It’s not only Senator McCain who said the United States is not doing enough. It’s obvious that our closest allies and the ones who are nearest to the fight on the ground, the British and the French, are saying exactly that. They are complaining, yes, that the Turks and Germans and others aren’t helping. But what they are really talking about is the United States.
You’ve got Qaddafi defying us, going through the street in an open car the way the president of the United States or prime minister of England would not be able to do. He does that in Tripoli supposedly in the middle of a war that we are pretending he is losing. [Meanwhile,] the leaders of the three great countries of the United States, France, and Britain are penning an op-ed. That’s really going to worry Libya.
You’ve got the meeting of the allies and the Arab states in Doha declaring today that the changing of the regime is an objective. And yet there is a stalemate. We are not doing what we can. We are in fact doing far less than we did early in the campaign, and deliberately.
And again I say, if you are going to enter into a war, you are either serious or not. You don’t enter into a war to defend a UN resolution. You enter into a war to achieve a real strategic objective on the ground. If that is not what you will do, stay out of it.
I think everyone felt some grim, sad irony in watching Qaddafi’s tiny forces hold off a British-French NATO intervention, revealing the once-vaunted rebels to be mostly a Potemkin force — all as the U.S. outsourced its historic leadership role after less than two weeks. But that schadenfreude should have passed long ago, and at some point the U.S. is going to have to decide whether NATO is still a viable organization and worth saving, now that it is on the verge of being utterly humiliated in Libya. It was always a predominately U.S.-led alliance, but our engagement kept up appearances and seemed at times to provide the Europeans a measure of unity. No longer: The U.S. is detached, the European NATO members are bickering and squabbling, and no one in Washington can explain to them the mission in Libya, the methodology to achieve it, the ultimate results desired, or the extent of NATO commitment in the postwar aftermath. Meanwhile, NATO member Turkey is an open supporter of Hamas and hostile to most of what NATO is for. We are on the razor’s edge here, and it is not hard to see the alliance disintegrating — all at a time when the traditional supremacy of the dollar is questioned, the financial reputation of the U.S. is still sinking, the traditional use of affordable energy in America seems by intent to be over — and quite abruptly, unless the Obama administration, in its Libyan misadventure, finally decides to take the proverbial Vienna. |
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