Quick question about arming rebels

Does the administration’s decision to arm the Libyan rebels remind you of anything?  It does me.  It reminds me of the Reagan administration’s decision to arm the rebels in Afghanistan.

Back then, the rebels were not our enemy, and they were fighting a sworn enemy against whom we’d been engaged in myriad proxy wars for decades.  This time, the rebels are our enemy, killing our civilians and soldiers all over the world, and they’re fighting a government that hasn’t does us any active harm in recent years.

Somehow, despite our pure and fairly reasonable thinking back in 1980s, I seem to recall that our decision to arm and train radical Islamists proved to have bad and lasting consequences for us.  (Hint:  the Taliban.)  This time around, we don’t even have the excuse of ignorance.  The Libyan rebels we’re arming, comprised of useful idiots, Al Qaeda operatives, and Muslim brotherhood members, were our active enemy yesterday; they’re our active enemy today; and tomorrow, pumped up with our weapons and supplies, they’ll still be our active enemy, only more dangerous.

How does the military feel about Libya?

Under George Bush, our troops were told that they were going to Iraq and Afghanistan to protect American interests.  One can, of course, quibble with whether those wars have served American interests (which is not a quibble I want to have at this post).  But the point I want to make is that our young men and women were told that they were putting their lives on the line for their country.  They were protecting and defending.

In Libya, Defense Secretary Gates has stated explicitly that Libya itself has nothing to do with America’s vital interests, although it’s in a region that is important.  As best as I can tell, he hasn’t taken the next step, which is to say that what happens in Libya, though, will necessarily affect America’s interests in that region.

Obama has come out with a mountain of mush which boils down to a claim that the U.N. thinks this is a good idea for protecting some people in Libya, and we want Qaddafi out of there, although we won’t do anything actually to get him out of there, because that’s not our mission, even though we plan on having him leave.  We’ve since learned that significant sectors amongst the people who want Qaddafi out even more than Obama does — i.e., our allies — are Al Qaeda. For people with long memories, we’re fighting Al Qaeda all over the world, with American troops actively under fire in Afghanistan.

With those thoughts in mind about Libya — it’s an internationalist mission with no clear goals, that doesn’t necessarily benefit America, that sees us helping the same people who are trying to kill our guys in Afghanistan, one has to ask whether American troops have a sense of mission here?  Are they feeling the warm glow of altruistic humanitarians who are in the line of fire for people who have little to do with America and her interests (or are even routinely trying to kill Americans?  Do they have any sense that they are fulfilling their mission to protect and defend” if the people they’re protecting and defending are neither Americans nor American allies?  Or are they simply people who are doing their jobs, without a whole lot of mission analysis?

I’m a highly politicized, conservative, anti-Obama, pro-American, middle-aged armchair warrior.  With that bias, I know that I would not be happy to have my life on the line so that Libyan oil can flow to France and Al Qaeda can take over the Libyan government.  But that’s just me.  Do any of you have any sense about the boots on the ground thinking?

Yes, there is an Obama doctrine

Ed Morrissey has put together a very useful post summarizing various liberal media attempts to understand the Obama doctrine.  Morrissey concludes at the end that, try as hard as one likes, “There really is no doctrine.”

Morrissey is correct that there is no doctrine if one is looking for a verbally articulated doctrine.  Obama says everything, and Obama says nothing, and Obama says it all as boringly as possible.

The mere fact that the greatest communicator since Abraham Lincoln (that’s sarcasm, by the way) is incapable of articulating a doctrine, though, doesn’t mean he doesn’t have one.  Indeed, if one buys for one minute into the whole greatest communicator shtick, it’s pretty clear that, as I said in my earlier post, that Obama intentionally obfuscates in his speeches because he doesn’t want people to know what the doctrine is.

Fortunately, because actions speak louder than words, we can arrive at the Obama Middle Eastern doctrine without any actual verbal help from Obama.  Here goes:

America can no longer selfishly engage in wars that directly affect (i.e., improve) her national interests.  To prevent her from doing so, she must always sublimate her sovereignty to the U.N.  A small number of U.N. players, most notably Europeans who are dependent on Libyan oil, have decided that Qaddafi must go.  Even though the number is smaller than the number that joined with Bush on Iraq, they’re the “in” crowd, so Obama must follow where they lead.  Hewing to the popular kid theory, these “cool” U.N. players matter more than the American Congress, which is made up of rubes and hicks, who lack that European savoir faire, even the useful idiots who hew to Obama’s political ideology.

A subset of this Obama doctrine is that, while America must never mine or drill her own energy resources, it is incumbent upon America to dig into her pockets to enable other countries to get to their energy resources, which America will then buy back at a premium.  This is American charity at its best.  If you want to feed a man for a day, buy him a fish.  If you want to feed him for a lifetime, teach him to fish, buy all his fishing equipment, stock the lake with trout, break all your fishing equipment, make it illegal to fish in your own lakes, and then buy that man’s fish back from him at the highest possible price.

And whatever else you do, make sure you kick Israel around . . . a lot.  That will make the cool kids (e.g., the Euro-trash and the Mullahs) happy.  It never pays to lose sight of your true constituency.

Been there, done that (and a little bit about R2P) *UPDATED*

As I said yesterday, part of my blog silence has been that I was very actively engaged in wrapping up my book for e-publishing.  It’s been an amazing amount of work.  Starting last August, I went back and reviewed all 6,500+ of my old posts.  A lot of them are little nothings (“Hey, look at this cool post by someone else!”), but a fair number were substantive.  I copied all the substantive ones into the world’s biggest Word document, and then started reading them all to winnow out wheat from chaff.  After several months, I ended up with 100,000 words worth of posts, which makes for a long book.  I figured, though, that it would be nice to provide bang for the buck.

After the winnowing, came the editing.  As I repeatedly demonstrate here, I’m not the world’s best proofreader, something made worse by the fact that blog posts don’t tend to be carefully cultivated documents in the first place.  They’re responsive to the moment, so I slam them out.  I used Word’s spell and grammar checkers in the first pass (even though they’re deeply flawed), had Don Quixote read things, and then read everything myself five or six times.  Again, very, very time-consuming.

This past weekend I made the final push, which involved getting everything in e-publish ready format.  I’d done most of that already, since I’m a fairly meticulous word processor, but there was still a lot of coding (and un-coding) required to get the book up and out.  Now I wait, since Smashwords, which I chose as my outlet, is processing the material I uploaded.  When I have links, I’ll let you know.  To be honest, you all have been with me every step of the way for this book, as it consists of posts that you guys have read, commented upon, contributed to, etc.  If you buy the book, it will be an act of charity, since you won’t be getting anything you haven’t already gotten before.

It’s that “anything you haven’t already gotten before” factor that’s also slowed my blogging in the last few days.  Although there are new events unfolding (Libya, UN, economy, healthcare debate, etc.), I keep having a feeling of deja vu all over again.  I’ve written before about the Middle East’s theocratic tyrannies, about the UN’s anti-American and anti-Israeli animus, about Obama’s fecklessness and anti-Americanism, and about the disaster that is government spending.  I can write about the latest news, but my conclusions are unchanging:  Obama is a disaster, big government is dangerous, the Middle East is a cesspool of Islamic antisemitism, ObamaCare won’t work and will drive up costs, the UN is a fundamentally evil institution, yadda, yadda, yadda.

I’ll get my groove back and start blogging substantively, I promise, but for the next day or say, it may take me a little while to shake off the deja vu feeling that’s haunting everything I read.

Until then, I’d like to recommend very highly Trevor Loudon’s post about the insanity of the “responsibility to protect” (R2P) doctrine that Obama used to justify sending American troops into war without even a nod to Congress.

The doctrine, by the way, isn’t a new one.  It’s been around several years.  It was originally framed as a response to such atrocities as Rwanda or the Balkans, where genocide occurred within a nation’s own borders.  The world watched these genocides and dithered.  The question, of course, was “shouldn’t we step in to save these poor people?”  The R2P doctrine says, “yes, we should.”  Except the UN is deciding who gets saved and who doesn’t.  This means two things:  The UN becomes a supranation, superseding all other nations; and the UN decides who is a victim and who isn’t.  You’ll notice that the UN didn’t bother with the R2P doctrine when the Sudanese government was systematically slaughtering first Christians and then black Muslims.  It didn’t step in when Iran was murdering its own citizens.  For reasons as yet unclear to me, the UN doesn’t like Qaddafi, so he suddenly gets bombed under R2P.  I’m not saying he’s not a foul little guy, but his depredations don’t affect most of the world.

What’s very clear is that R2P, with Obama’s guiding hand, will inevitably be used to justify a UN attack against Israel.  After all, 90% of the UN’s efforts are to protect the poor, simple, innocent, peaceful Palestinians from evil, aggressive, genocidal Israel murder.  It’s a situation ripe for the R2P doctrine.  Bush and Bolton would have stopped that.  Obama and Powers will say “bring it on.”

Also, it turns out that Tom, a Watcher’s Council member, is also a musician and musical parodist.  Check this one out.

UPDATE:  The inevitable — a call to wage war against Israel based upon R2P principles — has begun.

Mark Steyn on Obama’s war

The whole thing is good (of course), but I enjoyed this bit especially:

“That’s why building this international coalition has been so important,” [Obama] said the other day. “It is our military that is being volunteered by others to carry out missions that are important not only to us, but are important internationally.”

That’s great news. Who doesn’t enjoy volunteering other people?

The Arab League, for reasons best known to itself, decided that Col. Gadhafi had outlived his sell-by date. Granted that the region’s squalid polities haven’t had a decent military commander since King Hussein fired Gen. John Glubb half a century back, how difficult could it be even for Arab armies to knock off a psychotic transvestite guarded by Austin Powers fembots?

But no: Instead, the Arab League decided to volunteer the U.S. military.

For the Left, it’s the right war, with the right leader

Glenn Reynolds has been enjoying himself pointing out the hypocrisy of many of those on the Left when it comes to Obama’s new war (“Watching the people who savaged Bush and called his supporters warmongers and so on now faced with watching the Lightbringer doing basically the same thing, only less competently, is too good a pleasure to forego.”)  One of his readers also pointed out something I’ve been noticing:  if you have liberal friends on facebook (as I do), they are absolutely silent about the newly declared war.

And why not?  This is the wet dream of liberal wars:  It hasn’t been billed as promoting American interests (and there is debate as to whether it does); it’s being led by the UN, which has been incapable of articulating an actual desired outcome; and a a pacifist, incompetent, disengaged American president is gratefully playing third chair, behind France.  This is the way wars should be fought. This is the Leftist version of a “good war.”

Bad wars are the ones that are sold expressly as advancing American interests; that have clearly defined, pro-American goals; and that are led, not by the international community, but by an American president who believes in the mission.  An incoherent war that sees America play second fiddle to the rest of the world is clearly a war that’s well worth the money spent.