Mar 20 2011
Obama’s Manufactured War Will Rally Terrorists Against America
It seems someone in the White House thought it might be a good political move to start a war against an evil enemy to shore up Obama’s image. An image which is in tatters due to his screwing up the economy and sending the nation spiraling into endless debt. And image being eroded due to his restricting access to our own energy resources so that we now are suffering through another energy crisis. An image on display when his party took historical losses in the midterm elections.
Not to mention the fact his recent lack of a caring and determined response on Japan has exposed his inner coldness and self absorption.
It would seem some genius thought the leader of the Peacenik Party should set up an evil (Muslim) straw-man enemy for the Warrior Obama to knock down.
The strategy was simple. First, you exploit the revolutionary streak currently washing across the Arab world to ignite the sleeping opposition – possibly with help from in-country intelligence assets to affirm the Wests’ willingness to provide military support. You do this by signaling, along with other world leaders, the demand that Qadaffi must step down.
Following criticism over its response to the Libyan crisis last week – and after sidestepping the question as recently as Friday – the Obama administration on Saturday for the first time called unambiguously for Muammar Gaddafi to step down.
On this signal civil protests then turn into rebellion and civil war. As the dictator Qadaffi fails to fall from power, he gathers his forces and nearly wipes out the rebels. Thus an international incident is created. The UN votes to fight Qadaffi and the next thing you know America is in another war.
The final spin is how Qadaffi is actually and enemy in the war on terror. This propaganda piece from the NY Times is riddled with BS and misinformation (or is it mis-recollection of historic events), but it completes the picture painted by the Obama administration and the EU to portray Qadaffi as an immediate threat to America – something he was not a month ago.
Asked if American officials feared whether Colonel Qaddafi could open a new terrorism front, Mr. Brennan said: “Qaddafi has the penchant to do things of a very concerning nature. We have to anticipate and be prepared for things he might try to do to flout the will of the international community.”
Among the threats the United States is focusing on is Libya’s stockpile of deadly mustard gas, he said.
Note the lack of any thing specific, just a bad feeling. When did US military action become triggered by unsubstantiated concerns? At least President Bush had evidence of WMDs in Iraq (as in actual weapons). It gets worse. The Time piece mixes it history to pretend Qadaffi had recently become a terrorist, when in fact he was more ally than anything else, since his turn during the Iraqi invasion:
After renouncing its nascent nuclear weapons program in 2003, and enjoying a brief interlude as Washington’s partner in combating Al Qaeda’s branch in North Africa, Libya has reverted to its status as a pariah government whose intelligence operatives blew up Pan Am Flight 103 above Scotland in 1988.
Emphasis mine. That last bit of awkward propaganda is a serious ‘tell‘ about what is really going on here. To connect the 1988 bombing of a passenger airline to Libya since 2003 is an enormous and transparent stretch. This is coming from the White House and dutifully put out by the suppliant NY Times.
The White House has figured out it has stepped into a political nightmare, where it has rattled its left wing base. So it can only find legitimacy with the Hawks – where there will be no great applause for getting America into another war. This is not a war to defend America, no matter how much Obama’s minions gin up the NY Times cheerleaders.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were due to direct attacks on America and Americans. We paid a heavy price to turn al Qaeda from being the future of Islam to being the enemy of main stream Islam.
Libya is not Afghanistan or Iraq. And it won’t fall in days, and it won’t fall quietly.
If you think GITMO is a rallying cry for Islamo Fascists, what do you think Libya will be? Typically capturing terrorists frustrates the forces of evil, but it is an expected part of their efforts. GITMO has never been that much of a rallying point – Iraq and Afghanistan is what sticks in the craw of Osama Bin Laden. Invading another Muslim country – now that will rally the terrorists to the cause!
Update: Speaking of rallying cries:
There, hundreds of supporters offered themselves up as human shields, cheering to newly minted dance songs about their adoration for their leader. “House by house, alley by alley,” the catchiest song went, quoting a Qaddafi speech. “Disinfect the germs from each house and each room.”
The crowd included many women and children, and some said they had family in Colonel Qaddafi’s forces. They said they had come to protect Colonel Qaddafi’s compound from bombing by volunteering to be shields. “If they want to hit Muammar Qaddafi, they must hit us because we are all Muammar Qaddafi,” said Ghazad Muftah, a 52-year-old widow of a soldier from the Warfalla tribe, who said she was there with her six grown children.
Yeah, this will be a cake walk.
Update: LOL! Calls for Impeachement! From the left. And an update from Ed Morrissey on how America is killing Libyan soldiers.
Update: An excellent retrospective on how the White House stumbled into war:
When Muammar el-Qaddafi first struck back against protesters, Obama hoped that tough sanctions and material support to the opposition would be enough to force the dictator from power. Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned him that a “no fly zone” would be ineffective and essentially commit the country to war. By Monday night, it was clear to Obama that this policy wasn’t working. Countries like Iran were getting the wrong message. The Libyan military was selectively testing the patience of the world by striking opposition strongholds. The opposition was pinned down in the port city of Benghazi, swelled by tens of thousands of refugees. Qaddafi kept using a phrase that stuck in Obama’s head: “no mercy.” And France, smarting from seeming to abandon Egyptians during their time of trouble, along with the U.K., were champing at the bit to use force.
…
Gates wanted to game out scenarios, knowing that any effective no-fly zone would necessitate a cascade of other military actions that would look a heck of a lot like an invasion, no matter how carefully it was done.
None of this sounds like a morally sound reason to go to war – looks morr like a lot of bruised egos trying to ‘man up’.
Update: More sound reasoning that uncovers the reactionary thinking behind the war with Qadaffi.
Sarkozy’s France has, without consulting her European allies, already recognized the rebels in apparent control of Benghazi as an alternative government. No one else knows whom they are supporting, and in point of fact, the most promising internal opponents of Gadhafi’s regime are thuggish tribal chiefs and Islamist ideologues we have no reason to prefer to the monster with whom we are overfamiliar.
And as we have already seen, both the strength and ruthlessness of Gadhafi’s Libyan regime, after more than four decades in power, have been underestimated. We cannot foresee, even to the degree we could over Serbia in 1999, the likely results of our “experimental bombing.”
We don’t know what we are doing. We only know that we have moral support for it on paper, from an international organization that is utterly corrupt, wherein members who do not wish us well are pleased to grant us permission to blunder.
That about sums up this incompetent war. These people screwed up a national economy, an international emergency care effort (Japan) and produced historic losses for their party. We expect them to know how to wage war?
Update: This war reeks of hypocrisy
Gadaffi called Obama a “Crusader”.
The Middle East is just about gone. I don’t know what will happen to Israel but its future has become more questionable. Only the Bible can foretell its future!
I don’t understand why we have to go after Libya and not go after the other countries in the ME. I don’t understand the reasons in going after Libya either other than to protect its rebels? First Obama wanted Gadaffi gone, now he says that wasn’t the purpose of the No-Fly zone.
I see that the arab states are balking at enforcing the no-fly zone. Guess when Obama backs out on enforcing the no-fly zone too soon, Europe and Arab states won’t be able to take over.
Is he hoping that Gaddafi will run out of ammunition soon?
I have never seen a military operation as deeply based on wishful thinking on this one. I just heard some military “analyst” opining that once we put in this no fly zone, then the Libyan rebels will be able to launch an offensive against Tripoli.
Excuse me? What fragment of evidence does he have that a rebel “force” capable of doing anything at all even exists? What we’ve seen is a motley and untrained group that collapsed as soon as the slightest amount of force opposed it. I haven’t seen any “rebel force” capable of any kind of coordinated operation, and neither has anyone else.
And yet our entire strategy is based on the existence of such a thing. What is this crowd of great military thinkers going to do after a few days pass and it becomes obvious that there is no one in Libya capable of taking out Qaddafi? Are they going to say “oh, never mind Mr. Moammar, we’re sorry for all that unpleasantness. Can we make up now?”
Not likely, because that would mean admitting to a mistake. And this is how wimps drag countries into wars far more long lasting and devastating than any well planned and honest military adventure would ever be.
it is comical how quickly the Arab League turned around, from asking for help to complaining about same. The Arab League’s attitude can be summed up as “Daddy! Daddy! Make bad scary man go away!!!!” Oh NOOO!!! Now you bad scary man too, Daddy! WAAAH! WAAAAAAHHHH!!!!
Anyone who pays any attention to anything people like this say is no better than they are.
AJ,
Liberal interventionism means intervening only when our interests are minimal, followed by cutting and running when those interests become vital, by virtue of our being there.
The Libyan intervention has all the hallmarks of a bureaucracy presenting all the options to an ‘Empty Suit’ leader, and painting scary pictures for all the outcomes, save the one the bureaucracy wants the empty suit to select.
It takes a High Energy Executive to get around such games.
Clinton did so on Bosnia in 1995 and Kosovo in 1999 over US Military high command and European objections.
Bush 43 did in committing the American military to the Iraqi Surge in 2006, despite US Army high command objections.
Obama hasn’t been a high energy executive since the Health Care Bill was passed in 2009 and never has been on foreign policy.
The two key points in any foreign intervention into a revolution are that;
1) Successful revolutions breed greater tyrannies [Exhibit A of American Exceptionalism] and
2) That institutions are more stable than people.
For Libya, we need a non-Islamicist, relatively local, institution in control to do this (or any other Muslim failed state, come to that) intervention right.
And yes, sometimes institution-interventions don’t work (See Nicaragua’s Guardia Nacional and Haiti’s Gendarmerie), but the one thing we can count on is for authoritarian tyrants to age.
(See Jeane Kirkpatrick — “Traditional authoritarian governments are less repressive than revolutionary autocracies.”)
The only way to do a Libyan intervention right is for America to pay the Egyptian Army to take over Libya and encourage them to share oil revenues with deserving Libyans, minus the cost of “security operations/occupation.”
Egypt has some really compelling security interests at stake here:
http://hotair.com/archives/2011/03/19/quotes-of-the-day-629/
“According to a cache of al Qaeda documents captured in 2007 by U.S. special operations commandos in Sinjar, Iraq, hundreds of foreign fighters, many of them untrained young Islamic volunteers, poured into Iraq in 2006 and 2007. The documents, called the Sinjar documents, were collected, translated and analyzed at the West Point Counter Terrorism Center.
Almost one in five foreign fighters arriving in Iraq came from eastern Libya, from the towns of Surt, Misurata and Darnah.
“On a per capita basis, that’s more than twice as many than came from any other Arabic-speaking country, amounting to what the counter terrorism center called a Libyan ‘surge’ of young men eager to kill Americans…
“‘Lingering civil conflict in Libya (certain to happen if Gaddafi clings to power) would create ample ground for radicalization and extremist recruitment,’ Yasser al-Shimy, an Egyptian diplomat who defected during the last days of the Mubarak regime, wrote recently. Protracted civil conflict ‘usually induces radicalization and chaos. In other words, Libya might turn into a giant Somalia: a failed state on Egypt’s borders with radical groups taking advantage of the mayhem,’ al-Shimy wrote in the blog, Best Defense. Or as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Friday about the immediate future of Libya: ‘We don’t know what the outcome will be.’”
***
Based upon the above, it would be easy to convince the Egyptians that dealing with “Q’Daffy” would be very much in their self interest…assuming Obama’s people have the wit to go there.
Otherwise a worst case outcome of an Iranian or Hamas style Islamist terrorist supporting state in Libya is very likely.
Yet it is the history of Liberal Interventionism to pick individuals — Aristede in Haiti, Diem in Vietnam are both examples — to pin interventions on and not institutions.
This Libyan intervention will be messier than the 1999 Kosovo War, and longer.
Gaddafi said he was fighting al Queda…….maybe it is the truth. Who is to say the eastern Libyans are good guys and not the very same people we were fighting in Iraq. I have read that they are, I don’t believe much……..I wait to see what they do.
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Sounds as if almost everyone commenting is of about the same opinion as I am, that what we get in it’s place may be worse than what we had.
Trent said: ” bureaucracy presenting all the options to an ‘Empty Suit’ leader, ”
I’m going to be an advocate for naming this the “Empty Suit Diplomacy” of Obama.
It’s actually going to be much better if “Empty Suit” stays out of this. Go play golf….
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