years, and there’s no sign (or will) to change this. Every president in my lifetime (and probably yours too) has used the flag of freedom to aid some(for example Iraq, Yogoslavia), while simultaneously allowing freedom to robbed by other groups (for example Rwanda, South America).

    Whether you agree (or not) with an overseas affair probably has nothing to do with your ‘morals’ or ‘strategery’ than with:
    partisan affiliation
    view of entrenched peoples,
    effects or personal/national gain

    But saying so is political suicide. Presidents want to look Bold and Altruistic when they help, but ignore the situations that don’t fit in the above paradigm.

  6. I would add to alchemist’s list:

    perceived threat of negative outcomes.

    I’m most concerned that what is being billed as an insurgency movement is merely a tribal civil war and that supporting the rebels with half measures will only end up getting as many people killed as were theoretically saved, and that our understandable unwillingness to put boots on the ground poses the risk of replacing one strong man rule with either another or two.

    I’m officialy of “no opinion” on this thing.

  7. My biggest critique with Obama on this is how off the cuff he has done it. He didn’t have his Congressional ducks lined up- he didn’t need them then but he may well wish he had if this thing drags on. This is absolutely ‘Obama’s War’ and that’s an unforced error, he could have spent the weeks before the attack rounding up congressional support so he could get some more finger prints on the thing. As it is, Obama will get the blame if an airliner goes down with a Libyan bomb aboard (true, he’ll garner the praise if this ends well somehow).

    There is no strategic vision here, or even a victory condition. Holding on to the hope of Ghadafi being overthrown by his toadies is no strategy at all, and the fact that Obama seems to believe that this is our way out is more disturbing to me than anything else I’ve seen from him. Hope is not a plan, and dictators are always ‘on the cusp’ of overthrow.

    Finally the lack of any doctrine or larger principle behind this act is both troubling and disappointing. Instead of giving pause to other actors around the world, it may embolden them. Assad in Syria should be sweating bullets right now, and to the contrary he must feel very confident he has no reason to fear being next in the crosshairs. Even if we have no intention of going next to Syria, Assad doesn’t need to be sure of that.

  8. The problem is not having or not having a doctrine. the problem is entering into a civil war in the first place.

    Let’s step back a bit and look at this not in terms of our interests, (Which, by the way it is not) but in terms of minding our own business. We are not responsible for every sparrow that falls from the sky.

    As far as doctrine is concerned, W’s worked out just fine. A decade and counting of war to no seeming purpose. an on going occupation, instability in the region, the strengthening of Iran. That doctrine worked out really well.

    Neither this administration nor the one that preceded it had anything close to a clue about the region. We now are involved in three conflicts in the Muslim world, two for a decade.

    Now that takes real genius!!

  9. _”I think our Isreali client state is doing a bang up job with Syria, why not leave it at that?”_

    Because Israel is being enclosed in an ever tighter ring of rockets and missiles and several of their arch foes are developing nuclear weapons… less a couple that Bush and his crazy neocons took out of play (one being Libya).

    This argument is so silly because it always posits that we dont really have any vital interests in the region when in fact we do, and they are routinely threatened. Should we have let Iraq have Kuwait? Iran have the Persian Gulf? Afghanistan continue to house Bin Ladin?

    I love this ‘I’m not an isolationist i just don’t believe in doing anything’ nonsense. All it really amounts to is waiting until something particularly bad has already happened before hoping you can pick up the pieces.

  10. My back of the envelope calculation was roughly $260 in aid per Israeli and $182 in aid per Palestinian for FY 2010.

    Anyhow, I’m a little perplexed as to how any questioning of the worth of interventionism is equated to isolationism. Are the Chinese, Russians, Indians, Brazilians, Germans, etc all isolationists?

  11. Which led to an indefinite quantity of US forces tied down in the region for years to keep Hussein in line… which was one of the rationale used by OBL in his 911 attacks if it matters. It also led us to the great uncertainty game of WMDs and terrorist activities that brought us to gulf war 2, supported by republicans and democrats alike by the way (and scary neocons of course). Say what you want about Iraq, we aren’t wondering what Hussein is up to while his missiles fly after our jets on a day to day basis any more. And his oil spigot isnt being turned on and off as he jacks the world around and makes the West look like toothless chumps either.

  12. And playing the ‘Israel will be fine’ game will continue to work until it stops working. The Arabs only have to be lucky once, Israel had better be lucky every time.

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