When my mom was at our place helping out with the kids while Ginet was in Sweden, she asked what I thought about Libya. I didn't give her a very good answer. If I remember, I told her something about it being complicated. I've still been thinking about it though and below is the better answer I should have given her based on two articles I read.
The first is a piece by Max Boot that was in the New York Times. He outlines many of the perils of our involvement: a protracted stalemate between the opposition forces and Qaddafi, tribes that are difficult to unify, an active Islamist movement, and so on. He also articulates one of my main concerns about our involvement over there, which I'm not sure has been adequately addressed yet: What's next for Libya? The aforementioned concerns guarantee that's not an easy question to answer. We know from Iraq and Afghanistan that it's easy to win the war, but we need to ensure we know how to secure the peace that needs to follow the war. It proved difficult for the Bush administration. Hopefully the Obama team can figure it out.
Boot's last two sentences are the essence of the article, "This is a worthwhile intervention for both strategic and humanitarian reasons. But the Obama administration must be alive to the numerous dangers that lurk down this path, and must make plans to deal with them."
The second is a nugget by Thomas Barnett that appeared in an Esquire blog. Many folks wonder how I could have voted for Obama, and I'll admit that I don't see eye to eye with him on everything. But the way he's leveraged his international celebrity in this instance has been noteworthy. I don't believe McCain would, or could, have been so shrewd. Barnett's words are better than mine:
"By waiting on virtually every imaginable stake-holding nation to sign off — in advance — before unleashing America's military capabilities, the Obama administration recasts the global dialogue on America's interventions. All of a sudden it's not the "supply-push" US intervention into Iraq, where it's all "this is what America is selling and if you don't like it, get out of the way!" Now, we're back to the type of "demand-pull" crisis responses by the US in the 1990s, where the world (aka, "international community") asks and America answers.
Moreover, by limiting US military participation up-front, the White House forces further "demand-pull" negotiations by our more incentivized allies (Vive la France!) and nervous neighbors as the intervention unfolds. That way, every step Obama takes can be justified in terms of the facts on the ground and how they make the rest of the world feel...
But again, the key revelation: This negotiating tactic does an excellent job of uncovering the actual global demand out there for America's intervention & stabilization services. A lot of anti-interventionists (and sheer Bush haters) want to pretend that's a myth and that there is no such demand for the American Leviathan, but the truth is, there's plenty of demand out there. The question is US bandwidth, which Bush-Cheney narrowed considerably.
Obama's approach — so long as it works, of course — is true genius. At a time when the US seeks to rehabilitate its national security image abroad, Obama's Brer Rabbit shtick effectively de-ideologize US participation — essentially "laundering" our motives through others. Plus, it has the virtue of sheer transparency — as in, what you see is what you asked for."
In sum, I'm nervous about our plans for the future, but if the smart way we entered the mess is an indicator of our plans for handling a post-Qaddafi Libya then I'm cautiously optimistic.
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