Great Game redux
by digby
This is an interesting behind the scenes report on the decision to endorse military action in Libya. An excerpt:
At the start of this week, the consensus around Washington was that military action against Libya was not in the cards. However, in the last several days, the White House completely altered its stance and successfully pushed for the authorization for military intervention against Libyan leader Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi. What changed?
The key decision was made by President Barack Obama himself at a Tuesday evening senior-level meeting at the White House, which was described by two administration officials as “extremely contentious.” Inside that meeting, officials presented arguments both for and against attacking Libya. Obama ultimately sided with the interventionists. His overall thinking was described to a group of experts who had been called to the White House to discuss the crisis in Libya only days earlier.
“This is the greatest opportunity to realign our interests and our values,” a senior administration official said at the meeting, telling the experts this sentence came from Obama himself. The president was referring to the broader change going on in the Middle East and the need to rebalance U.S. foreign policy toward a greater focus on democracy and human rights.
But Obama’s stance in Libya differs significantly from his strategy regarding the other Arab revolutions. In Egypt and Tunisia, Obama chose to rebalance the American stance gradually backing away from support for President Hosni Mubarak and Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and allowing the popular movements to run their course. In Yemen and Bahrain, where the uprisings have turned violent, Obama has not even uttered a word in support of armed intervention – instead pressing those regimes to embrace reform on their own. But in deciding to attack Libya, Obama has charted an entirely new strategy, relying on U.S. hard power and the use of force to influence the outcome of Arab events.
“In the case of Libya, they just threw out their playbook,” said Steve Clemons, the foreign policy chief at the New America Foundation. “The fact that Obama pivoted on a dime shows that the White House is flying without a strategy and that we have a reactive presidency right now and not a strategic one.”
This article represents the argument as essentially between the humanitarian interventionists, which includes SOS Clinton, and the “realists” including Robert Gates, who worry about American being drawn into yet another war:
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon also said on Thursday that the justification for the use of force was based on humanitarian grounds, and referred to the principle known as Responsibility to Protect (R2P), “a new international security and human rights norm to address the international community’s failure to prevent and stop genocides, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.”
“Resolution 1973 affirms, clearly and unequivocally, the international community’s determination to fulfill its responsibility to protect civilians from violence perpetrated upon them by their own government,” he said.
Inside the NSC, Power, Smith, and McFaul have been trying to figure out how the administration could implement R2P and what doing so would require of the White House going forward. Donilon and McDonough are charged with keeping America’s core national interests more in mind. Obama ultimately sided with Clinton and those pushing R2P — over the objections of Donilon and Gates.
Right. And the fact that similar circumstances are happening all over the middle east and Africa and the US isn’t chomping at the bit to intervene on the people’s behalf doesn’t strike anyone as suspicious? R2P is a noble concept. But the fact that it is only being invoked when France Total, ENI Italy, Conoco Phillips, Exxon and all the rest of the usual suspects are involved is curious to say the least.
Well-intentioned people who want to intervene on behalf of the rebels in Libya. Qadaffi is a madman. And there was a time when I would have wanted to do the same thing. But I have come to believe that we usually make things worse. It’s always possible that it won’t this time, but it’s a long shot.
More importantly, as I wrote yesterday, I think the rationale in this case is nonsense. The entire Middle East and several African countries are in turmoil and there are many places where the international community could have decided to intervene on this humanitarian R2 basis. The only one that has any “strategic” value is Libya, and that value is based upon its oil fields.
Maybe everyone agrees that it’s a good reason to go to war, but the people of this country deserve to have a debate about it so that they can understand the price they are paying for their dependence on oil (and stop thinking they are the world’s great saviors out of decency and altruism.)
Obama seems to be doing everything he can to keep the US brand off of this, but since we spend more on military than all other countries of the world combined, nobody’s going to believe it. This is the Great Game redux and the sooner we deal with that reality the sooner we’ll be able to make some rational decisions.
I hope more than anything that this can work very quickly and they can make a quick getaway. If it goes on for very long, I’m afraid we’re in for another extremely expensive and lengthy oil field protection operation. It’s a big risk.
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