With increasing frequency, warmongering neocons rear their unchastened heads. It is the Benghazi tragedy that inspires this resurgence. Never let a tragedy go unseized upon!
From deputy editorial page editors at the Washington Post to effete, soft spoken South Carolina moderates in the Republican minority, they whisper words of wardom, let it be.
To these shameless incompetents and bed wetters, President Obama's foreign policy sends up red flags because it lacks bellicosity - and a lack of bellicosity is, to be sure, a lack of leadership. They are atwitter because there is no cowboy in the White House yeehawing his way through crises, leaving thousands of bodies in his wake.
Yesterday's Washington Post provides us with a not so wonderful example of neocon nitwittery. Notice how the argument is wrapped in the soft prose of a faux moderate. Nothing, though, can cover the lupine rapacity of the author's ideology. The Post's Jackson Diehl says the following:
Barack Obama spent his first term undoing what he saw as the excesses of U.S. post-Cold War foreign policy, from land wars in the Middle East to insufficient attention to Asia. By his own account, he largely succeeded. But chances are he will spend his second term grappling with the flaws in his cure.
Contrary to the usual Republican narrative, Obama did not lead a U.S. retreat from the world. Instead he sought to pursue the same interests without the same means. He has tried to preserve America’s place as the “indispensable nation” while withdrawing ground troops from war zones, cutting the defense budget, scaling back “nation-building” projects and forswearing U.S.-led interventions.
Is “leading from behind” an unfair monicker for this? Then call it the light footprint doctrine. It’s a strategy that supposes that patient multilateral diplomacy can solve problems like Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability; that drone strikes can do as well at preventing another terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland as do ground forces in Afghanistan; that crises like that of Syria can be left to the U.N. Security Council.
For the last couple of years, the light footprint worked well enough to allow Obama to turn foreign policy into a talking point for his reelection. But the terrorist attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11 should have been a red flag to all who believe this president has invented a successful new model for U.S. leadership. Far from being an aberration, Benghazi was a toxic byproduct of the light footprint approach — and very likely the first in a series of boomerangs.
Why were Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans murdered by Libyan jihadists? The preliminary round of official investigations may focus on decisions by mid-level officials at the State Department that deprived the Benghazi mission of adequate security, and a failure by the large CIA team in the city to detect the imminent threat from extremist groups.
But ultimately the disaster in Libya derived from Obama’s doctrine. Having been reluctantly dragged by France and Britain into intervening in Libya’s revolution, Obama withdrew U.S. planes from the fight as quickly as possible; when the war ended, the White House insisted that no U.S. forces stay behind. Requests by Libya’s fragile transition government for NATO’s security assistance were answered with an ill-conceived and ultimately failed program to train a few people in Jordan.
A new report by the Rand Corporation concludes that “this lighter-footprint approach has made Libya a test case for a new post-Iraq and Afghanistan model of nation-building.” But the result is that, a year after the death of dictator Moammar Gaddafi, Libya is policed by what amounts to a mess of militias. Its newly elected government has little authority over most of the country’s armed men — much less the capacity to take on the jidhadist forces gathering in and around Benghazi.
The Rand study concludes that stabilizing Libya will require disarming and demobilizing the militias and rebuilding the security forces “from the bottom up.” This, it says, probably can’t happen without help from “those countries that participated in the military intervention” — i.e. the United States, Britain and France. Can the Obama administration duplicate the security-force-building done in Iraq and Afghanistan in Libya while sticking to the light footprint? It’s hard to see how.
Obama’s team may be betting that it can control the jihadist threat in North Africa the way it has countered al-Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula — with drone strikes and training for local special forces. But the drone leg of Obama’s strategy is looking shaky, as well.Opposition to drone strikes is growing steadily domestically and among U.S. allies — not to mention in the countries where the attacks take place.
A paper by Robert Chesney of the University of Texas points out that if strikes begin to target countries in North Africa and groups not directly connected to the original al-Qaeda leadership, problems with their legal justification under U.S. and international law “will become increasingly apparent and problematic.” And that doesn’t account for the political fallout: Libyan leaders say U.S. drone strikes would destroy the goodwill America earned by helping the revolution.
At best, Libya will be a steady, low-grade headache for Obama in his second term. But the worst blowback from his policies will come in Syria. What began as a peaceful mass rebellion against another Arab dictator has turned, in the absence of U.S. leadership, into a brutal maelstrom of sectarian war in which al-Qaeda and allied jihadists are playing a growing role. Obama’s light footprint strategy did much to produce this mess; without a change of U.S. policy, it will become, like Bosnia for Bill Clinton or Iraq for George W. Bush, the second term’s “problem from hell.”
Thank you, Mr. Diehl, for that dose of fear mongering disguised as lofty erudition. The reader pines for the good old days of 2001.
The following response was sent to Jackson Diehl:
The writer loses some credibility at the start of his argument and risks losing what remains by article's end.
To suggest that the Obama administration has been 'cutting the defense budget' is erroneous - highly misleading at best. Much to the chagrin of moderates, the DOD budget has been steadily increasing under the current administration. Small savings are on the horizon but 'cuts' suggest something substantially different than what the United States has been wasting these last many years. The defense budget is a bloated monstrosity - some savings will not impede the nation's ability to express power.
Diehl's third paragraph is a series of misrepresentations that put the 'straw' in straw man. Diplomacy, drones and the U.N.? Does the writer seriously expect us to believe that these constitute Obama's 'light footprint' doctrine?
Obama engages in realpolitik and his doctrine is best understood as 'smart power'. He uses all the tools at his disposal - political, economic, diplomatic, technological and military when engaging geopolitical challenges. It is a comprehensive approach to problem solving.
Diehl is strikingly naive if he believes the Unites States does not have 'boots on the ground' in Yemen, Somalia, Syria and scores of other hot spots. He is also naive if he believes this administration does not have contingency plans for military action in Iran.
Diehl seems unclear on tactical versus strategic thinking. What mistakes that were made in Benghazi, were made at the tactical level - at the point, specific to the situation. The 'smart power' stratagem in no way precludes appropriate security precautions on the ground. Quite the contrary - it demands it.
Scandal mongering congressional radicals are sure to be disappointed when they have only low level scalps to sacrifice.
The writer ends with a bit of hysteria on Syria - the cause celebre of neocon critics. Diehl suggests that if only the United States were jumping up and down, yelling and screaming, the world would see its 'leadership'. Perhaps 175,000 troops, as well? Often - most often - leadership is working determinedly and quietly.
Implicit in his argument, too, is the notion that United States is an omniscient, all powerful empire that can impose any outcome it desires. If only it were more engaged, things would not be so messy in Syria. If this is his argument, he has little understanding of the region or of the United States' rather spotty record on intervention.
Indeed, the United States has been involved in shaping Syria's future from the beginning of the uprising. In concert with Turkey, Arab allies, and NATO it has empowered a disparate opposition. Today, this very paper reports, "Syrian opposition groups strike reorganization deal". From whence does this deal come? From U.S. leadership.
Diehl's entire case is fundamentally naive and misinterprets the significance of leadership. Many of us quite prefer the Smart Power Doctrine of a chess player to the Neocon Neanderthalism of a cowboy. The world is a much safer place.
~
Their damned disaster in Iraq has not chastened the chicken hawks. They pine for the good old days of bully talk and bungled wars. We're not so foolish here.