The Other McCain

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Libya: Serious or Not?

Posted on | March 30, 2011 | 29 Comments

One of the reasons I’m having trouble taking the war in Libya seriously is that President Obama keeps treating it like another opportunity for political posturing. He gives his big nationally televised primetime speech on Monday and is off to wine and dine $30,000-a-plate donors on Tuesday while Vice President Joe Biden vacations in Aspen.

Wait, did I say “war” in Libya? I meant “kinetic military action.”

There I go again, cracking jokes. But if what is happening in Libya really matters, then why has the U.S. become involved on such a half-assed basis? If it was important, wouldn’t Congress have been consulted before we started shooting cruise missiles at Tripoli?

The Don’t-Call-It-a-War is being conducted under a United Nations “humanitarian” mandate that doesn’t include overthrowing Qaddafi. Only air power is involved, with no U.S. boots on the ground. It is being fought (or should I say “kinecticized”?) by a coalition led by the French while “the United States will play a supporting role” so that ”the risk and cost of this operation — to our military and to American taxpayers — will be reduced significantly.”

Insert punchline here.

We have a war that’s not a war, in which we are merely “supporting” a mission supposedly limited to protecting civilians, yet Obama continues to boast about getting rid of Qaddafi.

CBS headline: Obama: Qaddafi regime’s “days are numbered”

MSNBC headline: Obama: ‘Gadhafi will ultimately step down’

If Bush was mocked by liberals for his ”cowboy” swagger, at least he was willing to assume the political risks associated with being Gary Cooper in High Noon. Obama apparently expects to be taken seriously while playing Woody from Toy Story 2: “Ride like the wind, Bullseye!”

These jokes just write themselves, you see, and the biggest challenge of Barack’s Excellent Libyan Adventure is trying to keep a straight face while discussing it. For that task, you need a perfect SAT score and a Harvard diploma, which is why I’m grateful today for Ross Douthat:

One of President Obama’s recurrent rhetorical tropes during the 2008 campaign was the “false choice” maneuver, in which he would distance himself from straw men of the left and right to better sell himself as a post-partisan figure. He made the same move last night, defending his administration’s Libya policy by distancing himself from the “some” who “question why America should intervene at all,” and the “others” who “have suggested that we broaden our military mission beyond the task of protecting the Libyan people, and do whatever it takes to bring down Qaddafi and usher in a new government.” The proper course, the president argued, lay somewhere in between, with an intervention designed to save civilian lives, prevent a destabilizing refugee crisis, and “stop Qaddafi’s forces in their tracks,” without committing American power (and American troops, and American money …) to the task of changing Libya’s regime outright. …

Read the whole thing, because it really is quite impressive that Douthat was able to find something serious to say about the president’s absurdly unserious speech. That Obama the Commander-in-Chief is resorting to familiar tricks of Obama the Candidate — making replies to arguments attributed to the convenient straw men “Some” and “Others” — should not surprise us at all, given that the president doesn’t seem to be trying to accomplish any coherent foreign-policy goal so much as he is using Libya like a photo-op in his 2012 re-election campaign.

It takes a connoisseur’s taste for raw cynicism to appreciate what Obama is actually doing here: Attempting to add 20 seconds of footage to the film that’s going to be shown at the next Democratic National Convention before Obama’s acceptance speech. The “Libyans celebrate Qaddafi’s defeat” segment of that film, following on the “Egyptians celebrate Mubarak’s ouster” segment, will serve to convey the message that Obama the Peacemaker has accomplished almost bloodlessly, and at a discount, what Bush the Warmonger could not: Freedom in the Middle East.

While we’re all getting choked up on patriotic tears at the mere imagining of such scenes — the stirring music, the Oscar-quality production values, etc. — it is necessary to remind ourselves that we’ve got no idea what the situation in Libya will be next week or next month, let alone next year. Obama isn’t the only actor in this melodrama, and the villain doesn’t seem to be reading from the same script:

Rebel fighters fled under fire from a key town in eastern Libya on Tuesday as world leaders convening in London insisted that Moammar Gaddafi step down but offered no new suggestions for how to dislodge him from power.
The rebels’ chaotic retreat from the town of Bin Jawwad, which they had captured from troops loyal to Gaddafi just two days earlier, reversed the momentum they had seized over the weekend and suggested that the ad hoc and lightly armed opposition force may have reached the limits of its capacity.

Rather than “The Triumphant Liberation of Libya” — the forthcoming film for which Obama apparently anticipates rave reviews — the movie currently packing ‘em in at the mall multiplex is “Libyan Rebels Retreat Without Allied Air Cover”:

We cannot rule out the possibility that at some point in the future, perhaps sooner rather than later, the Qaddafi regime will collapse and give Obama the happy ending he expects. And leave aside, for now, any concern you may have that the next regime in Libya will be an al-Qaeda/Hamas radical jihadi co-production that makes Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Tehran theocracy look moderate by comparison. As long as no Tripoli-sponsored terrrorists blow up an American skyscraper between now and November 2012, the overthrow of Qaddafi will be counted as a “win” for Obama, without regard for how many Libyan adultresses or homosexuals are stoned to death in the post-Qaddafi era.

No, let’s take this situation at face value, in the same kind of “Campaign Scorecard” calculus that the Beltway media apply: What matters in foreign policy is not the fate of brown people in arid countries on the other side of the globe; rather the true measure of success is whether the outcome is good or bad for the president’s approval rating among independent voters in key swing states for 2012.

Screw the Libyans, what do “likely voters” say?

That’s the real game, you see, and nobody at the White House cares what a conservative blogger says about it any more than they actually give a damn about the Libyans. Still less does anyone inside the Obama administration give a damn about left-wing bloggers complaining that “kinectic military action” in North Africa wasn’t the Hope and Change they signed up for.

Whatever it was that Obama promised the Left, and however much the Left feels betrayed by the yawning gap between Obama’s promises and Obama’s actual policies, he doesn’t take the Left any more seriously than he takes anything else other than his golf game.

And really, why should Obama take the Left seriously? It’s not like MoveOn.org is going to be signing people up to a “Pacifists for Palin” petition drive in 2012. George Soros won’t be giving money to a Howard Dean comeback campaign in the Democratic primaries. Bill Maher isn’t going to start bashing Obama in his stand-up monologues. Michael Moore can rant on Twitter all he wants, but the folks calling the shots in the Obama administration take Fatso From Flint about as seriously as I do.

There is no critic on the Left who can influence Obama’s Libya policy, and the president only engages Republican criticism by distorting it as the “Some” and “Others” straw-men arguments he brushes aside in his TV speeches.

What we have in Libya, then, is a serious situation being addressed by an unserious president whose only concern is his own political benefit.

Insert punchline here.

If you’re not laughing, I don’t blame you. It’s not really funny at all, but these jokes just write themselves.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!


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Category: Barack Obama, Libya

Comments

  • Anonymous

    If it doesn’t involve his recreational activities or glorification, he can’t even fake interest.

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  • http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere

    As to the purpose and aim of our involvement in Libya: it seems the policy is Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

  • Anonymous

    Yeah, casual cynicism is staging a comeback. Forget all that “9/11 changed everything” stuff. We’re back to the Holiday From History mode of the Clinton era, when foreign policy was just a chance for the guy in the White House to “look presidential” for the benefit of suburban soccer moms in the key 35-54 demographic that the focus-group consultants were concerned about. So we can expect lots of photo-op meetings with Mideast leaders, maybe a Camp David summit or two, and Major Foreign Policy Addresses strategically timed to capture the news cycle whenever Obama’s poll numbers start slipping.

    And we’re supposed to bite our tongues and pretend that this is all very serious.

  • Anonymous

    it seems the policy is Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

    (Insert sodomy joke here.)

  • Frank

    The rebels are retreating because they’re not a real army. Why that should count against them, I can’t imagine. It’s a civil society movement against the baldest repression you can imagine. Hence the need for intervention. We’re on the side of people vs. a dictator and his private militia.

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  • Alias4TD

    Nobody is ‘counting that against them.’ And it is not clear this is anything that should be characterized as a ‘civil’ movement. We know next to nothing about the leadership of this uprising, or whether they might even survive should Khaddafi fall.

    What is becoming clear is that they, as currently constituted, lack the ability to directly confront the current regime’s forces. They cannot hold the towns they recently took – sympathetic towns no less. They have absolutely zero possibility of militarily defeating Khaddafi in his tribal homelands. Urban warfare is a supreme challenge, even for the most highly trained and best equipped, for the inept it is doomed to failure.

    Barring a major escalation on the part of the US this is going to devolve into a muddled and bloody mess. And we’ll be smack in the middle of it all.

  • Bellemundo

    I’m waiting for the photo op of the O in flight gear striding across the deck of the aircraft carrier outside Tripoli.

    “Kinetic action over,boys. Great job!”

  • Anonymous

    I think he already regrets sticking his beak in… soon as his the polls didnt’ bring a war rally.

    All Gaddafi has to do was wear done Obama’s paper thin resolve while preventing rag tag 20-somethings from overrunning Triploli for a few weeks- and he already knows we won’t put any boots on the ground.

    When you’re a guy willing to shell protesters with naval guns and kill anybody who looks at you wrong, piece of cake facing down this smiley plastic mannequin Obama.

    Linked at RR

    Obam’s Razor: 
    “What’s the Most RADICAL Explanation for Recent US Action in Libya…?”

  • http://dad29.blogspot.com/ Dad29

    The objective, R. S., is Chaos. That’s what Obama wants, and by gum, it’s what he’s creating.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1385852725 Richard Mcenroe

    Maybe it will get serious when the first 30-year old Marine aviator crashes his 40-year-old Harrier on the deck of the Kearsarge.

  • http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere

    I wouldn’t touch that with a ten-foot Pole…or Czech.

  • http://leatherpenguin.com/wordpress/ TC_LeatherPenguin

    These “people” you speak of involved in your “civil society movement”; can you tell us poor rubes exactly who they are? Because I worked in commodities, and know how to read a map, so I have a pretty refined idea why Obama got the US dragged into this fiasco.

  • Anonymous

    Obama’s “moderate” approach would be parodical , if that were still possible. It’s literally the *only objectively wrong choice* when considering war: engaging voluntarily without the will, intention, or means to win.

    That’s right: both “Some” and “Others,” representing opposite extremes, have perfectly legitimate positions on this war. The neocon liberals and superpower cons say we should liberate Libya and kill or capture Gaddaffi. The libertarians and doves say it’s none of our business, not worth our blood, and anyway we’re broke. Both are valid arguments; only Obama in this discussion is speaking inchoate nonsense.

    As someone once said, “‘The essence of war is violence; moderation in war is imbecility.”

    In other words, Obama is still fighting strawmen, but now he’s actually losing the argument to his mannequin opponents.

  • Anonymous

    What about a Slovene?

  • http://theundergroundconservative.wordpress.com The Underground Conservative

    Obama’s foreign policy is making me nostalgic for the missteps of the Clinton administration.

  • http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere

    They’re already gay enough.

  • http://theundergroundconservative.wordpress.com The Underground Conservative

    Ten-Foot Pole. Stretch Kowalski, the tallest Pole I ever knew.

  • http://theundergroundconservative.wordpress.com The Underground Conservative

    Like your avatar. I miss Reagan more and more every day. Remember when we had a real President?

  • http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere

    Well…Stacy did tell us to supply the jokes…

  • http://ak4mc.us/2c/2011/ McGehee

    Some men just want to watch the world burn. Why so serious?

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1385852725 Richard Mcenroe

    They’re retreating because whether they’re AQ offshoots, plucky Benghazi humanities majors, or both, they’re an undertrained militia with lousy logistics, zero expertise at maneuver combat and less unit cohesion who got caught outside their prepared defenses and hammered.

  • ThomasD

    Not to be offensive. But this is a bit of a trope – one that the anti-Bush crowd played ad infinitum when the rhetorical shoe was on the other foot.

    No Naval or Marine aviator chose his position in order spend twenty years clock punching. They are just too smart and too skilled – if all they wanted was security then they’d already be firmly ensconced somewhere safer, easier, and probably much closer to kith and kin.

    No, those individuals live for the challenge, and the risks are well understood. They claw for any chance at training – which carries the exact same risks, and actual combat missions are exactly what they train for. That there is the possibility they may die doing precisely what they so strongly want to do? All part of the gig. To pretend otherwise is to infantilize their endeavors.

    They deserve much more than that.

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