We think we control the vertical. Try hard with the horizontal. We, however, know for sure about the Goldilocks thing.
Follow here for your conditioning. Watch and believe . . .
The Imperial City And The World
We think we control the vertical. Try hard with the horizontal. We, however, know for sure about the Goldilocks thing.
Follow here for your conditioning. Watch and believe . . .
[After finally unlocking WH:] “Mission creep? No one *ever* utters those words. Tell Carney to use ‘saving more lives’ if he wants to keep the job.”
Even as other nations begin taking a larger role in the international air assault mission in Libya, the Pentagon is considering adding Air Force gunships and other attack aircraft that are better suited for tangling with Libyan ground forces in contested urban areas like Misrata, a senior Pentagon official said Friday.
Gortney [JCS staff director], however, said there has been no reduction in the number of American planes participating. In fact, he said the Pentagon was considering bringing in side-firing AC-130 gunships, helicopters and armed drone aircraft that could challenge Libyan ground forces that threaten civilians in cities like Misrata. The U.S. has avoided attacking in cities thus far out of fear that civilians could be killed or injured. AC-130 gunships, which operate at night at low altitude, can attack with unusual precision.>
Meanwhile, this is what we fight for:
As the transition to NATO command and control of the military operation proceeds, the administration has still not made a decision about recognizing the Benghazi-based Libyan opposition council as the legitimate government of the country. The U.S. closed its embassy in Tripoli in February but has not broken diplomatic relations with the Gadhafi regime.
Gene Cretz, the U.S. ambassador to Libya who has been reaching out to opposition figures, said the administration was still not entirely certain about the identities and intentions of the transitional council, although he said they had made positive statements about their goals and plans to respect human rights.
“I think they’re off to a good start,” he told reporters at the State Department. “That’s not to say that we know everything about them; we don’t. We have to be very careful about who might be included in the future and how they go about forming a government, if in fact they have that opportunity.”
It’s hard to see America today and not feel somewhat disassociated. Not in the twitchy Upper West Side sort of way, but as we all experience when a loved one needs help, cries out for help, yet in the end must be cut off. For that loved one must want to change before help can have meaning.
We must face facts and surrender illusions. Iraq, Bush, the whole tapestry was not the aberration we believed. We mean in the sense of chronic American inability to approach international challenges in pursuit of a concrete strategic outcome. Since 1980 spastic force unleashed by feeling and emotion, doubly irrational, is the norm. 1991 is the exception.
Why? We all know, of course, the coffee table paradigms dusted off 2001-2008 – liberal international humanitarianism, Jacksonian impulses, Neocon cynicism, multi-lateral institutional inertia, etc. Those labels, however, are merely descriptive rather than explanatory. Consider:
Western leaders acknowledged, though, that beyond the immediate United Nations authorization to protect Libyan civilians there was no clear endgame, because it was uncertain that even military strikes will force Colonel Qaddafi from power. Many of the leaders in Paris have called for Colonel Qaddafi to quit, and it may be that military intervention leads to negotiations with the opposition for the colonel and his family to go — or, at the least, buys time for the rebels to regroup. (emphasis added)
Force blindly deployed without clear rationale or strategic political objective. This after the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq. We don’t need Graham Allison to grasp that internal U.S. bureaucratic models are only partially helpful. Ultimately organizational process is even less satisfying than the paradigms, supra. Personalities make a difference, true; people are policy. Consider that we arrive at the same outcome despite diverse voices as Bill Clinton, Not-So-Bright, Bill Cohen/Wesley Clark, Cheney, W., Rummy et. al., the Boy King, HRC and retinue.
Details and public rationales (lies) varied. The underlying consistency? U.S. inability to control compulsive shortsighted kinetic twitching.
We’ve discussed here together at length the military’s congenital failure as well. The Army’s fetishization of Wehrmacht operational art and the concomitant inability to formulate doctrine sufficient to achieve strategic victory conditions is just the most recent permutation. Russell Weigley’s magisterial The American Way of War traces the phenomenon back to the Civil War and before. The Air Force is no different. The comparatively tiny Marines stand out uniquely – from the invention of amphibious warfare and island hopping in the 1920s to Iraq and Afghanistan today.
Welcome to the new normal. American fundamental capacity for developing and subsequent implementation of strategic thought is depleted. Too bold? More than that, we submit that those pursuits are actively punished, mocked and disregarded by ‘the market.’ Can anyone who knew Bob Osgood, Nitze, even (ack) Zbig, etc., the CFR and FA when they meant something, doubt it? Max Boot as Senior Fellow? Beinart? Look at Condi’s pathetic NSC. Obama’s not a big step up. ‘Experts’ are only what the chyrons tell us.
Is it their fault? Beginning with cable, satellite and now the Net time as a linear concept simply vanished. Digital is binary, 1s and 0, no in betweens. Strategic thought above all takes time.
Our blind, unthinking embrace of ever-tightening micro news cycles, likes, trending tweets, page views and links is a collective pithing. Policy is necessarily reactive to ephemera of heat, noise and intensity. What would happen if Charlie Sheen took an interest in foreign affairs?
We’re not churning cant blaming the Net. But it does identify our most pressing question: how to cultivate and deploy societal strategic perspectives in this environment? We don’t have a ready answer.
Put it another way – would Nixonger be possible today? Plumbers are a quaint notion when ‘unnamed senior White House officials’, Congress, all of them leak, tweet and call cable producers. A multi-year secret diplomacy climaxed with a covert trip to China via Pakistan, etc. is laughable. Kissinger would be caught by a camera phone and put on TMZ at the get go.
Now add WikiLeaks to that environment with institutional blood vendettas everywhere. The Good Old Days are always rosy in hindsight. The Sovs used to complain that their biggest problem with Americans is they don’t’ know what they want. Similar symptoms under the thumb of three networks, the Grey Lady, AM radio and The Phone Company. Kissinger observed even then government service burned up years of thinking in mere months.
We used to say often over at STSOZ 1.0 the American tragedy might well be we learn how to think about power in fully realized, purposeful terms only when we lose it.
How easily the U.S. steps into the unknown. Not burdened with strategic concerns about what to do, how to do it or how to get out. Everyone but the most dishonest Neocon admits a no-fly zone will have no impact on Khaddafi’s ability to crush the opposition on the ground. So the UN resolution is implicitly an invitation to kinetic war. A war declared on Libya on behalf of people and tribes we don’t know. Once again, high dudgeon and emotional satisfaction heralds ‘regime change.’
It’s true the French have led the way. But we’ve seen that movie, too. Recall that the French also stridently demanded the Iraq no-fly zone only quickly to bug out. Americans held the bag while the French enriched themselves with Saddam’s contracts. Should Americans in fact strike Libya, they again will have stumbled into General Jello’s ‘Pottery Barn Rule’. So much for jobs, domestic reconstruction, deficits and recalibrating strategic ends and means.
Can’t blame Bush. Can’t even blame Cheney, Rummy and the Neocons. Should we slide into de facto war, this time America can only look down at the shiny Taco Bell counter and take in the reflection.
Khaddaffi the man is perhaps a necessary component of an unarticulated U.S. policy, but not sufficient in and of itself. We all know removing the man alone can not be the U.S. policy. After all, the Bush Administration happily worked with Khaddaffi after 2003, opening the door to economic and political collaboration.
The former ruling regime’s crimes are too obvious now. Its time over. Yet who is the ‘opposition’ embraced so fulsomely? No one knows. We don’t refer to the rote tribal breakdown of the Eastern and Western regions; this recital is no answer. Simply wanting Khaddafi out is apparently enough. So again we ask, what is the U.S. policy to be supported by exercise of U.S. power? And who, if any, in the opposition plausibly is a part of that?
Old imperial habits die hard. Reflexively, policy makers reach for comfortable trappings of a slipping era: carrier battle groups, special forces, no fly zones, the NATO fig leaf etc. Libya presents a chance to be seen doing/talking about something in contrast to political paralysis before domestic fiscal and social collapse. American leadership apparently still hasn’t learned that such Middle East exertions are ephemeral and self-defeating. Ironically, perhaps only the final dissipation of American power may allow that reality to sink in.