No way to fight a war

Seeing as how we’re at war in a Mideastern Muslim nation which to my knowledge we've not intervened in militarily for a quarter-century, it might be worth blowing the cobwebs off this blog, which was for its first three years a repository mostly of military news and analysis. This just seems to me to be no way to fight a war:

1. One day in March, we woke up with no conception that we’d be at war in some godforsaken, basket-case country called Libya; as of suppertime, we were at war. Up until the moment that the war vote came down in the United Nations Security Council, there was not the first hint that America was going to war.

The President and Commander-in-Chief who was ordering the United States Armed Forces into this new war had not given the faintest indication that he had been headed toward war, because until the moment he decided on war, he in fact wasn’t headed to war. If the silence had been to preserve some operational secrecy and element of surprise, that would be one thing, but the reason we had no inkling that we’d be at war on that day in March was that the Commander-in-Chief himself had no conception of it and had done none of those things that any other president of the United States would have done to prepare his forces and brace his nation for a military campaign.

2. To broadcast that we’ll bomb a bit for a few days and then quit is to tell the enemy to just hang in there. Anyone plucked at random from a Tulsa, Oklahoma Walmart would understand that implicitly, and yet Obama has made this same mistake twice now as commander-in-chief of the greatest armed force the world has ever seen, the first time being his declaration on the occasion of his Afghan faux-surge order, that he’d start hauling out come hell or high water 18 months later. The very Commandant of the Marine Corps reported that the date-certain for withdrawal was “giving sustenance” to the enemy, and yet here is Obama duplicating his mistake and announcing that his campaign will last “days, not weeks” -- i.e., just hang in there for a few days, Moammar; there’ll be some smoke and noise, but keep your head down and it’ll be over before you know it. The way to go about it is to set objectives and to declare that the campaign will last for as long as it takes to achieve those objectives.

3. I am sympathetic to the argument from history and necessity that a president and commander-in-chief needn’t always seek and receive Congressional authorization for an act of war before the bombs start flying, but in those cases where he must act first and ask later, he had darn well better get that authorization after the fact, and of course Barack Obama has not so much as suggested that Congress authorize his new Libyan War. Oh, yes, and Obama lectured the last president on the Constitutional requirement for Congressional authorization of acts of war, despite that President Bush had authorizations for both of his wars from a Republican House and Democrat Senate.

4. There is not the faintest, nascent notion of a mission, beyond "protecting civilians" -- from tens of thousands of feet up. We’re lobbing some bombs for a few days. At what, who knows? To what end, who knows? And what next, who knows?

5. The time for no-fly zones was two to three weeks before the no-fly zone vote at the UN. I'd have supported a no-fly zone over Libya at that time, and I’m compelled to support it now, but now it’s a dollar short and a more than a day late. There was a time, a couple weeks before the intervention, when the Gaddafi regime had lost effective control over most of the nation to the rebels; at that time Gaddafi’s only prospect was importing mercenaries and outside help to prop himself up and try to push back the ascendant rebels. And at that time a no-fly zone and naval blockade would have gone a long way toward denying Gaddafi the means of saving himself.

Wars aren’t won by air power alone, but air power may in fact have been decisive at that stage of what became the Libyan Civil War, in guaranteeing rebel gains on the ground and in preempting Gaddafi’s counteroffensive.

But by the time the no-fly zone was agreed to at the UN Security Council and the first British and French warplanes lifted off to enforce it, Gaddafi already had his mercenaries and outside support, and had pushed the rebels back to not much more than Benghazi, which is Libya’s second city but nothing to compare with the rest of the country.

The British Prime Minister was calling for a no-fly zone at the time when it might have made the difference, and so indeed was Sarah Palin, but Obama was disengaged as ever on the rolling Arab revolts, caught flat-footed by each and every development and following the now-familiar pattern of silence, then flailing and incoherence, then calls for the inevitable and the faits-accompli, and finally self-congratulation. Four days before he went to war, Obama played the 61st golf game of his presidency and attended a Beltway soiree, and two days before he went to war he was filling out his March Madness "brackets" for ESPN. We had our chance to do this on the cheap and win the war for the rebels before the bloodshed started in earnest, and we missed it.

6. If we’re lobbing Tomahawks into Libya, then at least one of them had better have Moammar Gaddafi’s name on it, however it may be spelled. Libya is at this point as close to a one-man regime as you’re liable to find -- Gaddafi is dependent for his regime on mercenaries and outside help -- so hit Gaddafi and his regime may very well expire with him, the war may be ended blessedly quickly, the rebels may be spared and untold unlucky civilians besides, and there may just be some outside chance of a decent society emerging in that godforsaken country. There is no telling what atrocities have been committed already or are forming in the mind of a terrorist madman dictator who uses language like “cleanse” in describing what he means to do to a rebel-held city.

President Reagan tried hitting Gaddafi in ’87 because Gaddafi was by that time a known terror-sponsor with the blood of innocent Americans on his hands; today there’s all that plus the immediate humanitarian reasons to argue in favor of a hit on Gaddafi. But as of this writing, the United States government is expressly not targeting the actual culprit in all this, and I’m afraid they really mean it.

7. And another thing: when a commander-in-chief launches a war, the place for him is his White House, and on no account should he be swanning around Rio de Janeiro while the bombs fly. A president of the United States can cancel a prior engagement, and the Rio trip could have waited.