Gadhafi warmly engaged Bush secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and even displayed a crush on her. Gadhafi had called Obama his “Muslim brother.” Both administrations had embraced him, his regime, and his willingness to help root out Islamist enemies of America. We had even provided foreign aid to him and sent taxpayer-funded contributions to charities managed by some of Gadhafi’s sons. Libya is a major oil producer, but while Europe relies on Libyan oil, the United States does not. There were no vital American interests at stake in Libya, unlike in Iraq. But Gadhafi rightly considered himself a partner of the United States. We were at peace with his government. Imagine, then, his surprise when suddenly American bombs were falling on him.
Like Mubarak before him, Gadhafi must have thought, “What the @$%&! just happened?”
How did we go from an intelligence-sharing partnership with Gadhafi to prosecuting a “dumb” war against him in a matter of days? The Arab “Spring” had come to Libya, but not in the same magnitude that it had settled upon its neighboring countries. There were some limited demonstrations, but nothing like the mass protests that had occurred in Egypt. Gadhafi had mobilized some security forces, but there was no real need. And yet, the president who had derided Bush’s policy of preemptive war launched his own preemptive war with neither significant U.S. interests at stake nor real violence being committed by the regime in question.
The ideological framework for Obama’s “dumb” war came from one of his top foreign policy advisers, Samantha Power, whose concept of “responsibility to protect” was embraced by Obama and NATO as the rationale for military intervention in Libya. Obama spoke of the need to respond to humanitarian crisis: “When the entire international community almost unanimously says that there is a potential humanitarian crisis about to take place … that a leader has turned his military on his own people, we can’t simply stand by with empty words. We have to take some sort of action.” (Emphasis added.)
In other words, preemption. In 2006, Bush’s doctrine of preemption stated: “We do not rule out the use of force before attacks occur.... We cannot afford to stand idly by.... This is the principle and logic of pre-emption.” In 2010, Obama reworded it: “While the use of force is sometimes necessary, we will exhaust other options before war whenever we can … when force is necessary we will continue to do so in a way that reflects our values and strengthens our legitimacy.”
That last tortured phrase meant that Obama would do what Bush did and seek the blessing of the UN, NATO, the Arab League, or whatever other international institution before acting. And like Bush, Obama reserved the right to act alone if necessary. So: same policy, more gobbledygook to make it look like Obama was more “enlightened” than Bush.
“Responding to humanitarian crises” can come in many forms: economic, diplomatic, and so on. It doesn’t necessarily have to involve military action. But that’s the route Obama chose to take in Libya. Libya is a rough-and-tumble tribal society in which the removal of Gadhafi won’t stop the internal brutality. And furthermore, Obama chose not to intervene when tyrannies in Iran, Syria, China, Russia, and elsewhere slaughtered and repressed their people. Going into Libya was about accelerating a regime change there that would bring about “democracy,” which would, in turn, result in an Islamist government.
And so, without warning, Gadhafi, like Mubarak, went from being a valued partner of the United States to an enemy who had to be overthrown. Unlike Bush, who sought and received congressional authorization for the war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama went to war in Libya without getting that authorization. Perhaps “leading from behind” is just an excuse to avoid getting congressional support. Obama leaned only on the Arab League’s okay and a United Nations Security Council resolution that called for a no-fly zone to protect civilians. It did not call for war against Libya or regime change, and yet Obama saw to it that both were carried out. Despite assuring that there would be “no boots on the ground,” Obama sent in covert intelligence operatives to help the “rebels,” who, with our help, took up arms against Gadhafi.
Who were these Libyan “rebels”? They weren’t exactly a band of Mother Teresas, roaming Libya desperately trying to protect civilians. While there may have been some authentic democratic reformers among them, they included a large and varied mix of Islamists and violent jihadists. Among their commanders were al-Qaeda operatives, including at least one who had been held at Guantánamo Bay, and others who had recruited terrorists to fight Americans in Iraq. As the United States and NATO were targeting Gadhafi and his henchmen, our “rebels” were rounding up black Africans and lynching and beheading many of them. When they started advancing with the help of NATO firepower, they seized thousands of weapons such as shoulder-launched missiles and missile launchers and funneled many of them to their Islamist comrades in al-Qaeda and Hamas in Gaza.
In a March 2011 interview with NBC, Obama was asked about his “strategy.” He replied, “We may not be applying the same tools in each country, in every case.”
How about applying some of those tools to places that are actually strategically important to the United States? Say, Iran, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen? Obama was basically saying, “My only goal is to destroy American power and buck up our enemies. So: I may intervene. I may not. Some terror states I like; some I don’t. Some civilian protests I like; some I don’t. Some days, I’m for regime change; some days I’m not. Some places, I’ll stop genocide; some places I won’t. Some days, I eat Froot Loops; other days I eat Count Chocula.”
When asked if he was considering arming Libyan rebels—about whom we knew little beyond their ties to al-Qaeda or the Muslim Brotherhood—Obama said: “I’m not ruling it out. But I’m also not ruling it in.”
At the start of military operations against Libya, Obama told members of Congress that any U.S. military involvement would last “days not weeks.” As days stretched into weeks and weeks into months, administration lawyers began to issue warnings that Obama’s prosecution of the war was violating the constitutionally dubious 1973 War Powers Resolution, which limits the commander in chief to a ninety-day commitment to a military action before requiring him to come to Congress for further authorization. Obama turned to a fellow kook, State Department counsel Harold Koh, who conveniently argued that invading Libya, dropping bombs all over it, and trying to take out its leader didn’t amount to “hostilities,” so Obama the Nobel Peace Prize winner was free to pound Libya and try to kill Gadhafi for as long as he wanted. And so it came to pass that the man Reagan had called the “mad dog of the Middle East” met his end at the hands of a pack of mad dogs far more rabid than he.
Under Obama, Gadhafi didn’t get much due process. No Saddam Hussein–like trial by his countrymen. No stint at Guantánamo Bay, complete with ACLU lawyers and Geneva Convention protections. That kind of legalese was for loser rule-of-law guys like Bush.
Before Gadhafi’s body was cold, the leader of the Libyan Transitional National Council, Mustafa Abdul Jalil, proclaimed that sharia would be the “basic source” of Libyan law. Lenders were immediately banned from collecting interest on loans and multiple wives were instantly legal for men. Here again, Obama threw over a U.S. partner in favor of anti-American forces who pushed toward an Islamic state. To Obama, there were no foes of the United States, just friends waiting to be made. He would let every nation know, whether they wished America well or ill, that he would pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, and oppose any foe … to assure the survival of polygamy in Libya.
The Gadhafi dictatorship was hardly a basketful of puppies. But his unsavory regime had turned its back on supporting terror, was cooperating with the United States against Islamists, and was reaching out to the West economically and politically. For that help, he was overthrown by a U.S.-led military operation, dragged through the streets, and assassinated. Lesson to the Iranian ayatollahs: don’t give up your nukes and try to be friends with the U.S. or you guys could end up on a freezing cold slab of stainless steel
in a random meat locker.
If Obama had a victory strategy, he certainly didn’t articulate one. Instead he singled out Gadhafi as ripe for overthrow, but only because the “world” was clamoring for it. He hid behind the Arab League and the UN to authorize the use of force in Libya. When Syria and Yemen blew up, he essentially justified not intervening in those places by saying, “Gosh, golly. I’d really love to help y’all, but the UN/NATO/Arab League/Congress/American people just won’t let me!”
Is there an Obama strategic doctrine, or is it an ad hoc mess? Is America’s foreign policy being done on the fly, or is it all part of a deliberate grand strategy to reduce our influence in the world and encourage the world’s dark forces to advance? The Libyan operation was sold as a mission on behalf of human rights of an aggrieved people. It ended with a U.S. partner murdered by a wild-eyed Islamist mob, the rise of al-Qaeda and other terrorist and militia groups, and an emerging violently anti-American Islamist regime. If that’s what Obama had intended all along, then his motives for the Libyan war were sinister. If it wasn’t what he intended, then his policy has been an abject failure, with U.S. interests far more threatened than they had been before.
The answer may be found in what was flying over Benghazi within days of Gadhafi’s death: the al-Qaeda flag.
For all of Obama’s Muslim “outreach,” for all of his attempts at “engagement” with our enemies and his bailing on suddenly inconvenient allies, for all of his talk about “remaking” relations with that part of the globe, he has laid an egg. A May 2011 Pew Research Center poll found that America’s favorability rating across the Arab world has dropped precipitously under Obama and so has his personal favorability rating to 10 percent or less. In Egypt, just 5 percent viewed the United States favorably and only 3 percent agreed with Obama’s policies. Similar bottom-of-the-barrel numbers were reported from Turkey to Pakistan. The results also showed that the United States was more popular in the Muslim world under President Bush than it is under President Obama.
Obama promised to change the world’s perceptions of us through a radical shift in policy and the force of his magical persona. Obama thought he’d just flash his megawatt smile, pass out apologies like Halloween candy, give a speech in Cairo, enlist NASA, and voilà! The Muslim world would “heart” us. After all, his middle name was Hussein. What wasn’t to love? A lot, apparently. Not only did the vast majority of Muslims around the world dislike Obama personally, but their disapproval of American foreign policy hit unprecedented levels. All of that bowing and scraping earned him gongs, not applause. And it decimated American prestige, power, and respect beyond anything previously imaginable.
The revolts that occurred across the Middle East gave us a providential opportunity to encourage real freedom in the region and reduce the threats of Islamist jihad. Instead, our strategically incomprehensible and morally vacuous policies have led much of the Middle East to exchange one form of fascism for another. Election victories simply embolden the Islamists to move faster and more aggressively to advance their agenda. As we’ve seen in Iran, Islamic theocracy breeds savage oppression, deep corruption, and terrorism. And yet, that’s where the bulk of the Middle East is heading, primarily because Obama’s version of a “freedom agenda” resembled more of an “Islamist free-for-all agenda.” If millions of people in the Middle East and North Africa end up consigned to the perpetual darkness of Islamist rule, it will be Obama who will go down in the history books as the man “who lost the Middle East.” On purpose.
Better Red Than Dead I: Reset? Nyet!
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In early March 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton boarded her jet to Moscow with a small surprise packed in her luggage. She couldn’t wait to arrive and present it to her host, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov. What awaited Lavrov was one of Obama’s olive branches. Actually, it wasn’t a real olive branch. It was a large, red, plastic button like the kind you hit on Jeopardy! when you’re ready to answer in the form of a question. During the 2008 campaign, Obama had criticized the Bush administration for damaging relations with the Russians through “provocative” acts such as promising our Eastern European allies a missile defense shield and criticizing Russia for its invasion of democratic Georgia. Obama promised that he’d work to restore relations with Russia through his ready incentives offensive. Bush had used sticks; Obama would use carrots. How could the Russians not want to give up their national interests and fall madly in love with Obama the way so many others had already done? Obama promised to hit the reset button in order to restart our bilateral relationship.
And so, somebody in the State Department—perhaps Hillary herself—came up with the button gimmick. With dramatic flair, she presented the plastic button to Lavrov. Stamped on top was the Russian word for “reset.” Or so she thought. “We worked hard to get the right Russian word. Do you think we got it?” Hillary asked eagerly. Lavrov took one look at the button and smiled broadly, suppressing a major eye-roll. “You got it wrong,” he replied. He then told the U.S. Secretary of Hope and Change that the Russian translation of the word wasn’t “reset,” but “overcharge.” Hillary laughed nervously and said, “We won’t let you do that to us.” Lavrov simply nodded, probably wondering how the United States had gone from Thomas Jefferson to this pantsuited fool. Lavrov would’ve been more satisfied with a T-shirt that had an arrow pointing in Hillary’s direction that said I’M WITH DUMMY.
The leftists were determined to make the U.S.-Russia relationship more Oprah and Gayle and less Kim and Paris. In order to move away from the Bush-era hostility and woo Moscow into being our BFF, Obama settled on the idea of a “reset,” which essentially meant giving away the store to the Russkies. He didn’t stop at simply “overcharging” the Russians; he let them take every advantage. Obama fell over himself to shower the Russians with unprecedented concessions in order to show them that we could be friends instead of frenemies or outright enemies.
This kook approach ignored several things. First, the cold war didn’t end when the Soviet Union collapsed. It simply changed form. The Russians remain as competitive with the United States over the global chessboard as ever, but the competition is more indirect, more economic than military, more stealthy and, in some ways, more dangerous. The only reprieve we got from this grand game of strategy was the eight years Boris Yeltsin was president and hammered on vodka all the time.
Second, Russia has its own national interests and ideology that are diametrically opposed to ours, and no matter how much schmoozing we do, that reality can never be changed. Warm personal relationships between leaders can soften relations at the margins but they never override clear-eyed pursuits of interests. Conflicts stemming from differences in national interests can be managed but not eliminated.
And third, Obama’s “I Heart Russia” approach ignored the fact that Russia had become far more authoritarian under Putin/Medvedev; had journalists, lawyers, and others killed who dared to speak about rampant corruption and oppression; was seeking to reassert control within the former Soviet Union; and was intervening in the Middle East on the side of bad guys like Iran and Syria, including providing crucial assistance to their nuclear programs.
Instead of confronting Russia on these issues, Team Obama sought to reward it for its bad behavior. The “reset” policy signaled one thing to Russia: the United States is in strategic retreat. That meant that they could go to town with their fellow villains around the world and the United States wouldn’t lift a finger to stop them. If the American president believed in restricting U.S. power, who were the Russians to stop him?
The first casualty of the “reset” was America’s close friends in Eastern Europe. During the fifty years of the cold war, the United States provided an unequivocal beacon of moral, political, and ideological support for the tens of millions of people trapped behind the Iron Curtain. U.S. policy was to seek the liberation of the “captive nations” by all available means, from materially supporting dissident movements such as Sol
idarity in Poland to broadcasting Radio Free Europe across the Soviet bloc. Everyone behind the Iron Curtain knew that the United States stood for freedom and that it was doing everything it could realistically do to support them. When liberation arrived with the fall of the Soviet empire in 1989 and in the years that followed, those nations enjoyed special relationships with the United States that involved political, economic, military, and moral backing as the young democracies found the Russian bear breathing down their necks. But they always knew that the United States would stand behind them, confront Russia when necessary, and defend their interests, which were, after all, American interests.
That is, until Obama became president. He would set aside inconvenient facts such as Russia’s support for the Iranian and Syrian nuclear programs, not to mention Hugo Chávez’s nuclear ambitions in Venezuela. He would overlook Russia’s intimidation of its neighbors. He would ignore Russia’s extortion over oil supplies to countries like Ukraine and Poland. Russian weapons proliferation to rogues around the world? Not a problem. There would be no more bullying from the United States. No more old-school cold war games. No more distrust.
In the fall of 2009, Obama made his first major anti-American move vis-à-vis the Russians. He announced that as a gesture of goodwill, he was canceling the Bush administration’s plans to deploy a missile defense shield in Eastern Europe. The missile system—which would have been comprised of ten ballistic missile interceptors in Poland and a radar center in the Czech Republic—was sold as a defense system against long-range Iranian missiles that would be able to reach deep inside Eastern Europe. But to the Russians, it was treated as a provocation that essentially would render useless their ballistic missile capability. Russian president Medvedev had threatened to station tactical missiles on Poland’s border if the United States went ahead. Bush, however, was committed to protecting our close friends in Eastern Europe, arguing to the Russians that the plan was defensive and not offensive in nature and that they should also be worried about the Iranian nuclear and missile threat. Not Obama. No missile defense for you! Instead, he announced a new, vastly scaled back and sea-based deterrent that wasn’t nearly as comprehensive as the Bush plan. It left our Eastern European allies bitterly disappointed. Former Polish president and Solidarity hero Lech Walesa said, “It’s not that we need the shield, but it’s about the way we’re treated here.”
What the (Bleep) Just Happened? Page 30