Libya, a Jolly Short War

By Alan Caruba

There’s nothing like a war to either make or break a President. There’s a reason the writers of the Constitution also made the President the Commander-in-Chief because war needs a centralized authority to direct the military. A goodly number of the nation’s presidents were former leaders in war, starting with General George Washington, progressing forward to General Ike Eisenhower.

Few nations have the record of its people being extraordinarily resistant to engaging in combat unless provoked than America. Woodrow Wilson was elected with the slogan “He kept us out of the war” and then, after the Germans had the bad judgment to sink the ocean liner Lusitania, America sent “Black Jack” Pershing to put a finish to World War One.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, having made a thorough botch of the Great Depression, was propelled into war by the attack on Pearl Harbor. Until then, Americans wanted nothing to do with another “European war” or the one being waged in Asia. FDR had the good luck to be guided by Gen. George C. Marshall.

Time and time again, U.S. Presidents have had to engage in war and almost always under circumstances that involved a large part of the population being opposed to it. There is something about “modern” wars that means we end up staying on far too long after we’ve dropped the bombs, let lose the artillery, and sent in the Marines and infantry.

Like the Romans of old, Americans do not like protracted wars and, worse, they tend to weaken a nation or an empire. The irony for the Romans is that, as often as not, they were invited by the host nation to keep the peace. Indeed, that’s how the term “Pax Romana” came about. And just as often the locals got tired of the Romans and revolted against them.

It is common knowledge that it’s easy to get into a war, but hard to end one. We are in Afghanistan, not because we started a war with Osama bin Laden, but because he had declared war against the U.S. in 1996, tried to blow up the Twin Towers in 1993, and then waited until 2001 to do it again. George Bush’s response was to bomb the hell out of Tora Bora in Afghanistan and, initially, to drive the Taliban out of there.

Then, on the theory that democracy could be exported to Iraq and because Saddam Hussein was going to make trouble so long as he drew breath, Bush junior decided to invade, perhaps having drawn the lesson from Bush senior’s decision to leave Saddam in power after the first Gulf War, one he later regretted.

In Afghanistan, “mission creep” set in and Bush stayed on. Now President Obama has stayed on. The United States of America has been an occupying force in Afghanistan longer than the former Soviet Union. That does not suggest a good outcome to me because one of the taunts of the Pashtun tribal members is “You have the watches, but we have the time.”

So let it be said, Obama has probably made the one and only really good decision of his presidency. He has made it clear that no American troops will be among the “boots on the ground” when it comes to ridding Libya of Gaddafi. At a time when the U.S. military is in Afghanistan and Iraq, albeit with timetables to leave, we can quite literally ill afford a third war in the Middle East.

If we have to defend the Saudi oil fields—which we may have to do—the Saudis can afford to pick up the bill and had better be handed one. Meanwhile, their military are busy helping put down protests in nearby Bahrain. The prospect that there will be all manner of protests throughout the Arab region of the world is now guaranteed.

The one in Egypt ended remarkably well with a bare minimum of dead Egyptians. The Tunisian overthrow of its dictator went swiftly and smoothly. Dare I remind the reader that both nations were led by men who were U.S. allies? Things are a tad shaky for another longtime ally, King Abdullah of Jordan, who has the evil Syrians as neighbors and a huge Palestinian population.

Flying well under the radar of U.S. media, on March 15, Israeli commandos intercepted a ship from the Turkish port of Mercin that was headed to Egypt’s Alexandria, loaded with weapons for Hamas in the Gaza. The ship had initially departed from Syria en route to a stop at a Turkish port. Turkey used to be an ally of Israel. (See YouTube IDF video) Formerly Egypt would never have allowed Hamas to get weapons. Also under-reported were the estimated fifty rockets fired into Israel from Gaza on March 19. The Israelis responded with a quick, lethal air strike.

You don’t have to be a CIA analyst to conclude the weapons were all made in Iran or at least transferred from there initially. Or that Israel will face another war at some point. If they nuke targets in Iran, it should be over fairly quickly, but they will still be facing Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south.

Like the Romans, the U.S. needs to extricate itself as much as possible from the Middle East unless its vital interests are threatened there. By which I mean, unless we have to defend Iraq’s, Saudi Arabia’s, Bahrain’s, Kuwait’s, and the United Arab Emirates’ oil fields. Defending the region’s only Western democracy, Israel, is also a good idea.

For the same reason that President Obama elected to let the British and French take the lead in Libya, we have ample firepower from the skies and from offshore naval forces to do much of the damage that may be required in what is likely to be a jolly good, but limited military operation in Libya and likely future conflicts.

There isn’t a single military figure among any of the potential candidates in the next election. What we need in the years immediately ahead may well be a President Petraeus.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Brits Vote for No Government

By Alan Caruba

I doubt that many Americans paid any attention to the elections held in Great Britain on Thursday. A great many Brits apparently did not either because thousands showed up too late to cast their vote.

Those that did vote ended up not giving either the Tories, the UK equivalent of our conservatives, or Labour, the UK equivalent of our liberals, sufficient votes with which the party winning the most seats in parliament could then form a government under a Prime Minister. There was also a third party called the Liberal Democrats which, to American ears, sounds very much like our own liberal Democrats.

What struck me was the way, here in America, almost every election and every poll splits right down the middle. There is always the hard core who will vote the party line no matter who is running. It is the independent voters who decide elections these days. Then, too, there are the voters are too young or too dumb to understand any of the issues.

We are becoming more and more like the Brits insofar as they have perfected the concept of a Nanny State in which the government determines just about everything in one’s life. Right now, it is busy bankrupting everyone. And so is ours.

This accounts for why the polls show that the primary concern in America is the economy and, one presumes, this is true for the Brits, but they are far more vulnerable because of their membership in the European Union, the worst idea to come out of Europe since World Wars One and Two.

The Brits have to some extend the same problems as in America. High on the list is immigration and England now is a polyglot of people from around the globe. It has a huge Muslim population that pretty much terrorizes the rest of the Brits and is constantly demanding more and more sovereignty over Muslims as opposed to other of the Queen’s subjects.

My favorite British columnist, Melanie Phillips of the Spectator, wrote that the Brits have been shouting their unhappiness from the rooftops insofar that “they were concerned that all politicians were venal, incompetent and untrustworthy, and that people had had it up to here with the entire political system.”

I think this reflects a similar line of thinking here in the United States where a significant number of voters have opted out of both parties to self-identify as independents.

With the inauguration of Barack Obama, it only took a few months for an eruption of Tea Parties that have become an umbrella for disaffected Democrats and Republicans who think the government is unresponsive.

Speaking solely for myself, I have long ago concluded that we have the greatest collection of dunces and grifters ever assembled when it comes to the aggregate membership of Congress. As for the White House, it is overflowing with the worst elements of Chicago’s political system, sprinkled liberally with loonies otherwise known as environmentalists.

The incompetence of our huge federal government is now a constant topic of conversation whether it is its obvious inability to spot an Islamic terrorist before he blows up Times Square or how long it takes for anyone in government to do anything about a huge oil rig accident in the Gulf of Mexico.

England’s economy revived under the conservative leadership of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, but after the past thirteen years of Labour Party governance, the island kingdom is in such deep debt that the Queen will be taking in washing any day now. But then, who are we to criticize when we just voted a president and party into office that has tripled the national debt in just under a year and a half?

“So now all is murk,” wrote Ms. Phillips. “And no, the likely political paralysis is not good at all. But then, no party was offering any prospect of getting to grips properly with anything important anyway. It is the condition of British politics, and beyond that the state of British society, which is not good at all and of which this election result is an accurate reflection.”

Politics is about policies and programs that solve problems. Or, at least, that’s what it should be. What the Britis have encountered and we, too, are experiencing are politics that create the problems and then fail to come up with any solution or an effort to undo the mess.

© Alan Caruba, 2010