EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN:

Inside Obama's War Room: How he decided to intervene in Libya - and what it says about his evolution as commander in chief (Michael Hastings, 10/13/11, Rolling Stone)

Since the beginning of the Arab Spring, the Obama administration had been grappling with how the United States should respond to the wave of democratic uprisings sweeping the region, first in Tunisia, then in Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, Morocco and Syria. In his first major foreign-policy address as president, given 18 months earlier in Cairo, Obama had pointedly called for a fundamental realignment in the region. "I've come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world," he declared, warning autocratic governments that they must maintain their power "through consent, not coercion."

But once those governments actually began to fall, the Obama administration was slow to distance itself from the oil-rich autocrats the U.S. had supported for decades. In Egypt, Vice President Joe Biden downplayed the democratic revolt, saying that he didn't consider Hosni Mubarak a "dictator." In Bahrain - home of the U.S. 5th Fleet - the administration looked the other way as the royal family allowed the military to violently crush peaceful street protests. In Yemen, the U.S. chose not to intervene when the country's military fired into crowds calling for the president's resignation. To Arab protesters, Obama's "new beginning" seemed more like the same old American realpolitik that had long dominated the Middle East.

In Libya, however, the uprising took on a decidedly different character than those of its neighbors. [...]

By the end of February, according to a senior administration official, Obama had begun "an incredibly intensive series of discussions in the Oval Office and the Situation Room" on how to handle Libya. From the start, insiders say, the players broke down into two distinct camps. On one side were top-level Pentagon and White House advisers who were skeptical of further military intervention, given the continued U.S. presence in Afghanistan and Iraq. This group included Biden, who had argued strongly against Obama's decision in 2009 to launch a military surge in Afghanistan, and Biden's friend Tom Donilon, the president's national security adviser. (The two men are close: Donilon's wife is Jill Biden's chief of staff.) Also in the skeptic camp were Donilon's deputy, Denis McDonough, who had served on Obama's campaign staff in 2008, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who dubbed calls for intervention "loose talk."

The skeptics didn't disagree that a Libya without Qaddafi would be a desirable outcome. Libya sits atop the world's ninth-largest oil reserves, producing 1.6 million barrels a day, and the colonel was an unpredictable ally at best, a dangerous madman at worst. In 1986, Qaddafi ordered an attack on a Berlin disco that killed two U.S. soldiers, and in 1988, he authorized the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, resulting in the deaths of all 270 people onboard. His personal quirks - the rambling speeches, the Bedouin tents, the sexy female bodyguards - added to his image as a villain straight out of James Bond. Since 2003, however, Qaddafi had undergone an extreme makeover, courtesy of a multimillion-dollar PR campaign that enlisted influential Washington insiders and policy wonks like Richard Perle and Francis Fukuyama. He gave up his weapons of mass destruction, helped the CIA interrogate Islamic radicals and secured Libya a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council. To top U.S. officials he had become, in the infamous tweet in 2009 from Sen. John McCain, "an interesting man."

Despite the temptation to overthrow Qaddafi, however, the skeptics in the administration posed a set of tough questions: Would intervening on the side of the rebels make it harder to support U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan? Could it inadvertently lead us into a third ground war? Would it jeopardize cooperation from other countries in the battle against Al Qaeda? Would it undercut the rebels by putting an American footprint on what had up until now been a homegrown revolution? And did we really know who the rebels were? "There was a certain wariness to get involved militarily in a third Muslim country," says one senior administration official who took part in the deliberations.

On the other side of the internal debate was a faction of unlikely allies within the White House and the State Department who viewed Libya as an opportunity to enact a new form of humanitarian intervention, one that they had been sketching out for nearly a decade.

It's America, the Realists always lose out to the Crusaders.


Posted by oj at October 15, 2011 5:00 PM
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