Last weekend, nearly three weeks after Obama declared that
terrorist dictator Gaddafi must leave, U.S. and British forces
launched more than 100 Tomahawk cruise missiles against Libyan
targets and — with the French — established a no-fly zone denying
Gaddafi’s air forces the ability to kill the rebels still remaining
in the eastern city of Benghazi.
But what are we attempting to accomplish in Libya? Obama
and Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen have made it clear that
we are not trying to remove Gaddafi and only want to protect Libyan
civilians from him. And Obama has said that our commitment will
last only for days or weeks. So what is the end state that
President Obama’s strategy is designed to achieve?
A quick survey of Obama’s Middle East seems to reveal a
region as unstable as it has been since Messrs. Sikes and Picot met
to divvy up the remnants of the Ottoman Empire in 1916. Looking a
bit deeper, we see that Obama’s doctrine is destabilizing the
Middle Eastern nations that are at best unreliably aligned with us
while our principal enemies — the terror-sponsoring nations such
as Iran and Syria — are unaffected by his
ministrations.
European liberals and Islamists around the world are
rejoicing at President Obama’s decision to renounce leadership and
commit American military power in UN-sanctioned action against
Gaddafi’s forces. They rejoice because Obama has granted the
achievement of their ultimate goal: American foreign policy and the
employment of American military power have been subordinated to the
whims and caprices of their multilateralism.
Progress since President Obama began his campaign to
remake our relationship with the Arab world is measured in these
facts: Saudi Arabia managed to crush nascent internal protests and
send tanks to Bahrain to prop up the latter’s own little despotism.
Libya, Yemen and Tunisia are aflame. Egypt is hanging on the edge,
holding a post-revolutionary constitutional referendum and Iraq is
caught between Maliki’s strongman ambitions and al-Sadr’s
Iran-funded Shiite supremacy. Lebanon’s Hizballah — also
Iran-funded and armed — is being used as a deterrent against an
Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
Among the loudest lobbyists for the UN action and U.S.
intervention in Libya were the Saudis and the Arab League. Having
failed to get the Arab League to take military action on its own —
and fearing that Iran was behind the unrest in Bahrain and Libya —
the Saudis were calling for quick action by the UN. The Arab League
blessed the idea of a no-fly zone over Libya but weren’t willing to
provide their own air forces to help.
Obama’s presidency was predicated on the evils of
unilateral American action and repairing our broken relations with
the Islamic world. But he has now intervened in a Middle Eastern
civil war. Yet our Libyan war, like the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, isn’t aimed at our principal enemies — the
terror-sponsors in Iran, Syria and — yes, Saudi Arabia — which
weren’t the focus of President Bush’s nation-building in Iraq and
Afghanistan and aren’t now the focus of Obama’s new military
action.
The Libyan operation, as Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) said on
yesterday’s Fox News Sunday, is not about protecting
American interests. This is about Obama’s desire to subordinate
American power to the “international community.” He was maneuvered
into this action by the Europeans, the Arab League, and the ladies
on his national security team led by Hillary Clinton.
As I’ve written many times, the war the terror-sponsoring
nations wage against us can only be won by forcing those nations to
cease their support of Islamic terrorism. We have no interest in
Libya sufficient to justify the use of American military power.
Obama declared that Gaddafi must go, but the mission he assigned
doesn’t include removing Gaddafi. Adm. Mike Mullen,
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on the same Sunday
morning show that our mission was only to enforce the UN’s
decision, protect civilians, and establish safe corridors for
humanitarian relief.
How long will we be fighting in Libya? Obama has said it
would be days, not weeks. The Bosnia NFZ lasted about three years.
The NFZ established over Saddam’s Iraq lasted from 1991 until 2003.
There is no strategic goal in Libya, so there is no end point to
this operation. If our desire is to protect civilians from Gaddafi
and we aren’t going to remove him, we could be there
indefinitely.
Bahrain’s despotism is one of our more important allies in
the Middle East, the nation where we base our Fifth Fleet. The
rebellion against the Bahraini government may well have been
created in Iran.
Because Bahrain shares a border with Saudi Arabia and
because it feared Iran’s influence there, the Saudis sent about
1,000 troops into Bahrain to help its government defeat the rebels.
Whatever the immediate result, the Iranians will not cease their
support for revolution in Bahrain and other nations they perceive
to be aligned with the West.
Yemen is also on Saudi Arabia’s border but its violent
protests have not drawn Saudi intervention. Government forces there
have fired on protesters and killed dozens if not hundreds. Yemen
is another al-Qaeda nursery but it hasn’t — at least obviously —
fallen under Iran’s hegemony. Its threat to Saudi Arabia not being
apparent, there is no hint of Saudi intervention.
Egypt’s future is up for grabs. The removal of Hosni
Mubarak was largely peaceful thanks to the Egyptian army’s refusal
to intervene. Last weekend Egyptians voted on an army-sponsored
constitutional referendum to establish limits on presidential
power. But the growing influence of the Islamic Brotherhood and
other Islamists has terrified the Coptic Christian community. Egypt
will not be stabilized for months or years to come, and when it is
it may be another Islamist dictatorship and sponsor of
terror.
Iraq is suffering increased terrorism on the eve of the
last U.S. forces withdrawing. Iraqis have taken to the streets,
demonstrating against Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government
and its inability to provide security. Maliki, in turn, has stalled
sharing power over the nation’s security and armed forces,
generating more political heat from former PM Iyad Allawi and
playing into the hands of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr who
returned months ago from years of “study” in Iran.
Iraq’s increasing instability probably foreshadows the
next violent rebellion in the Middle East. Iran, the historic enemy
of Iraq, is eagerly awaiting our final withdrawal this summer.
Maliki’s government is not likely to survive the year.
And Lebanon’s Hizballah may wait another year or two to
begin yet another war with Israel. Hizballah has been re-armed
massively since the last conflict in 2006. Tens of thousands of
missiles aimed at Israel ensure against an Israeli attack against
Iran. Israel — under continuous pressure over settlements and
suffering brutal murders by Palestinian terrorists — sits on a
razor’s edge. It can only avoid devastating attacks by Hizballah if
it continues to acquiesce in Iran’s nuclear progress.
Weakness is provocative, as former defense secretary
Donald Rumsfeld is fond of saying. Obama’s doctrine of
multilateralism — subordinating American power and interests to
the will of other nations — is a profession of weakness to all the
terror-sponsoring nations.
Across the Middle East, Obama’s doctrine is provoking our
enemies to action. What is happening in Libya, Egypt, Yemen,
Bahrain, Iraq and Tunisia is only beginning to show its
effect.
Gaddafi has promised a long war and he may be able to make
good on the promise. But what will we do? Are we prepared for
another long war, straining our already-stretched military
resources further to no apparent purpose?
Obama’s decision to use military force in Libya was wrong,
and it compounds his — and his predecessor’s — mistakes in the
war the terror-sponsors wage against us. We have entered a fight at
the UN’s behest. Will Obama await UN approval to withdraw our
forces? Will he commit our forces to an endless UN “peacekeeping”
operation there? We — and the terror sponsors in Tehran, Damascus,
and elsewhere — eagerly await his answer.
