Strategizing Without Overthinking

Tom Ricks is continuing to emphasize a nation's limited ability to achieve strategic clarity before going to war:

These notes I get from military officers demanding clarity of goals and stated strategic purposes puzzle me. The nature of war is ambiguity and uncertainty. I worry that such demands are really a fancy form of shirking.

Ricks believes that the intervention was a necessary and appropriate for humanitarian reasons. If you accept, as he does, that but for President Obama's decision to proceed with the intervention "we would indeed probably now be looking at Benghazi as [President Obama's] Srebrenica", you can state that your goal is to stop that from happening and that, although you haven't given much thought to how you might extricate the U.S. military after the intervention, the cause is sufficiently urgent to justify the risk and expense of a long-term military commitment. But you should be prepared to explain either how you anticipate extricating the military from its commitment or that it's an open-ended military commitment.

The President has, in my opinion somewhat belatedly, spoken on the intervention:

The U.S. "exit strategy" as such appears to be to try to hand off as much responsibility as possible for the continued military intervention to "our NATO allies", which seems to translate into Britain and France. The President states that we're "offering support to the Libyan opposition"; but that appears to be an understatement. It isn't clear to me what degree of regime change is going to end the intervention, but it does seem clear that the present goal is to send a very clear message that it won't end while Qaddafi remains in power.

Juan Cole, a proponent of the intervention, has penned an "open letter to the left" that overlooks, in my opinion, both the fundamental reasons to be concerned about the commitment and that those concerns should not be presumed to be borne of political ideology or to be predicated upon anything other than a reasonable analysis of the situation, its knowns and unknowns.

Among reasons given by critics for rejecting the intervention are:

1. Absolute pacifism (the use of force is always wrong)

2. Absolute anti-imperialism (all interventions in world affairs by outsiders are wrong).

3. Anti-military pragmatism: a belief that no social problems can ever usefully be resolved by use of military force.

Cole admits that almost nobody fits into his first category. The question thus becomes, as Scott Lemiux suggests, how representative are his second and third categories and why no mention of other possibilities? You can reject the notion that this is somehow an exercise in imperialism - you can even reject the concept that U.S. imperialism would be a bad thing - and accept that some problems can be addressed, if imperfectly, through military force, while nonetheless questioning the wisdom of a specific military venture. As John Casey notes, Juan Cole supported the war in Iraq. The circumstances of the action in Libya and the magnitude of the intervention to date are markedly different than those the U.S. faced in deciding whether to enter the Iraq War, but between the underestimated difficulty of that war and the duration and cost of occupation, it's not unreasonable to worry about getting sucked into something much more complicated than what was initially suggested as a planned "no fly zone".

In retrospect, while looking at the same facts, it's possible to argue that George H.W. Bush's decision to end the first Gulf War while leaving Hussein in power was either one of the most cowardly acts of a modern President or one of the most insightful. You can take the position that to depose Hussein would have split the coalition and, although Hussein's defeat would have been inevitable, would have required a massive investment of money, cost a lot of lives, and would have required a lengthy military occupation. Actually, that's the position that George H.W. Bush's administration took - and while you can argue "It still would have been worth it," on the whole they were correct. You can also argue that his approach - supposedly being duped into letting Hussein militarily crush a Shiite uprising, then trying to lock Hussein in a box while his country suffered - created a great deal of human suffering while effectively shifting responsibility for "finishing the job" to a future President. There's truth in that critique, as well. It's not a phenomenon unique to the Presidency, but sometimes no matter what choice you make "you can't win". (And "if you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.")

Some advocates of intervention make an assertion that, between the improvement in Qaddafi's military position, his rhetoric about taking revenge against those who rose against him, and now-documented facts about his military strategy (e.g., indiscriminately shelling the occupants of rebel-held cities) we were on the verge of a humanitarian disaster. That the rapid shift of facts on the ground necessitated immediate action. That, unlike situations like Rwanda in which air strikes would have been useless to stop the violence and a full understanding of the situation is said to have come too late for a meaningful intervention, air strikes actually could stop the advances of Qaddafi's forces and stop the shelling of and potential slaughter in major civilian centers. I expect that will be the case the President lays out tomorrow. I also expect that the delay in the President's making a speech is that he didn't want to address the public before there was a firm plan for a hand-off of responsibility for the continued intervention, or perhaps with the hand-off already a fait accompli.

Juan Cole writes,

Assuming that NATO’s UN-authorized mission in Libya really is limited (it is hoping for 90 days), and that a foreign military occupation is avoided, the intervention is probably a good thing on the whole, however distasteful it is to have Nicolas Sarkozy grandstanding.

Let's assume that at the end of 90 days Qaddafi is out of power and neither his successor nor the rebel factions are actively engaged in warfare. How is military occupation avoided? If the country remains divided, would you not expect the national government to at some point seek to unify it? How will reunification occur, and why should we expect in the absence of any form of occupation that it will be peaceful? Why should we not be concerned that each side will violently purge its territory of anybody it believes is loyal to the other side? If those questions cannot be answered, Cole is with Ricks - the situation was urgent enough to intervene without having an exit plan - but he's using a theoretical 90-day time table to avoid admitting the possibility that the incursion could turn out to be much more complicated and much more long-term than NATO hopes. While it's true that the worst-case scenarios almost never come true, on the whole it seems to me that the "candy and flowers" faction doesn't fare much better. Hope for the best, plan for the worst.

What Would Be a "Successful" Outcome in Libya

Many people have observed that the coalition going into Libya has not articulated what "success" would look like. You can find optimistic recitations of what might constitute success from people like Juan Cole, but there are no publicly stated official goals or benchmarks beyond addressing immediate humanitarian concerns.

That silence leaves me uncharacteristically cynical.¹ That is, it was not at all long ago that Qaddafi was being fêted by the leaders [added: and would-be leaders] of nations that now want him ousted. He was a poster child for "victory in the war on terror", a rehabilitated character who was opening his country up to foreign investment. But really, he was the same old Qaddafi and everybody knew it (and he was happy to provide occasional reminders "just in case"). I heard a war crimes prosecutor explaining why Qaddafi hadn't been charged along with Charles Taylor for war crimes in Sierra Leone. Qaddafi's public rehabilitation was a leading factor. Qaddafi's mistake, perhaps understandable given how much he had been able to get away with since having been declared "reformed", was that the embarrassment brought about by his actions would again make him persona non grata and subject to removal by military force.

For the engineers of the intervention, what do I believe an unstated "acceptable outcome", perhaps even "preferred outcome" of this intervention to be? For somebody within Qaddafi's regime to oust him (whether by convincing him to go into exile or through "wet work"), and to promise to the west that Libya's new leadership will honor its contracts with western companies, tone down the embarrassing behavior, and add a few layers of velvet to its iron fisted domestic rule. If in six months the new leader has kept the first two promises, I expect the response to be a shrug, "Well, two out of three ain't bad."
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1. Yes, I know, it's not uncharacteristic. Let's call that sentence an exercise in poetic licence.

A Weak Case for War

If you follow Eunomia, the recent New York Times columns by Ross Douthat and Anne-Marie Slaughter on the possibility of military intervention in Libya may seem like familiar ground. Slaughter advocates a "no fly zone", an approach challenged by others as inappropriate. Douthat implies that we should be cautious.

Douthat has received quite a bit of praise for his column from those who are skeptical of where a "no fly zone" would lead, and he does a good job of gently laying things out.

Moreover, even with the best-laid plans, warfare is always a uniquely high-risk enterprise — which means that the burden of proof should generally rest with hawks rather than with doves, and seven reasonable-sounding reasons for intervening may not add up to a single convincing case for war.

Advocates of a Libyan intervention don’t seem to have internalized these lessons. They have rallied around a no-flight zone as their Plan A for toppling Qaddafi, but most military analysts seem to think that it will fail to do the job, and there’s no consensus on Plan B. Would we escalate to air strikes? Arm the rebels? Sit back and let Qaddafi claim to have outlasted us?

If we did supply the rebels, who exactly would be receiving our money and munitions? Libya’s internal politics are opaque, to put it mildly. But here’s one disquieting data point, courtesy of the Center for a New American Security’s : Eastern Libya, the locus of the rebellion, sent more foreign fighters per capita to join the Iraqi insurgency than any other region in the Arab world.

And if the civil war dragged on, what then? Twice in the last two decades, in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia, the United States has helped impose a no-flight zone. In both cases, it was just a stepping-stone to further escalation: bombing campaigns, invasion, occupation and nation-building.

Me? I'm feeling less patient. I am frustrated by calls for military action by people whose positions on Libya seem to shift with the wind. In the 1980's, Qaddafi was crazy, and an undisputed supporter of terrorists. In the 1990's he remained a tyrant, kept at arm's length by much of the west, but our interest in him and his regime diminished. In the 2000's, along came G.W. and all of a sudden Qaddafi was redeemed - because he gave up WMD programs that didn't appear to amount to much and allowing western investment - and he was held up by leaders like Bush and Blair like a trophy, "Exhibit A" that the "War on Terror" worked. And then, lo and behold, it turns out that he's still a tyrant and isn't eager to relinquish power to rebel factions and... it seems like we're back in the 80's.

As I've suggested before, sometimes it feels like the loudest voices for military intervention around the world began and ended their study of military conflict by watching episodes of the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers - the good guys go up against opponents who are manifestations of pure evil, defeat them in clean, honorable battle with no collateral damage, and the world is saved! Not even the never-ending wars in Afghanistan and Iraq can change their minds. ("All we're doing" is intervening in a civil war while engaging in an act of war against a nation that hasn't attacked us and shows no interest in doing so - first we bomb their air defenses, then we create a 'no fly zone' and then we win! What could possibly go wrong?")

Look, I can understand the sentiment that all you have to do to bring peace, love, understanding and freedom to a population that lives under a tyrant is to decapitate the regime. It's a perfectly appropriate belief to hold before you expose yourself to enough human and military history to see how things are more likely to turn out. Slaughter suggests that if we don't help defeat Qaddafi, "when Colonel Qaddafi massacres the opposition, young protesters across the Middle East will conclude that when we were asked to support their cause with more than words". Except, you know, sometimes the revolution brings to power somebody like Pol Pot or Rouhollah Khomeini. Frying pans, fires, and all that. So I'm with Douthat here - part of the process of deciding when and where to intervene has to be to look at what's likely to result from your intervention.

By virtue of my own frustration with the "Let's have another war" crowd, I do have a criticism of Douthat. The man simply can't bring himself to take a stand. He trots out the parade of horribles, "All this nasty stuff could happen if we intervene militarily in Libya," but he can't bring himself to state a stronger conclusion than "th[e] case [for war] has not yet been made". He's an opinion columnist, and I guess that does count (in a wishy-washy way) as an opinion. And no, I'm not trying to argue that he needs to rule out any possibility that a case could be made that would inspire him to change his mind. But after laying out a strong argument as to why the case has not been made for military intervention, would it have been too much for him to run with his own argument? To emphatically state that the burden of proof is properly placed on the proponents of the war, that we should not be tricked into excusing their failure to meet that burden by rhetorical flourish or by the type of doctored evidence that was at the heart of the case for the war in Iraq?

Is he afraid that he'll be accused of defending a tyrant, much the way skeptics of the war in Iraq were accused of being happy to let Hussein terrorize his people? If that's the worst that can happen, given his position and the fact that he's a reasonably good writer, he can pen a column explaining why that's a (deliberately) unfair and inflammatory argument. If not... come on, man. Take a stand.

Update: Robert Farley comments on the... should I say utilitarian views of the neocons?

Whether they leave the point implicit or explicit, the neocons are reasonably clear about their preferences; we should support the rebels to the extent that we can be certain that they’ll win, and then we should install and support whichever parts of the rebel alliance are most to our liking.

The difficulty comes, of course, when you hitch your wagon to the wrong star - Ahmed Chalabi or, as increasingly appears to be the case, Ahmed Karzai, and the like. It may turn out that, when the shooting is over, there's no part of the "rebel alliance" that's actually to your liking, or deems the person you had hoped would lead and shape the "rebel alliance" into a new government to be wholly unacceptable. And it may be that your anointed leader for the new era is almost as problematic, albeit perhaps in different ways, than the leader you deposed.