Federal Judiciary

The Fog of Obfuscation

Everyone knows about the fog of war. In Libya, Pres. Barack Obama has added to the inherent indecipherability of immediate military events the fog of obfuscation.

We aren't leading military operations, even though the operation is led by an American general. We aren't seeking Moammar Qaddafi's ouster, even though we are destroying his command-and-control capabilities and shellacking his military. We aren't helping the rebels, even though they are back on the march. And we aren't sure where any of this is headed.

#ad#Only the last of these seems, strictly speaking, to be true, although not quite: The logic of events in Libya points inexorably toward the end of Qaddafi 's rule as the ultimate aim of the campaign. No other rationale for the war makes as much sense, or is alone worth the expenditure of American military might.

Protecting civilians on the ground? When Qaddafi pledged a cleansing with no mercy for the rebel capital of Benghazi, a city of 700,000 that the allied air campaign saved in the nick of time, he no doubt meant it. But we have stood by and watched much worse massacres through the years without stirring ourselves to act.

Fostering the 'Arab spring'? Any chance Libya had of playing a role in the viral spread of popular uprisings in the Middle East ended when the rebels' survival came to depend on outside intervention. Indigenous revolts have inherent appeal as glorious instances of people power; Western airstrikes -- even when requested by the Arabs themselves -- tend to reinforce a sense of Arab powerlessness.

Creating a democracy? Before we launched our first airstrike, Libya was already a broken-down shell of a society. As we destroy its military and its economy sustains body blows, it becomes more of one. This does not make fertile ground for democracy-building.

The most compelling reason to wage war in Libya is simply to topple Qaddafi. He had been on reasonably good behavior in recent years, frightened by the wars of the Bush years. He gave up his nuclear-weapons program and his terrorism, and the Bush administration declared him a rehabilitated man. If he had quashed the current revolt with impunity, despite all our protestations, he'd surely have lost all reason to fear us. He would have been foolish not to restart a WMD program as the hostile dictator's best insurance policy against retaliation for acts of mayhem.

We have never truly settled accounts with Qaddafi for his past masterstroke: the midair bombing of Pan Am 103 in 1988, in which he killed 189 American citizens. There should never be a statute of limitations for the mass murder of Americans. Not that President Obama would ever say such a retrograde thing, not when it might grate on sensibilities at the U.N. and the Arab League, which have had a larger role in authorizing the Libyan War than the U.S. Congress.

Even the limited U.N.-sanctioned goal of protecting the Libyan population is senseless without dislodging Qaddafi, who has proven a remorseless threat to his own population.

Libya is yet another Obama-era replay of the 1990s. Just as Bill Clinton had his confused humanitarian intervention, Obama now has his. The Libyan War is Kosovo II: a military action from the air with no congressional authorization; little engagement from the president; tenuous public support; contention among the allies over means, ends, and rationales; and de facto proxy forces on the ground who won't meet our civilized standards of warfare.

Yet we prevailed all the same against Slobodan Milosevic, who, like Qaddafi, was a miserable tin-pot dictator with a tin-pot military extremely vulnerable to us. Otto von Bismarck's putdown of the British army -- if it invaded Germany, he'd have it arrested -- applies with much more force to Qaddafi's ramshackle force that has proven adept only at facing down even more ramshackle rebels.

We can't expect much good to come from the Libyan War, except the good we dare not mention -- the long-overdue end of the lunatic, American-murdering rule of Colonel Qaddafi.

— Rich Lowry is editor of National Review. He can be reached via e-mail, comments.lowry@nationalreview.com. © 2011 by King Features Syndicate.

Full post as published by Bench Memos - National Review Online on March 22, 2011 (boomark / email).