Follower-in-Chief

In his desire not to repeat our open-ended commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq, Obama's just pledged the U.S. to an open-ended fight in Libya.

It’s not just generals who fight the last war.

President Obama’s speech about Libya on Friday afternoon served notice: he is still fighting against the Iraq war.

More than a month after rebellion erupted in Libya – more than 2 weeks after Obama himself declared that Qaddafi “must go” – the president is at last poised, almost ready to take action to fulfill his own words.

And what is that action?

It’s action pursuant to a resolution of the UN Security Council: meaning that America acts only if China and Russia say yes.

It’s action limited to humanitarian protection of the Libyan population: meaning that America professes indifference to whether the utterly illegitimate Qaddafi regime survives or falls.

It’s action limited to air interdiction only: meaning that Qaddafi knows from the start that America will go so far and no further.

It’s action justified by invoking the support of the Arab League: meaning that it’s fellow-members of the Arab dictators club who decide when a fellow-member’s time has elapsed.

It’s action in which American ostentatiously takes a back seat to France and Britain: which, with all due respect to those two great democracies, means it’s action is limited by France’s and Britain’s under-invested military capabilities.

It’s action that demands that Qaddafi do something (supply electricity and water to eastern Libyan cities) rather than cease to do something: meaning that the initiative will always be in Qaddafi’s hands, not the anti-Qaddafi coalition’s.

It’s action without any logical terminus: meaning that Obama’s words suggest it would be acceptable if months and years passed with Qaddafi holding onto power in Tripoli and Western militaries exercising humanitarian supervision over the eastern half of the country.

Bitterly ironic, in his desire not to repeat America’s frustrating open-ended commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq, President Obama has just pledged the United States to a third commitment in Arab North Africa designed from the start to be frustratingly open-ended.

President Obama cares desperately about international legitimacy and about sustaining the support of Arab and Muslim populations. He has just pledged the US to a commitment almost designed to alienate Arab and Muslim populations by extending an indefinite Western protectorate over half an oil-producing Arab and Muslim state. Paranoid accusations of war-for-oil are not more than a few weeks away.

I know well that those of us involved with the launch of the Iraq war don’t have a lot of standing to criticize unpromising military ventures. But Iraq was at least intended to be temporary and decisive. Libya is from the start planned as the opposite. Who knows? Perhaps President Obama will be very lucky and stumble into the opposite outcome from that which he professes to want. Equally possible: the war President Obama gets will be the war President Obama has designed.

Obama’s Libya operation is not Operation Desert Storm re-enacted. This is the Clinton-era supervision of Iraq revisited and extended. For the embattled people of eastern Libya, Western assistance will arrive as a huge relief, at least at first. But the United States is about to rediscover the oldest rule of interventions: the surest route to a big war is to start with a small one.

Originally published in the National Post.

Tweet