Obama, Interventionism And Democrats

By Steve Hynd

Some, like Kevin Drum, are having second thoughts about an interventionist President Obama after having voted for a dovish-seeming Candidate Obama:

I was one of many who ended up voting for Obama on the grounds that his judgment seemed a bit sounder. Maybe not as toughminded as Hillary, but just as smart and, in foreign affairs, seemingly a little more willing to look at the world with fresh eyes and resist the siren call of intervention at every turn.

So how's that working out for me?

It's being pretty sorely tested, that's for sure.

Kevin can at least console himself with the knowledge that Clinton as president would have been even more likely to answer that 3am phone call with military force - as SecState she's led the internal pressure on Obama over Libya and constantly been the most hawkish administration official on Iran. But still, he has a point.

Others simply embrace their inner interventionist now that the wars are being run by their party. Here's a chart that speaks volumes:

 
"The key argument is that the decline of the antiwar movement can be attributed, in part, to the fact that Democrats have stopped using the peace movement as a platform for anti-Bush sentiment."

Now that being anti-war isn't a useful club to hit Dubya with, many Dems have gone back to being gung-ho for war. As Jordan Michael Smith writes over at Salon:

Once again, the liberal hawks -- Democrats who support the frequent use of American military force abroad -- favor intervention. They include Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former director of policy and planning at the State Department; Bill Clinton; the editors of the New Republic; and the folks at the Progressive Policy Institute. And once again, the anti-imperialists at the Nation, realists like Stephen Walt and David Rieff, and humanitarian-minded liberals like Dissent editor Michael Walzer are hoisting antiwar flags.

One wonders if these Democrat hawks will still be so gung-ho for intervention when Libya degenerates into a long and drawn out quagmire. James Joyner writes:

as we should have learned over the past two decades�but clearly haven't�simply taking out the bad guys' air power and blowing up a few tanks doesn't end the problem; it merely transforms it into a tougher one.

Having bought into Libya, we're in it. As best I can tell, the strategy is to hope that somehow, some way, Gaddafi is removed from power.

Like Walt Slocombe, I'm deeply skeptical that it'll happen without substantial escalation. Gaddafi's air force, such as it is, was disabled very early in the operation, so the no fly zone is a moot point. But the ragtag opposition clearly is inadequate to win on the ground against a disciplined, trained force. So, unless the military revolts against Gaddafi�and we're seeing little sign of that�he's likely to prevail if NATO remains relatively neutral. And that means continued atrocities by Gaddafi's forces and, presumably, a prolonged guerrilla insurgency of the sort predicted by Steven Metz.

Metz, who is Chairman of the Regional Strategy Department, and Research Professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, was among the very first to predict a long counter-insurgency fight in Iraq - way back in 2003 in the very first, heady days of "being greeted like liberators". We should be listening to him.

History offers a number of sign posts that an insurgency will occur. Unfortunately Libya has almost all of them. At this point the political objectives of the government and anti-government forces are irreconcilable. Each side wants total victory�either Qaddafi will retain total power or he will be gone. Both sides are intensely devoted to their cause; passions are high. Both have thousands of men with military training, all imbued with a traditional warrior ethos which Qaddafi himself has stoked. The country is awash with arms. Libya has extensive hinterlands with little or no government control that could serve as insurgent bases. Neighboring states are likely to provide insurgent sanctuary whether deliberately�as an act of policy�or inadvertently because a government is unable to control its territory. North Africa has a long history of insurgency, from the anti-colonial wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to more recent conflicts in Chad, Algeria, and Western Sahara. Where insurgency occurred in the past, it is more likely to occur in the future. All this means that there is no place on earth more likely to experience an insurgency in the next few years than Libya.

What is not clear is whether the coming insurgency will involve Qaddafi loyalists fighting against a new regime or anti-Qaddafi forces fighting to remove the old dictator and his patrons. In either case, a Libyan insurgency would be destructive. Because they take place within the population, insurgencies always fuel refugee problems and humanitarian crises. They provide an opportunity for extremists to hijack one or both sides. And insurgency in Libya would destabilize a region undergoing challenging political transitions.

Unfortunately, there is little the United States can do to prevent an insurgency short of a full-scale military intervention to force Qaddafi's removal.

Joyner adds:

My strong guess is that this outcome will be unacceptable to the Big 3. Obama, the most reluctant to join the fight, now seems the most eager to take sides in the civil war. Given how unpalatable a stalemate would be, Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron would be likely to go along.

Simply giving better weapons to untrained "rebels," however, is unlikely to do much beyond getting more people killed. And Obama has been adamant that US ground forces will not be used. So, either someone else will have to be found to do the fighting�and there are no ready candidates�or Obama will have to break one or the other promise. Having put American prestige---to say nothing of his own---on the line, there's not much doubt which he'll choose.

Especially when he's being pushed by Hillary and other establishment Dems even more hawkish than himself.