Mind Boggling

I'm not fan of how we are fighting the Libya War. But I like to think that I don't let that distort my blogging about it. And remember that I want to win. I also think we are slowly winning, but that I have serious doubts that our desire to win will outlast Khaddafi's desire to survive (and if you are keeping track of defections from Khaddafi, add Norway to the list of defections on our side as they announce their pending withdrawal from the war on August 1st--and they actually fired weapons despite having only 6 F-16s committed). Also, whatever else, you should keep in mind that it is not morally wrong to overthrow a tyrant.

But this article is so skewed that it is hard to take seriously its wonder of how we are fighting the war.

One, the writer makes much of the fact that we are still fighting after 3 months even though President Obama said our role would be over in "a matter of days, not weeks." In fact, what the President was talking about--and what was clear to me when he made the statement--indeed it was the only interpretation that made sense--was that we'd carry out the big bang at the start of the campaign to knock down Libya's command and control, air power, and air defenses, and then pull to the background to let our allies take the lead in bombing missions. That is exactly what we did.

Two, he falls back on the pretend sophisticated question of why attack Khaddafi now after tolerating him for years? By that logic, we could never talk to potential or actual foes because we don't ever want to be accused of hypocrisy if we come to blows. You can imagine how the sophisticated would react to that approach ("Gosh, you make peace with enemies--not friends--of course we should talk to them!"). This is similar to complaining that we pick on weak thugs while letting powerful thugs get away with murder--as if they'd leap to support a fight to overthrow a strong thug state.

Then he says that a campaign intended to protect civilians is now reducing Tripoli to rubble. Really? You want to argue that? The tiny and precise air effort is not reducing Tripoli to rubble--the lack of good propaganda pictures of dead civilians after three months of precision bombing should indicate that this line of complaint is wrong. It is far easier to argue that failure to win fast is creating more casualties since the war drags on with civilians dying every day the civil war continues. But this is not carpet bombing.

And at that point in the article, after three really wrong observations about Libya, the author starts reaching for events beyond Libya in the Arab world, with even a shout out to Cleopatra--which regardless of whether or not they are accurate observations are not relevant to an article purporting to question what we are doing in Libya right now.

All I can say is that your writing has to be pretty bad to inspire me into a blog post in defense of the Obama administration's Libya policies.