Scarcely three weeks after the U.S. military launched Operation
Odyssey Dawn, the war in Libya is beginning to look like President
Obama’s worst failure to date. While official Washington and the
political press have been focused on budget negotiations and the
prospect of a federal government shutdown, a foreign-policy
disaster has been slowly unfolding in the deserts of the North
African nation that Col. Moammar Gaddafi has ruled for more than
four decades.
It was more than a month ago, during a
March 3 press conference, that Obama declared his intent to
“send a clear message: the violence must stop; Muammar
Gaddafi has lost the legitimacy to lead and he must leave.” Gaddafi
hasn’t left yet, nor has the 68-year-old dictator indicated any
intention of leaving any time soon, and the military actions of the
United States and our allies do not seem calculated to force
Gaddafi from power.
Least of all does Gaddafi’s continued rule seem
jeopardized by the poorly armed and ill-organized Libyan rebels.
Since March 28, when the Benghazi-based rebels had advanced far
enough west to threaten
Gaddafi’s hometown of Sirte, they have retreated more than 200
miles. The rebel retreat has entailed their loss of the oil ports
of Ras Lanuf and Brega on the Mediterranean coast in eastern Libya
and, as of Thursday, it appeared the rebels might even be on the
verge of retreating from their forward base at Ajdabiya, 50 miles
east of Brega. Further west, meanwhile, the rebels were grimly
holding onto parts of Misrata, Libya’s third-largest city, under a
relentless siege by Gaddafi’s forces.
Army Gen. Carter Ham, head of U.S. Africa Command, told a
Thursday hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee that the
military situation in Libya has developed into a stalemate. Gen.
Ham’s assessment may actually be a bit optimistic, as there were
reports yesterday of “mass
panic” among the rebels near Ajdabiya and their total defeat
seems more likely than a decisive victory over Gaddafi’s
army.
The military shortcomings of the Libya rebels were
dramatically illustrated last weekend when Geraldo Rivera of Fox
News accompanied a group of fighters toward the front near Brega
and came under
fire. After being pinned down and then nearly left behind when
the rebels retreated, Rivera angrily huffed that he was
“as worried about getting shot in the back by the good
guys as I was getting shot in the front by the Gaddafi forces.”
Describing the “absolute disorganization” of the rebels, whom he
called an “unruly gang,” Rivera warned against giving them
additional arms: “I swear to God, if you give these people weapons
more powerful than they have right now, they will be a grave danger
to themselves and others.” Nor was Rivera alone in
this low estimate of the rebels. Another
reporter in Libya described them as
“a hapless bunch” armed with a “mishmash” of
weapons “which few of them know how to use.” Despite worries that
the rebel forces are influenced by al-Qaeda operatives or other
Islamic jihadists, their alleged extremism is clearly no substitute
for military competence.
Military competence also seems in short supply among our
NATO allies whose air power was supposed to keep Qaddafi’s forces
in check. Last weekend, a NATO strike mistakenly killed 13 rebels
and there was another
reported NATO friendly-fire incident Thursday
which knocked out some of the rebels’ precious few tanks and killed
several more opposition fighters, prompting
one angry rebel to ask, “Why did they
do this? Do they want Gaddafi to win?”
It’s a fair question. The problem, of course, is that the
United States and NATO have intervened under terms that (officially
at least) require a sort of agnostic approach toward the outcome of
the fighting between Gaddafi’s forces and the opposition. When the
U.S. launched Operation Odyssey Dawn on March 19, it was in
fulfillment of a United Nations Security Council “humanitarian”
mandate, to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya and prevent Gaddafi’s
regime from slaughtering civilians. So while Obama has made various
bellicose declarations — “The noose has tightened
around” Gaddafi, whose “days are numbered,” the president
told CBS News last week — achieving regime change in Libya is
not part of NATO’s UN-approved mission. Such are Obama’s
self-proclaimed “core principles” in seeking to avert a “potential
humanitarian crisis” on behalf of “the entire international
community,” as he explained at a
March 21 press conference.
Obama’s eloquent expressions of his commitment to
multilateralism aren’t much help to the ragtag rebels fighting
Gaddafi’s army. Neither did the rebels derive any military gain
from the decision this week of Italy to join France and Qatar in
extending
diplomatic recognition to their interim government, the
Benghazi-based Libyan National Council. Obama’s
admirers who have sometimes compared their idol to John F. Kennedy
might not find the comparison so flattering, now that the president
has stumbled into a situation that is beginning to resemble the
botched 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.
The most tragic aspects of this situation are playing out
in the sands of North Africa, where anti-Gaddafi fighters are dying
for an increasingly forlorn hope. (The military stalemate may
result in something very much like
Roger Kaplan’s proposed idea for the partition of Libya.) While
hardly comparable to the suffering of the Libyans, the domestic
political consequences of Obama’s foreign-policy failure are not to
be underestimated. Many of his liberal supporters were dismayed by
the president’s resort to military intervention, and the prolonged
conflict in Libya — is it too soon to call it a “quagmire”? — has
helped push gasoline prices closer to $4 a gallon. Libya ranks only
18th among nations in terms of oil production, but the loss of its
1.5 million barrels per day is not insignificant, and crude oil is
now trading at prices not seen since September 2008. Some analysts
expect prices to reach as a high as
$150 a barrel later this year, and at least one Democratic
consultant has said the spike in fuel prices is a “mortal
peril” to Obama’s re-election prospects.
None of this is to say that the situation in Libya is
entirely hopeless. Gaddafi’s regime is being squeezed by economic
sanctions, there are reportedly shortages of food and other
necessities in Tripoli, and the dictator might be ousted next week
or next month, for all we know. Three weeks into the first American
military intervention of Obama’s choosing, however, the prospects
are not encouraging. The best support that New York Times
columnist Tom
Friedman could offer for Obama’s Libya policy was his prayer
that the president would be “lucky.” That was on March
29, when anti-Gaddafi fighters still controlled Ras Lanuf and
Brega. One report late yesterday described a rebel retreat that had
turned into a “stampede”
from Ajdabiya toward Benghazi. And so it appears that Obama’s luck
may be running out in Libya.
