Syria - There Are No Good Guys

Commentary By Ron Beasley

John Rosenthal of NRO reports that the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung is reporting that anti-Assad Sunni rebels are responsible for the Houla massacre.

According to the article�s sources, the massacre occurred after rebel forces attacked three army-controlled roadblocks outside of Houla. The roadblocks had been set up to protect nearby Alawi majority villages from attacks by Sunni militias. The rebel attacks provoked a call for reinforcements by the besieged army units. Syrian army and rebel forces are reported to have engaged in battle for some 90 minutes, during which time �dozens of soldiers and rebels� were killed.

�According to eyewitness accounts,� the FAZ report continues,

the massacre occurred during this time. Those killed were almost exclusively from families belonging to Houla�s Alawi and Shia minorities. Over 90% of Houla�s population are Sunnis. Several dozen members of a family were slaughtered, which had converted from Sunni to Shia Islam. Members of the Shomaliya, an Alawi family, were also killed, as was the family of a Sunni member of the Syrian parliament who is regarded as a collaborator. Immediately following the massacre, the perpetrators are supposed to have filmed their victims and then presented them as Sunni victims in videos posted on the internet.

The FAZ report echoes eyewitness accounts collected from refugees from the Houla region by members of the Monastery of St. James in Qara, Syria. According to monastery sources cited by the Dutch Middle East expert Martin Janssen, armed rebels murdered �entire Alawi families� in the village of Taldo in the Houla region.

Of course there is no way to verify any of this but the one thing that can be verified - there are no good guys here.  This is a tribal, religious and civil war all  rolled up into one.  Another thing we can be certain of that no matter which side wins they will not be a friend of the US or Israel.  

Just another of the many good reasons not to get involved.

Romney - Bush Redux

Commentary By Ron Beasley

A few days ago I did a post on Romney's foreign policy.  If it looks familiar it should - his foreign policy advisors are mostly retreads from the Bush/Cheney administration.  

Today there are a couple of new posts from people to the right of me on Romney's militaristic foreign policy. From Daniel Larison we have:

Romney�s Campaign Dislikes the Neoconservative Label, But Keeps Embracing Neoconservative Policies

The campaign is right to bristle at the neoconservative label. That�s not because the label is inaccurate. Romney�s foreign policy statements often sound as if they are drafted by Weekly Standard staff writers. Except for McCain, Romney has been campaigning as the most unapologetic adherent to neoconservative foreign policy views of any Republican nominee. Regardless of the �range of backgrounds� of his advisers, the diversity of their views is not very great.Two-thirds of them worked for George W. Bush in some capacity. The campaign bristles at the description because they understand that the neoconservative label is politically damaging. That doesn�t seem to stop Romney from giving voters every reason to believe that his foreign policy would be a neoconservative one.

The second comes from OTB's Steven Taylor:

Romney and the Military

1. Romney here appears to be saying that if he has to choose, he chooses military power over taking care of the social needs of the citizenry. Even recognizing that military power is important, this is a telling statement. It is odd, or so it seems to me, to so easily dismiss the importance of social needs and to, to use Erik�s word, sneer at the Europeans for diverting more resources to that than to military power.

2. Of course, an underlying question: how big is big enough? As Doug Mataconis noted recently, he US already spends the most in raw terms than any other country in the world. Indeed, the US spends six times was the second place country (China) spends and over 11 times what the number three county (Russia) spends. In terms of the Europe quip and Romney, it is worth noting that four of the top ten in raw spending are European countries (France, the UK, Germany, and Italy). Further, along those same lines, Doug notes:

If you add in the military budgets of the NATO and non-NATO allies in the Top 20, it amounts to more than 70% of the worldwide military spending, dwarfing the spending of nations like China, Russia, and Iran to a considerable degree. Based on sheer numbers alone, the idea that the United States isn�t spending enough on defense, a refrain one hears frequently from the hawkish wing of the GOP, is quite simply absurd.

Romney will give the wheel to the neocons again.  I don't like a lot of what Obama has done but I sure don't want the Weekly Standard crew in charge again.  We should all know how that worked out last time.

Standing On The Edge

By Steve Hynd

I've a post up at The Agonist today wondering if the time has finally come for the West and Iran to either do a deal or go to war. Trita Parsi says it has and I'm inclined to agree.

But if the first order consequences of attacking Iran have been well covered by many, second order and further consequences ar harder by their very nature to predict and have not been well explored in the media. Previous wars in the region have shown that events which interrupted between 4 and 7% of the world's oil supply caused price spikes of between 25 and 70%. Iran accounts for 5% of the world's supply and all the oil flowing through the Hormuz Straits comes to 20% of that supply. At some point, if oil hits a sustained price of over $110 a barrel and before $150 a barrel, the global economy begins to break down. At over $150 a barrel for a long period, we can expect a worldwide economic crash. The current price of oil is around $100 a barrel. The math is easy. here.

I'm torn between coming across as too alarmist and calling the potential oncoming disaster what it is. We don't need Mutually Assured Destruction between Cold war superpowers to cause the downfall of modern civilization any longer. If the world pitches into a massive economic crash right now - with the debt-ridden nations of Southern Europe leading the way - it won't recover in time before global warming and peak cheap oil really begin to bite, causing their own massive economic impact. It may not be an exaggeration to say these talks constitute a threshold.

Prepping to bomb Iran

By Dave Anderson:

Via Gahlran at Information Dissemination:

Today, mentioned in passing in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee - without a word or question on the topic from any supposedly well informed Senators - Chief of Naval Operations Jonathan Greenert told the Senate committee that the US Navy is going to deploy 4 minesweepers to the Persian Gulf (which will double the number of US Navy Minesweepers in the Persian Gulf) and also send additional mine hunting helicopters to the region. This comes following news earlier this year that the US Navy is working on the USS Ponce to deploy to the Persian Gulf to be a full time Mine Warfare Command Ship....

And here is the charter. Note the timeline. Basically we seem to be in a hurry to get everything in place by summertime.

Other indicators that the US is anticipating a major military campaign by either the US or Isreal in and against Iran would be the deployment of more anti-missile batteries to Bahrain, salvage and naval construction units to multiple points on the western shore of the Persian Gulf, and additional E-8 JStars and E-3 Awacs that would be used to coordinate the anti-ship missile battery hunt. 

Pay attention to those moves as the precursors to a major operation against Iran. 

Intervention: We're Doing It Wrong

By Steve Hynd

While news of human rights abuses in Syria are burning up the headlines, it's worth remembering that Libya still has major human rights problems despite Western intervention there, thanks mainly to the plethora of militias run riot. And let us not also forget that Iraq, almost a decade on, still has serious problems with its humanitarian record. Afghanistan's problems post-intervention have never been more manifest than this last week.

The lesson the West took from Iraq and Afghanistan is that it was best to intervene and get out again, rather than try to manage the aftermath. That's why current calls for intervention in Syria, which are often hopelessly unrealistic even on their own terms, usually don't mention any plan to manage the aftermath despite the fact that any such intervention will be destabilizing on a scale comparable to Iraq.

It would be far better to accept the utilitarian principle of "first, do no harm" and not employ military means in pursuit of humanitarian causes at all. After all, the resources involved could be better expended - saving more lives and relieving more misery, fulfilling "for the greatest good of the greatest number" - by non-military aid and development in places where the shooting hasn't started yet.

Syria Musings

By BJ Bjornson

I haven't written about Syria before now since it didn't appear that the situation there was going to spill over into an international issue in anything more than a rhetorical sense. However, the bleeding ulcer of the continued fighting and escalations has stoked additional calls for international, and often American-led, intervention of some sort. Greg Djerejian has popped up with a longish post (referenced by John below) that discusses three of the more notable of those calls. (Steve ripped through the one by Ann Slaughter Djerejian describes as the "sloppiest, almost offering up something of a parody", over at the Agonist on Friday, which is worth the read.)

Djerejian does seem more persuaded by the third of the articles he mentions from the Financial Times' Emile Nakhleh, mainly due to a fundamental point that the Assad regime is already doomed, and so "The longer the denouement, the bloodier it will prove. So why not act now?" While Djerejian agrees with that point, his reservations regarding the wisdom of intervention are worth quoting:

1) Unlike with Libya, the opposition do not yet control territorially contiguous areas of operations, making any effort to assist them far more complicated;

2) Syria's strategic location in the Levant implicates far more complex regional dynamics implicating at minimum its immediate neighbors of Lebanon, Turkey (particularly with respect to Kurdish areas of Syria emboldened amidst the chaos to pursue irredentist claims), Iraq, Israel and, lest we forget, Jordan (heretofore a reasonably stable, reliable ally amidst the Arab Spring despite widespread dissatisfaction among its Palestinian majority with the Hashemite throne);

3) The relationship between Syrian opposition outside the country and inside is still tenuous and patchy, at best, so that attempts to recognize the Syrian National Council do not guarantee a positive, 'bankable' spill-over impact in-country given this still evident lack of cohesion;

4) Related to "3", even the external opposition itself is far more divided than Libya's was (at least at the conception of the Libyan uprising), largely a function of Syria's more complex ethnic and sectarian make-up, and the same issues with lack of cohesiveness applies to the so-called Free Syrian Army within Syria (they are more simply a series of localized militias, if the local opposition itself generally has a more unified agenda, namely, for Bashar to be ejected from power, but then what, regarding preservation of consistent goals?);

5) Assad's Army is larger than Gaddafi's, and he will unfortunately also likely retain more loyalist units until the bitter end;

6) Assad enjoys large stock-piles of perilous chemical weaponry, we can suspect if his own skin is on the line in an existential end-game he may well employ same (once a war criminal it is a slippery slope of cascading horrors, and he has already well proved his despicableness), and/or there are risk presented by whom may gain control of these stock-piles were the regime to chaotically implode;

7) The prospects of revanchist violence and horrors are at least equal to Libya, but given the crazy quilt-work of villages, town and cities where such internecine horrors would unfold, could prove far bloodier;

8) The possibility that Lebanon were pulled into the mire of a full-bore Syrian civil war is very high, and the prospects of border instability will also greatly concern Amman and Tel Aviv (there are also Iraqi issues that would concern, not only Iran, but also elements of the Shi'a leadership in Baghdad);

9) The Russians have proven so dismal in their naked-self interest (historic client state relationship, arms contracts, the naval base in Tartous, etc) that one would have to be concerned about possible retaliatory machinations in the broader neighborhood if they over-step to defend their client; and

10) Turkey's role cannot be seen as simply that of a Good Samaritan, while they are arguably the key player in the entire equation (of which more below) they will have critical interests regarding Kurdish minorities among other priorities that may not wholly gel with those of Washington, or those of the (rather juvenilely named conclave) 'Friends of Syria'.

Even Djerejian notes that the above is far from a comprehensive list of the issues facing an Syrian intervention, even if he comes to conclusion that the Assad regime has crossed enough "red-lines" that the international community "must become more proactive in its approach." The details of this approach are left vague beyond noting it will depend largely on what the Turks are willing to do insofar as a "safe haven" in northern Syria is concerned, but given he's starting from a premise that the Assad regime is already doomed, the end game is clearly regime change, which remains a drastic action without any clear idea of just how much effort, time, and resources will have to be expended by the "Friends of Syria" to accomplish.

Iraq remains the default cautionary tale for those opposed to such interventions, but for myself, Libya, an intervention I supported, contains sufficient lessons for why a similar intervention in Syria is a foolish and counterproductive endeavour.

Start with the reservations Djerejian lists himself. At #1, it is not just that the rebels don't control territorially contiguous areas of operation in Syria, it is that they don't control much territory at all, and that the areas they do control are not of the kind to make a Libyan-style intervention very useful.

Libya is a country with a thinly populated strip of land along the coast, and the opposition took over control of a large swath of said land, including the second largest city, and had considerable support within the capital itself. The eastern front of the revolution in Libya was almost picture-perfect for airstrikes to play a decisive role, which they did, only to get swiftly bogged down when the terrain in question was the western mountains or urban battlefield of Misrata, terrain which more closely matches the Syrian situation. Add in the far more sophisticated Syrian air defences and the larger, more loyal, and far better trained and equipped Syrian military, and the difficulty of the operation increases manifold.

This is also where I have to question the fundamental point of Djerejian's (and Nakhleh's) argument, that the Assad regime is already doomed. The opposition to Assad is nowhere near as widespread as the Libyan opposition to Qaddafi was, nor has it accomplished anywhere near the level of success the rebels in Libya managed prior to the regime's counter-attacks. That the Syrian opposition has continued to fight on in the face of such grinding defeats is remarkable, but given how much of a struggle it was for the better organized, supported, and widespread Libyan opposition to overthrow Qaddafi even with Western support, I am nowhere near as convinced that the Assad regime is staring into the dustbin of history at this point.

(As an aside to the above, the sheer tenacity of the Syrian opposition also calls into question whether or not the Qaddafi regime's march east on Benghazi and Tobruk would have actually ended the rebellion against him or merely started a longer and more brutal insurgency as the repeated Syrian military conquests of rebel strongholds has resultantly spiraled into in Syria.)

Things grow worse regarding Syria from there. While Western media coverage of Libya has been mostly quiet since the premature back-slapping victory laps of those who had called for the intervention celebrating the defeat and death of Qaddafi, the country has hardly been all candy and roses in the aftermath, and while the spillover effects have been relatively minor to date, they certainly exist, and are causing serious issues in at least a couple of neighbouring states as returning pro-Qaddafi Tuareg mercenaries stir up trouble in their home countries.

Here again, Djerejian notes that the prospects for retaliations and internecine horrors are likely even worse in Syria than they are in Libya, and that Syria is starting from a more divisive opposition to begin with. And he also notes that Syria is far more strategically located than Libya, with spillover effects far more likely and disruptive.

Really, there isn't a single neighbour of Syria's that doesn't have a stake in how things turn out. Israel has obvious security concerns related to their occupation of the Golan Heights and what kinds of actions a new regime in Damascus might pursue in relation to Israel overall, much as they've been concerned about a new Egyptian regime made up of parties less likely to overlook or accede to Israeli policies vis-a-vis the Palestinians in Gaza.

How the parties in Lebanon react is also an open question, and probably the most at risk for violence and turmoil to spill over thanks to the intertwined recent history of the two nations, likely causing even more Israeli concerns as a result.

Turkey has the Kurdish regions to worry itself about. Jordan's stability during the whole Arab Spring is also at risk thanks to a new flood of refugees, and Iraq's newly aggressive Shiite regime must be concerned that the many Sunnis who fled the cleansing of their neighbourhoods during the American "surge" may choose to return home and again challenge their authority.

Further, while Qaddafi had no real allies among the world powers and his isolation allowed for intervention to proceed without much opposition from non-Western powers, Assad and Syria retain some international backing, making an international consensus, and therefore bringing at least some legitimacy to the intervention, next to impossible.

Let's face it, the Libyan intervention was a hard, bloody slog that has left behind a fractured state struggling to put itself back together and resulting in knock-on effects that have yet to play out. And at that, it remains the best-case scenario I can think of for a Western-style military intervention.

As a result, I see no way that an intervention into Syria will not cause far uglier consequences on every measure. On this, Iraq does provide a parallel worth considering. When one talks of the "red-lines" Assad has crossed that requires the international community to act, namely the level of death and destruction he has visited upon his own people, how do those acts compare in scale to the level of destruction the U.S. military visited upon the people of Iraq and in cities like Fallujah during their long occupation of that nation? You can't argue from a moral high ground you don't actually occupy.

Ultimately I don't know what is going to happen in Syria, but given its strategic importance to numerous regional and international players, I suspect we'll see enough meddling from the outside that the situation won't be getting any better in the year to come than it has been during the one past. I can only hope the powers that be prove either intelligent or self-interested enough to keep the meddling from blossoming into overt intervention, since that will be the worst of all possible results for the people of Syria.

A little history on U.S.-Iran relations

By BJ Bjornson

Nothing new or even surprising here, and all pretty much just a basic overview, but it is still nice to be reminded of the history every now and again, particularly given the increased drumbeat towards military action these days.

Real Men Go To Tehran Via Damascus

By Steve Hynd

The CSMonitor's Nicholas Blanford today writes that "diplomats and analysts say Western and Arab officials are mulling an option of military support for the rebel Free Syrian Army," the Sunni main opposition to Assad's Shiite regime. Despite the continued shelling of the Sunni stronghold city of Homs by Syrian government forces, now into its fifth day, the UNSC vetoes of China and Russia as well as military appreciation that Syria is not like Libya seems to have taken a "colaition of the willing" direct intervention off the table. Blanford quotes Andrew Exum of the CNAS think-tank in Washington, a group acknowledged as a primary driver of the Obama administration's foreign and military thinking.

�The Syrians will almost certainly resist any intrusion into their sovereignty, so to execute either a NFZ [no-fly zone] or safe haven would mean a fairly extensive air war to reduce Syrian air defenses,� Exum says. �We should also note that any such air operations would take place in some of the most militarily and politically sensitive air space on Earth.�

Syria has an aging but extensive air defense network provided by Russia, along with the bulk of its other weaponry. It's military is five times larger than Libya's. Both Hillary Clinton and the UK's William Hague have explicitly ruled out direct military action for now.

It may be that the West is already funneling both weapons and trainers to the FSA's rebels. Two days ago Borzou Daragahi, the Middle East and North Africa correspondent for the Financial Times, tweeted: "Wow - Misurata revolutionaries announce combat deaths of three #Libyan fighters in #Syria". That would seem to at least partially substantiate Philip Giraldi's report back in December (well in advance of any UNSC vote) that:

Unmarked NATO warplanes are arriving at Turkish military bases close to Iskenderum on the Syrian border, delivering weapons from the late Muammar Gaddafi�s arsenals as well as volunteers from the Libyan Transitional National Council who are experienced in pitting local volunteers against trained soldiers, a skill they acquired confronting Gaddafi�s army. Iskenderum is also the seat of the Free Syrian Army, the armed wing of the Syrian National Council. French and British special forces trainers are on the ground, assisting the Syrian rebels while the CIA and U.S. Spec Ops are providing communications equipment and intelligence to assist the rebel cause, enabling the fighters to avoid concentrations of Syrian soldiers.

However, Assad has friends that Libya did not have, namely Russian and China, who have interests in Syria that they can exercise, whereas they did not have the ability to project force in Libya nor supply the regime at reasonable costs. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov has said that Assad is ready to negotiate with the rebels but few believe Assad really means it - especially since the shelling of Homs continues - and in any case the rebels are standing firm on their call for regime change. Thus the stage is set for a protracted proxy war between the West and Russia, which has a major naval base in Syria it will not want to give up.

It also sets up a direct confrontation between Shiites and Sunnis in the region, with the neo-whatever eternal bugbear Iran sitting in the background as a clear target. The neocon Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) think tank in particular is being especailly vocal on Syria right now, hoping to drive Western policy towards a showdown with Tehran. They are talking up the FSA:

�I believe the FSA is now one of the drivers of the situation. It is going to shape the outcome,� says Jeffrey White, a military analyst with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) and author of a new briefing paper on the FSA. �It has changed the nature of the conflict with the regime, is becoming increasingly identified with the popular opposition within Syria, has shown resilience on the battlefield, and is growing in capabilities and numbers.�

And talking up the notion of proxy intervention.

turning the FSA into a coherent military force will require �coordinated action by the intelligence services of a coalition of the willing,� says Jeffrey White, a military analyst with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

The FSA, he says, would need an assured supply of arms and ammunition, especially anti-tank missiles, secured means of communication, advice on how to coordinate operations across different regions of Syria, intelligence on Syrian Army operations and vulnerable military infrastructure.

�The intelligence services of the US, the UK, France, Turkey, Jordan, and other states in the region have the know-how and capabilities to do these kinds of things,� Mr. White says. �It would be important to have cooperation from one or more of the states bordering Syria, especially Turkey, in order to establish base facilities, training camps, supply routes and infiltration routes.�

It's a dangerous route to take.

�Syria is already an arena for proxy competition between Saudi Arabia and its allies and [rival] Iran and its allies,� says Aram Nerguizian, a military analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and author of a report published in December on the risks of military intervention in Syria. �Anything that would involve direct Western intervention would be deeply destabilizing at the regional level.�

Of course, destabilizing the region has long been the neocon answer to the Middle East - as long as it doesn't include Israel. Their stated theory is that a shake-up will mean the emergence of democratic states more friendly to the U.S. Thus WINEP and others advocating covert arming of the rebels have both regime change and crippling Iran in mind when they do so.

"In Syria [sectarian identity] is there. All you have to do is scratch the surface," says Andrew Tabler, a Syria specialist with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author of a book on Syria under the presidency of Mr. Assad. "Until now, I don't think you have seen a tremendous amount of organizing along sectarian lines.... But it is natural that the main divide is going to be between Alawites and other Shiite off-shoots versus Sunnis."

The Guardian's Seumas Milne is spot on when he writes:

Already US, British and French leaders are busy setting up a new coalition of the willing with their autocratic Saudi and Gulf allies, satirically named "friends of democratic Syria", to build up the opposition and drive Assad from power.

Intervention is in fact already taking place. The Saudis and Qataris are reported to be funding and arming the opposition. The Free Syrian Army has a safe haven in Turkey. Western special forces are said to be giving military support on the ground. And if that fails, the UN can be bypassed by invoking the "responsibility to protect" civilians, along Libyan lines.

But none of that will stop the killing. It will escalate it. That is the clear lesson of last year's Nato intervention in Libya.

...The overthrow of the Syrian regime would be a serious blow to Iran's influence in the Middle East. And as the conflict in Syria has escalated, so has the western-Israeli confrontation with Iran. Even as US defence secretary Leon Panetta and national intelligence director James Clapper acknowledged that Iran isn't after all "trying to build a nuclear weapon", Panetta has let it be known there is a "strong likelihood" Israel will attack Iran as early as April, while Iran faces crippling EU oil sanctions over its nuclear programme.

Western intervention in Syria � and Russia and China's opposition to it � can only be understood in that context: as part of a proxy war against Iran, which disastrously threatens to become a direct one.

To WINEP and many others calling for intervention by proxy in Syria, greater sectarian conflict and a possible confrontation with Iran are features, not bugs. The former head of Mossad took to the NY Times yesterday to proclaim that "Getting Iran booted out of Syria is essential for Israel�s security" and "The current standoff in Syria presents a rare chance to rid the world of the Iranian menace".

There are without doubt some serious and genuine advocates of the "Responsibility to Protect" doctrine who are allying themselves with the regime-changers over Syria, but they are few and far between.

The Aftermath of Intervention

By Steve Hynd

The aftermath is never as full of rose petals and candy as neo-whatever advocates of the intervention told us it would be.

(Tripoli) - A Libyan diplomat who served as ambassador to France died less than 24 hours after he was detained by a Tripoli-based militia from the town of Zintan, Human Rights Watch said today. Dr. Omar Brebesh, who was detained on January 19, 2012, appears to have died from torture.

A preliminary autopsy report viewed by Human Rights Watch said the cause of death included multiple bodily injuries and fractured ribs. Photos of Brebesh's body, seen by Human Rights Watch, show welts, cuts, and the apparent removal of toenails, indicating that he was tortured prior to death. Human Rights Watch also read a report by the judicial police in Tripoli, which said that Brebesh had died from torture and that an unnamed suspect had confessed to killing him.

"The torture and killing of detainees is sadly an ongoing activity by some Libyan militias," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. "These abusive militias will keep torturing people until they are held to account. Libya's leaders should show the political will to prosecute people who commit serious crimes, regardless of their role in the uprising."

According to the ICRC, there are about 8,500 detainees in prisons in Libya right now, most run by militias with only tangential connections to the central government. Many of these detainees are dark-skinned Libyans or sub-Saharan Africans. Many reliably report having been tortured.

The detainees who reported abuse said guards had beaten them, sometimes on a daily basis. Seven prisoners in two facilities, including women, said guards had subjected them to electric shock. Two detainees who had been at one facility reported beatings on the soles of their feet � a torture technique commonly used during Gaddafi�s rule...Fewer than half of the 53 interviewed detainees said they had been questioned, and none had been investigated by the police or brought before a judge. None said they had been able to speak with a lawyer.

What you won't be hearing is any kind of contrition from those who pushed for the NATO intervention - no, not even a little bit. They're apparently too busy calling for the next one, in Syria, to care what happens in the aftermath.

Hasten the Day

By Steve Hynd

Romney charges that the Obama administration's announcement of a 2013 end to combat missions in Afghanistan and 2014 pull-out date "makes absolutely no sense."

One of the few moderate, sane Republicans left, James Joyner, responds:

Critics who worry that this announcement of a withdrawal severely undercuts our negotiating position with the Taliban are surely correct. They can easily bide their time now that they have a date certain.

So how can a decision that undermines our allies and our own negotiating power nonetheless be the right one? Because the alternative is to continue getting people killed -- not to mention inadvertently killing innocents -- in a fight we can't win.

...As with many other Obama foreign policy decisions, one might have wished for a better rollout. Consultation with our NATO allies and partners on the matter would have been good form. And, after a more than a decade of fighting, a presidential speech rather than a casual announcement by the defense secretary would have been more fitting.

Ultimately, though, hastening the day Americans stop dying for a lost cause is the right call.

The Taliban always could "bide their time" in Afghanistan. They live there. Announce the timetable or not, it's meaningless.

I'm highly skeptical that this announced transition will actually mean the end to Americans fighting and dying in Afghanistan, and even more so that 2014 will see the end to a US military presence there, but I cannot help but concur with James' sentiments about "dying for a lost cause".

Alas, I'm fairly sure that Simon Jenkins is right when he writes that nothing has been learned from Afghanistan.

More alarming about the Afghan war has been its psychology. It has generated some two dozen books on my shelf, and every one of them warns, cautions, criticises, condemns. The Pashtun Taliban should not be underestimated. Defeating them by main force flew in the face of all experience. Pakistani intelligence would offer them sanctuary and support. Nato should not drive al-Qaida, a tiny Arabist cell in 2001, into alliance with the Taliban. The idea that force of western arms could turn a corrupt Muslim statelet into a sanitised, pro-western democracy was arrogant and unreal.

Every warning was disregarded in a classic of "cognitive dissonance".

...Unlike most European countries, sucked into the Afghan vortex by Nato blackmail, Britain and the US were willing warriors, with belligerence in their cultural genes. Discussing "what must be done" to order the rest of the world is second nature to their political class...Which is why this is not the endgame. Britain is even now rattling sabres and dicing with disaster alongside the US against Iran. Such a war would be as catastrophic as could be imagined, and against a country that poses no conceivable threat to western security. The sole reason for going to war against Iran is to go to war against Iran. That is how we went to war against Afghanistan and Iraq. Clearly, nothing has been learned.

If not Iran, then Syria. If not Syria, then somewhere else. It certainly seems correct to say that the US and Britain share some subtextual notion of "manifest destiny" that means they can keep on blithely assuming they have the right and wherewithall to "order the rest of the world" at gunpoint. To truly "hasten the day Americans stop dying for a lost cause" we're going to have to deal with that notion. I confess, I've no blessed clue how.

Tarnishing a Hero

By BJ Bjornson

This McClatchy story about the Marines inflating the story around Congressional Medal of Honor winner Dakota Meyer is just depressing on too many levels.

First off, of course, is the fact that they felt the need to inflate the story of Meyer�s already heroic deeds in the first place.

[T]here�s a problem with this account. Crucial parts that the Marine Corps publicized and Obama described are untrue, unsubstantiated or exaggerated, according to dozens of military documents McClatchy examined.

Sworn statements by Meyer and others who participated in the battle indicate that he didn�t save the lives of 13 U.S. service members, leave his vehicle to scoop up 24 Afghans on his first two rescue runs or lead the final push to retrieve the four dead Americans. Moreover, it�s unclear from the documents whether Meyer disobeyed orders when he entered the Ganjgal Valley on Sept. 8, 2009.

The statements also offer no proof that the 23-year-old Kentucky native "personally killed at least eight Taliban insurgents," as the account on the Marine Corps website says. The driver of Meyer�s vehicle attested to seeing �a single enemy go down."

What's most striking is that all this probably was unnecessary. Meyer, the 296th Marine to earn the medal, by all accounts deserved his nomination. At least seven witnesses attested to him performing heroic deeds �in the face of almost certain death.�

Braving withering fire, he repeatedly returned to the ambush site with Army Capt. William Swenson and others to retrieve Afghan casualties and the dead Americans. He suffered a shrapnel wound in one arm and was sent home after the battle with combat-related stress. Meyer�s commander, Lt. Col. Kevin Williams, commended him for acts of �conspicuous gallantry at the risk of his life � above and beyond the call of duty.�

What follows is a tale of inter-service rivalry and misplaced pride creating pressure for awarding more and better medals leading to a rushed citation, but I found this part of the story even worse in all respects.

In response to McClatchy's findings, the Marine Corps said it stood by the official citation that was produced by the formal vetting process. Asked to explain the individual discrepancies and embellishments, the Marines drew a distinction between the citation and the account of Meyer's deeds that the Marines constructed to help tell his story to the nation. They described that account as "Meyer's narrative of the sequence of events," which Marine officials said they didn't vet.

Doesn�t it just warm your heart to know that winning your nation�s highest award for bravery doesn�t render you immune from the brass blaming you in an attempt to cover their own asses?

The sad part about all of this is that despite the many heroic actions Meyer did perform that day, the Marine Corps decision to exaggerate and become inventive on the official account is going to put an asterisk beside his Medal of Honor win, one that honesty could have avoided. No one deserves that.

The drums of war and the economy

Commentary By Ron Beasley

It used to be that the drums of war would boost the economy.  When that war would involve the Strait of Hormuz not so much.

Why? This:

"every $1 per barrel rise in oil decreases U.S. GDP by $100 billion per year and every 1 cent increase in gasoline decreases U.S. consumer disposable income by about $600 million per year."

The rumors of an attack on Iran's nuclear installations was enough.

Libya and the Left

By BJ Bjornson

Michael Berube has a few unkind things to say about the left and the debate on Libya, and while I was supportive of that action, I felt I had to respond to at least a couple of his points.

The first is, appropriately, his opening:

In late March of 2011, a massacre was averted�not just any ordinary massacre, mind you. For had Qaddafi and his forces managed to crush the Libyan rebellion in what was then its stronghold, Benghazi, the aftershocks would have reverberated well beyond eastern Libya. As Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch wrote, �Qaddafi�s victory�alongside Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak�s fall�would have signaled to other authoritarian governments from Syria to Saudi Arabia to China that if you negotiate with protesters you lose, but if you kill them you win.� Qaddafi�s defeat seemed to send a message to American politicians and media instead. Contrasting Obama�s handling of Libya with Clinton�s handling of the Balkans, Malinowski observed that �Presidents get more credit for stopping atrocities after they begin than for preventing them before they get out of hand.�

The NATO-led attack on Qaddafi�s forces therefore did much more than prevent a humanitarian catastrophe in Libya�though it should be acknowledged that this alone might have been sufficient justification. It helped keep alive the Arab Spring: after rebellions in Tunisia and Egypt had begun to transform the political landscape of North Africa and the Middle East, and after Qaddafi�s repression of the revolt had earned the condemnation of both the Arab League and the African Union, NATO�s preservation of Benghazi in March sustained the rebellion and made it possible for the rebels to prevail in Tripoli five months later.

This is, frankly, bullshit. You don�t have to look any further than Syria to see that the lesson being applied, and even in late March, Qaddafi had already shown that he had figured it out, same as the authorities in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, and you could look back a year or two to Iran for more proof of the concept, if it hadn�t been the preferred method of tyrants to deal with those that opposed them since time immemorial.

Thinking that the NATO action in Libya might have far reaching effects beyond its borders regarding the Arab Spring was likely wishful thinking even in late March. To pretend that it still does now after months of inaction over Syria and other Arab authoritarian states� crackdowns is pretty much delusional.

The second point is one I made back in August. It is still way too early to start crowing about whether or not the mission was a good idea or not. At that time, the problm was what was going to happen when the anti-Qaddafi forces entered Sirte and other loyalist strongholds. News on that front hasn�t exactly been comforting, and the news from Tripoli these days doesn�t sound like the issues that led to some of the nastier aspects of revenge-taking have yet to be dealt with.

Abdul Mojan's moment of realisation came when the good guys threw him into the boot of their car, slammed it shut and drove off with him a prisoner inside.

When they finally stopped and hauled him out, he asked them: "What are you doing? I'm a revolutionary just like you! I've never supported Gaddafi.'"

But the former rebels didn't care. They had taken a liking to the new office block in western Tripoli that Mr Mojan managed and they wanted the keys and ownership documents. He tried to reason with them, pointing out that there were plenty of government buildings standing empty.

. . .

More alarming than the looting have been the armed clashes between militias. There have been three big fights in the capital alone in the past week; shoot-outs at a hospital, Martyr's Square, and the military airport, which have left several dead and dozens wounded.

Then there are the detentions. With the fighting over, the revolutionaries have not been idle. They have kept busy rounding up hundreds of suspected Gaddafi supporters in a wide-scale witch-hunt, often on the basis of little more than rumour and accusation.

There are a few points in Berube�s article that ring all too true, and remind me how easy it is for tribalism to get the better of one�s thought processes. Still, given how horrifically incompetent and out of touch with reality the right has been on foreign policy over the last decade and more, I think some pushback on yet another �the left was wrong� meme over Libya is in order.

Do We Care?

By BJ Bjornson

Every now and again I get reminded just how much I would hate to be in President Obama�s shoes. It isn�t the big things usually, like the fact that he gets covered more negatively than the entire pack of WTFs running to oppose him, or the fact that the media treats his opponents as though they have anything constructive to add to the conversation. That kind of stuff just makes me happy that I�m not living in the U.S.

No, for me it is usually a story like this one from McClatchy, questioning whether or not Obama tried hard enough to keep U.S. troops serving in Iraq past the end of this year. Now, Obama was elected in part due to his consistency on claiming Iraq was an expensive and dangerous waste of time and critical resources (resources that he wanted to use in Afghanistan, but whatever), and there is a huge majority in the U.S. that has been wanting the troops out of Iraq for quite some time.

Now ordinarily given such starting points, the question someone would be asking is, why are we even trying to maintain an indefinite military presence in Iraq? Unfortunately, the idea that the U.S. should maintain military bases everywhere on the globe where they once landed troops, even if mistakenly, is so ingrained that not only does the question of why on earth the U.S. would want to maintain an expensive and likely counterproductive presence in Iraq not get asked, but the White House now has to work on claiming that they did really, really try and go back on Obama�s election promise and against the wishes of the majority of the voting public to keep U.S. troops on the ground in Iraq.

Honestly, there�s no way that can�t suck.  Can't we just be happy that, however it was accomplished, the American military will no longer be sending soldiers into harm's way in Iraq rather than writing an attack piece over how terrible it is that the President didn't appear to work harder to continue their ultimately worthless presence going.

Apparently we can't, which is why I'll never envy the man.

The War Industry: Bad Job Creators, Bad Bosses, Bad Stewards of Tax Dollars

By Robert Greenwald and Derrick Crowe

On Tuesday, the military contractors behind the "Second To None" campaign pleaded "no comment" to our War Costs campaign's full-page Politico ad exposing the economic damage caused by massive war budgets. The same day, they announced a press conference and the upcoming launch of a national campaign to scare people about job losses if we cut the war budget. It seems like they had a comment or two after all. But as these companies gather at the National Press Club on Wednesday morning to frighten you into funding their trust funds, remember: military spending costs us jobs compared to other ways of spending the money.

These contractors will undoubtedly try to obscure the fact that every $1 billion of military spending costs anywhere between 3,200 and 11,700 jobs or more when compared to other ways of spending the money. They'll probably also try to obscure the fact that because the deficit committee has to find spending reductions equaling a certain dollar amount, this is a zero sum game, pitting military spending against the exact kinds of spending that would create more jobs. If the industry is right, and we should be coming at the question of where to cut spending from the perspective of job creation, then we have to cut war spending because other cuts would cost even more jobs.

Reporters should also keep in mind that these folks have a history of fudging jobs numbers when they feel it's expedient for their profit margins. For example, back when Second-To-None-backer Lockheed Martin was trying to secure additional taxpayer dollars for its F-22 fighter jet in 2009, the contractor grossly inflated the number of jobs sustained by the program. The actual job numbers should have been less than 40 percent of those claimed by Lockheed. When this industry comes at you with jobs numbers, caveat emptor.

All this assumes, of course, that we buy the war industry's spin that for them, it's all about the workers. If one looks at these companies' histories, that's an absurd assumption. The organization through which the industry organized the Second To None campaign, the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), includes on its executive committee representatives of companies which have paid more than $130 million in labor-related fines and settlements in the last 10 years, according to the Project on Government Oversight's contractor misconduct database. These violations include sexual harassment; Americans with Disabilities Act actions; federal safety standards violations; wrongful termination; age, sex and racial discrimination; and whistleblower retaliation.

Almost all of the above war industry misbehavior takes place on the government dime, of which the companies behind Second To None and AIA are very, very poor stewards. Their leadership [.pdf] includes executives at three of the companies cited by the recent Wartime Commission on Contracting's eye-popping report [.pdf] on the waste of $60 billion: DynCorp, ITT Corporation and L-3 Communications (The report discusses "ITT Federal Services," which is a subsidiary of ITT Corp.). In addition, the companies represented on AIA's executive committee have been responsible for a bucket-load of documented misconduct in federal contracting worth more than $5.7 billion since 1995, according to POGO's database.

We're having a hard time here understanding why we should look to the corporations behind Second To None to hire workers or spend our hard-earned money. Maybe they'd like to comment about that.

Join War Costs on Facebook, and follow Robert Greenwald and Derrick Crowe on Twitter.

No New Jobs, No New Ideas

By Steve Hynd

The big news today is that the economy showed no increase in net jobs in August. That's right, a net of ZERO new jobs, leaving the unemployment rate mired at 9.1%. Paul Krugman writes that policy makers have been "fighting phantoms while the real problems festered". He's talking about the debt farago - but his "fatal distraction" could equally be the playground politics both major parties and their political chattering class seem to so delight in.

Yesterday, the top political story was Obama's dumbass decision to schedule his jobs speech on the same day as the GOP debate - a decision compounded by further political dumbassery when he then caved to Republican demands to move the date of his speech. Right now, the top chattering story is NASCAR drivers boycotting an event at the White House. I. kid. you. not.

Look, the U.S. flushed at least $60 billion down the drain, lost in corruption and waste, in the last decade on foreign adventures that turned American kids into people capable of atrocities. Meanwhile left-leaning think tanks are praying Obama has the balls to announce a job-creation plan on Sept 8th that is funded at exactly that amount and expecting far less. What we need is, say, a $200 billion plan, funded by cutting the military's obscene $700 billion budget (Update: Kevin Drum suggests $1 trillion over five years). And maybe another $200 billion on a resurrected Peace Corps to do COIN and R2P when even the most avid advocates admit it really counts - before the shooting starts. America's military would still be outspending it's nearest rival by over three times. What's not to like? But we all know this would be politically impossible. Why should it be?

Yesterday, my friend Keith Boyea emailled me something that we then talked about on the Polizeros Radio podcast last night.

Do you guys ever feel like you're living in a bizzaro world? I mean, our country is commiting atrocities overseas and fighting senseless, never ending wars and our politicians are generally ignoring any medium to long term problem. And no one seems to be upset about this? What the hell is going on? I feel completely detached from the world that everyone else seems to be living in. So much so, I begin wondering what is wrong with me.

Bob Morris and I were quick to assure Keith that there's nothing wrong with him - the problem is that the political chattering class and the political elite are utterly insulated from the concerns of most Americans. Just ask the common man or woman in the street and, no matter their political affiliation, eventually they'll tell you the problem boils down to just this: they feel helpless in the face of a political elite which does not have the same concerns as they do, which doesn't respond to the issues that matter but instead pursues playground political pointmaking, and they feel unable to change the equation by political action. The elite holds all the cards and won't let the common man into the game.

That feeling of frustrated helplessness, of being an outsider to the political process, is what fuelled the anger of the Tea Party and is currently fuelling anger in the Democrat Party's left-wing base. More broadly, it's what leads around a third of all Americans to stay away from even the presidential polls. "What's the point of voting? My voice will go unheard anyway. The politicians will always act in their own self-interests, never in mine or the country's." As for becoming a politician yourself to change things: "What's the point? Only the rich or corrupt or selfish - those who play the game the elite's way - can get elected and even if someone else tried, the process that leads to success would change them into something just like the rest."

The level of apathy among people is just stunning - and it's not improved by an education system that has become so self-servingly obsessed with passing standard tests, thus assuring schools of funding and teachers of jobs, that the nation is graduating people from its high schools who don't know the difference between a continent and a country. The stenographic tendency of the media doesn't help either - allowing "officially unofficial sources" free access to the news cycle, or supressing stories, so that the reporters involved can keep their precious access. How is the common person expected to have and raise their political voice if they don't get the information a democracy needs and even if they did they don't have the education to analyze it on their own - instead relying on the stenographers to parse it for them, each to their own agenda?

I don't just hear this kind of talk from a few people - I hear it from almost everyone nowadays, including often grassroots activists of every party. Democracy in America is, if not broken, then at least badly bent out of shape. And I think everyone knows it - even those it serves just fine to have a bent system.

But solutions are elusive. Ask anyone and they'll have some ideas - then on further thought they'll say "but it wouldn't work because..." and the following will be some reasons that at base are a mixture of apathy and elite manipulation of the political process. The same base problems we so desperately need to deal with.

What's to be done? Is this just the way it is, something people shouldn't struggle against? Or is there a way out of the apathy trap?

R2P Before The Fact

By Steve Hynd

Over at Andrew Sullivan's Daily Beast blog, Zach Beachamp responded to my last post on the ethics of R2P. Zach writes in defense of R2P interventions that "humanitarian intervention is often necessary to create the conditions under which aid can be effective in saving lives."

Food and medicine can't very well get passed out in war zones, and evil or corrupt governments will limit the ability of aid organizations to operate. Either way, aid doesn't get to the people who desperately need it.

That's why it's so critical to either end the fighting or, as the case may be, topple the government slaughtering its population. Civil wars and awful governments have tremendous long term consequences beyond the already-awful casualties caused by the fighting itself. They are, in some cases, the root causes of the spread of disease, famine, poverty, and other horrors. Further, both civil wars and bad governance prevent the international community from taking effective action to ameliorate the humanitarian crises they create. Somalia is one example. North Korea is another.

Steve's talking about Libya, a comparatively better off country. However, Qaddafi was directly responsible for dire poverty despite the country's wealth, and one can only imagine that conditions would have gotten worse as a result of a) the government diverting resources from economic development/basic subsistance aid to power consolidation after the likely slaughter in Benghazi and b) growing international isolation. The intervention in Libya likely headed off long-term humanitarian problems as well as a short-term catastrophe.

As I've been examining in the past few days, we aren't certain that the consequences of intervention will be comparatively better yet, though there are reasons for optimism. That's an important constraint on intervention: that the outcome be better than the consequences of doing nothing. Indeed, humanitarian intervention, like any other war, is subject to just war constraints.

This is one of those cases where I'd agree wholeheartedly if the real world matched the idealised one in which we often talk about ethical matters, but it simply doesn't - as Zach obviously recognises. If in the real world aid cannot be delivered to those who need it because of an oppressive regime that first needs toppling by external forces, it's equally true that in the real world those external forces are then unimaginably bad at delivering aid and development at gunpoint.

Take Afghanistan as just one example. Billions of foreign dollars delivered, massive surges of COIN armed intervention paired with grandiose externally developed plans for development - and yet there's very little to show for it. Corruption is rampant and a goodly portion of all those aid bucks has gone to enriching the kind of people who in other circumstances would be the subject of calls for regime change. Massive infrastructure projects which still don't touch the lives of those they need to - and in which the always-substantial profits get repatriated by foreign contractors. And the killing  - both of the humanitarian interveners and locals alike - continues. The overwhelming evidence is that armed humanitarian intervention is incredibly bad at delivering the "humanitarian" bit. Instead, those intervening invariably seem to turn into Hummvees in a china shop.

The same now looks likely to happen in Libya. The West will not stop the rebels from assaulting the town of Sirte en masse, despite the certain loss of civilian lives. The rebels estimate that 50,000 civilians have died in the Libyan conflict already - and they're only counting civilians on "their" side. The UN is planning what can only be described as heaby-handed running of the post-conflict situation. The rebels in Misrata are already rebelling against the Benghazi leadership, composed as it is of people parachuted in from exile in the US and ex-Gaddafi strongmen who have changed sides with the wind. Those strongmen and their militias are already acting like the old regime.

All of this argues that humanitarian objectives are extremely, I would say prohibitively, difficult to deliver at gun point. Instead of such armed interventionism R2P missions should be focussing on aid and development before the situation deteriorates to the shooting point. Zach's argument sounds to me (and Zach) like an argument for a Peace Corps to do aid before military intervention becomes needed, one that wears dungerees instead of uniforms and weilds shovels instead of assault rifles and airstrikes. Fund it to the tune of say $200 billion, taken right out of the Pentagon's over-inflated budget and put it to work on "pre-COIN", aid and development to promote good governance and helpful infrastructure before things in a country go so far South that airstrikes are needed. It would not only be a perfect utilitarian answer, it would even be useful on the home front.

Where's The Billions For R2P Against Famine?

By Steve Hynd

In comments to my last post on the dangerous precedent of R2P interventions that are really all about picking favorites, my friend and Newshoggers colleague B.J. Bjornson asked:

How many thousands of civilians being in danger of massacre would be enough? If you believed that it actually was hundreds of thousands, would you then have supported the intervention? Tens of thousands? Just a few hundred? ... Are there any circumstances where you would call for the US and other nations to step in and try to prevent the worst from happening?

It's a question worth addressing, of course, and my first impulse is the strict Nuremberg answer: that the only legal armed intervention should be responding to aggressive warfare by a state on another state, otherwise the intervention itself would be the aggressive war and thus a "crime against peace". But we live in times of "non-state actors" and there's also at least some case for saying that a state waging aggressive warfare on an entire segment of it's own population qualifies as a case for legal armed intervention.

But in response to the "how many" question, I have another.

Do you think the dead care how they died?

Right to Protect interventionism is essentially a utilitarian argument - that by using violence in reply to violence the greater good of the greater number can be achieved - specifically, that fewer people will die if there is an armed intervention than if the state or non-state actor is allowed to continue killing unopposed by external forces. But it largely ignores a wider utilitarian argument to do so - that the resources required to intervene could be put to better use saving more lives elsewhere.

The war in Libya has cost the US somewhere in the region of $1.2 billion over six months, at a rough guess. That's a drop in the ocean compared with the hundreds of billions so far spent on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, or the bloated overall defense budget. But State spends far less on core foreign assistance - including food aid - than is spent on America's wars. That stands at only $32.9 billion in the FY2012 request. DoD will get three and a half times that money for Afghanistan and Iraq alone.

Meanwhile:

Drought, conflict and a lack of food aid have left 3.6 million people at risk of starvation in southern Somalia. The drought, the worst in decades, has affected about 12 million people across the Horn of Africa.

And:

Famine in parts of southern Somalia has killed tens of thousands of people, mostly children, the United Nations said Wednesday in an official declaration of what aid officials describe as the worst humanitarian crisis in the troubled country in two decades.

I doubt the dead care whether they are killed by a bullet or starvation - they're still just as dead. Utillitarian ethics, such as those used to justify R2P interventionism, dictate that resources should first go to missions which would help the greatest number - yet the budget for Somalian aid is a measly $105 million.

My utilitarian answer to the question of when R2P armed interventions would be justified is the same I think J.S. Mill would have offered: when the other, greater threats of massacre by any cause have already been dealt with. Where are the billions for Right To Protect against famine? Where are the Beltway foreign policy insiders advocating allocating scare resources where they will do most good?

R2P Or Picking Sides: A Dangerous Libyan Precedent

By Steve Hynd

Washington's foreign policy elite are beside themselves with glee right now at the belated success of the Libya policy they advocated so hard for. It's a modified version of the original Afghan invasion whereby the locals get to play the role of the "poor bloody infantry" and NATO provides airpower, with the US as hands-off as possible. All so as to prevent the "Pottery Barn scenario" of "you broke it, you're responsible for fixing it" that enmired the West in Afghanistan and Iraq. It seems to have worked, although in months not days. I wonder if the US Army is watching events unfold and thinking "Ruh-roh, there goes our future budget"?

However, amongst the euphoria I'd like to be a wet blanket and recommend an excellent post by my friend, James Joyner, which brings up some needed questions. Questions like: but should we have intervened in the first place, even if the intervention seems successful?

while I'm thrilled at Gaddafi's ouster, none of my earlier views were rendered obsolete by yesterday's happy events.

First, I predicted that the arguments proffered for intervening would spawn calls for intervening in similar, if not more dire, circumstances. Anyone following the debate over the horrendous conduct of the Syrian regime knows that has happened.

Second, I predicted that the thin "population protection" mandate would soon be subject to mission creep, with regime change an obvious war aim and follow-on rebuilding and reconstruction likely ones. That's happened.

Third�and here I was at least partially wrong�I argued that, having undertaken the mission, we had an obligation to do more than hope for the best. Specifically, given weeks of indications that the rebel forces were not up to the fight even with the awesome backing of NATO air power and support, I argued that we needed a Plan B. Juan Cole argues, persuasively in hindsight, that the rebels were actually making much more steady progress than it appeared from a Western vantagepoint, which was overly focused on Benghazi and environs. Regardless, it certainly seems, as my colleague Barry Pavel argues, that "strategic patience, and persistence, pays off" and that some of us were lacking that quality. (A peril, perhaps, of living on Twitter Standard Time.)

Fourth, I warned that toppling Gaddafi would not end the struggle and that we needed to have a plan for what military planners call Phase IV: the handover and post-conflict management. This continues to be my chief concern.

Fifth, in terms of domestic politics, I argued that Obama's pretense that the United States was not involved in hostile activities and that the War Powers Act was therefore not operative was a dangerous precedent. While I'm not sure we'll ever go back to the days, as Leslie Gelb and Anne-Marie Slaughter recommended years ago, where Congress will actively declare wars and thereby take full responsibility for them, I nonetheless believe that perpetual war on the say-so of the president alone is undemocratic.

All that said, that Gaddafi is apparently no longer in power in Libya is a great thing, indeed.

I agree with most everything James writes, but would take issue with his third, and by extension fourth, points. Instead, I always felt that "Plan B" should have been to default back to non-intervention. The West called for this "right to protect" (R2P) war on the basis that there was a real and present danger of hundreds of thousands of civilians being massacred by pro-Gaddafi troops if it didn't. Yet in every case where Gaddafi loyalists retook a town from the rebels in the early days of the uprising, when the rebels were largely just unarmed protesters and before it had developed into two armed camps, mass reprisals and massacres singularly failed to happen. In later phases, it seems as though the rebel militias have been just as culpable for civilian deaths due to fighting to capture urban areas - and just as guilty of reprisals ( albeit both sides have done so on a far lower scale than we were led to expect). Non-intervention, even by withdrawing, would not have led to a massive humanitarian catastrophe, it seems.

Non-intervention or later withdrawal would have led to Gaddafi keeping power, yes, but would perhaps in time have led to peaceful regime change without bloodshed too. Not all revolutions have to happen now - the phrase about "strategic patience, and persistence" should be just as applicable before the bombing starts. It should also apply after the bombing stops. Libya's future should be for Libyans to decide upon.

But more crucially, it shouldn't be any part of an R2P mission to reduce civilian casualties by picking sides and thus hopefully shorten a war - as the original UN resolution made clear only to be ignored by NATO as it began "openly functioning as the air force of the opposition army." That logic leads to aggressive madness, where any war at all becomes an R2P excuse for armed medddling on behalf of a favored side. Yet that is the logic the US and its NATO allies have embraced and given precedent to. We should hope other nations - Russia, for example - don't embrace it too.

The success of this intervention, in terms of using it as aprecedent to justify future R2P wars, future mission creep and future lack of democratic accountability, may be a success we in the West could have done without. Libyans may be jubilant, and rightly so, but they'll never know how many lives could have been saved by waiting and taking a quieter, longer-term approach to revolution - and as James and many others are at pains to point out, we don't yet know how well that revolutions aftermath will turn out.

What Price National Security?

By Steve Hynd

New Defense Secretary Leon Panetta joined with SecState Clinton today to warn that cuts to the Pentagon's budget could be "devastating" to America's national security.

Panetta said the Pentagon is prepared to make $350 billion in cuts over the next 10 years, as agreed by Congress. But he warned of dangers to the national defense if bigger reductions are required.

The deficit compromise reached between the White House and Congress set up a special bipartisan committee to draft legislation to find more government cuts. If the committee cannot agree on a deficit-reduction plan by year's end or if Congress rejects its proposal, it would trigger some $500 billion in additional reductions in projected national security spending.

"This kind of massive cut across the board � which would literally double the number of cuts that we're confronting � that would have devastating effects on our national defense; it would have devastating effects on certainly the State Department," Panetta said.

Woah. State has a fraction of the DoD's budget - it's entire annual budget is what the Pentagon spends on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone every quarter. Does anyone at all get why State has to bear any burden when what we need to do is empty the bloated Pentagon's piggy bank some, other than some Beltway B.S. about proportionate fairness between departments? Beuller?

Nancy Youssef at McClatchy has a great piece on just how profliagte DoD has become: "True cost of Afghan, Iraq wars is anyone's guess".

Yes, Congress has allotted $1.3 trillion for war spending through fiscal year 2011 just to the Defense Department. There are long Pentagon spreadsheets that outline how much of that was spent on personnel, transportation, fuel and other costs. In a recent speech, President Barack Obama assigned the wars a $1 trillion price tag.

But all those numbers are incomplete. Besides what Congress appropriated, the Pentagon spent an additional unknown amount from its $5.2 trillion base budget over that same period. According to a recent Brown University study, the wars and their ripple effects have cost the United States $3.7 trillion, or more than $12,000 per American.

...According to Defense Department figures, by the end of April the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan � including everything from personnel and equipment to training Iraqi and Afghan security forces and deploying intelligence-gathering drones � had cost an average of $9.7 billion a month, with roughly two-thirds going to Afghanistan. That total is roughly the entire annual budget for the Environmental Protection Agency.

Of that insane amount, the Saintly Director-General's own staff estimates that:

$360 million spent on combat support and reconstruction contracts in Afghanistan has ended up in the hands of people the American-led coalition has battled for nearly a decade: the Taliban, criminals and local power brokers with ties to both, The Associated Press has learned.

Over at Danger Room, Noah Shachtman and his staff have daily stories about even more waste and profligate spending. The entire U.S. inventory of stealth fighters - F22 and F35s, build at a cost of hundreds of billions - is grounded due to technical difficulties. Not that they've been used in any of the small wars the U.S. has involved itself in, because they're too expensive to risk. And just like those shiny jets, the insanely expensive Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 is intended for hypothetical wars with nations that spend 10% of America's annual defense budget (and that own America's debt, making some wonder what percentage they'd see in war). The Falcon HTV2 crashed again this week - the rocket that launched it alone costs at least $30 million a pop.

The DoD's budget for 2012 is $671 billion; $553 billion in the �base budget� and $117.8 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Projecting forward, the entire looked-for savings from national security spending amount to only 5% of the entire spend over the decade. Even if a debt trigger gets pulled, we're still only talking about less than 10% of the total spend. Yet the DoD itself doesn't expect to do anything other than be involved in small colonial wars of choice like Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq: wars that are almost certainly a bad idea in the first place and have a net effect of driving down America's approval abroad while simply stalling inevitable civil wars until the U.S. decides to pack up and go home. A sizeable chunk of spending, around $200 billion a year, is actually going to preparation for "hypothetical" wars with states that spend a tiny fraction of the U.S. budget and which have no intention of starting a fight in any case.

The only rational conclusion is that the military-industrial complex has grown hopelessly out of control and needs courageous politicians to drastically trim what can no longer be afforded. Unless, of course, someone would like to make the case that the idea of "American exceptionalism" is worth $6.5 trillion a decade when the civilian infrastructure and social fabric of the nation - an entirely different type of "national security" - are frayed beyond belief and in danger of being collapsed entirely so that DoD can afford its shiny new toys.

Update: Chris Hellman at Salon.

This June, the Institute for Policy Studies released the latest version of what it calls "a Unified Security Budget for the United States" that could make the country safer for far less than the current military budget. Known more familiarly as the USB, it has been produced annually since 2004 by the website Foreign Policy in Focus and draws on a task force of experts.

As in previous years, the report found -- again in layman's terms -- that the U.S. invests its security dollars mainly in making war, slighting both real homeland security and anything that might pass for preventive diplomacy. In the Obama administration's proposed 2012 budget, for example, 85 percent of security spending goes to the military (and if you included the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that percentage would only rise); just 7 percent goes to real homeland security and a modest 8 percent to what might, even generously speaking, be termed non-military international engagement.