According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libyan_Air_Force, the Libyans don’t have a very capable air force. Their planes are old and the maintenance capability is questionable. The Saudi Arabians, for example, have a much better air force (Wikipedia) and certainly the Europeans all have much more modern and better-maintained warplanes. Why then is the U.S. at war once again? Aren’t we already in enough wars? Couldn’t Libya’s neighbors handle this situation (if indeed it needs to be handled at all)?
Separately, since there was no urgency about this war (the Libyan uprising started on February 15), why couldn’t Nobel Peace Laureate Obama have gotten approval from Congress before showing the Libyans that sometimes the most lasting Peace comes in the form of a 1000 lb. bomb being dropped on their heads by a $1 million Tomahawk missile?
I think I figured it out. Or else I read it somewhere:
The UK recently let the Lockerbie bomber free in exchange for a lucrative oil deal with Ghaddafi, which caused them to lose significant face when it turned out he wasn’t dying of cancer after all.
When hostilities started in Libya, the Chinese quickly evacuated some 40 000 of their nationals. Who knows what they were doing there, but it was most likely an oil project. Having learned this, NATO decided that having paid for Libyan oil with the blood of their innocents, they could not countenance the prospect of the Chinese pumping it right out from under their noses. Whatever deal the Chinese made with Ghaddafi will no doubt be repudiated by his successor at the urging of the Eurosphere.
The US had to get involved to keep their interests on the table in whatever is to follow. Plus, it would just be weird if the Europeans did everything themselves. Maybe next time.
Finally, the Wikileaks saga has slowed the pace of international diplomacy by making diplomats averse to writing any of this down, which is why it took so long for it to come together (and why Wikileaks will ultimately decrease transparency and increase the number of complex paranoid conspiracy theories like this one).
Obvious answer – Oil. Not quite as obvious answer – The Arab League gave their blessing. It’s a golden opportunity to remove an unfriendly power from an oil-rich state with minimal flack in the Arab world.
Uh, so their oil fields can be plugged back into the petrodollar. Or, maybe we need to “fight the terrorists over there before we fight them over here.” You’re choice. Imma stick with the petrodollar narrative.
I’m genuinely confused on this one. Gadhafi is an evil SOB and not many would mourn if a bomb dropped on him, but if that’s the only criteria, then we should be at war with a lot more of the world. And it’s hardly clear that the rebels are anything to be admired.
George Will said it best in his column yesterday, “America has intervened in a civil war in a tribal society, the dynamics of which America does not understand. And America is supporting one faction, the nature of which it does not know.”
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/566654/201103211745/Civil-War-In-A-Tribal-Society-We-Dont-Know.htm
Why are we still at war with Iraq and Afghanistan? Why are we spending billions to walk through x-ray body scanners and be groped at airports? Why is Gitmo still open, and why has the Patriot Act not only been renewed but strengthened?
As best as I can determine Obama has decided he loved Bush Jr’s policies after all. I’m not so sure however that the American people are thrilled with the third Bush term.
Folks who believe “oil is the answer”: Even if oil is the answer, I don’t see why the U.S. has to be involved. The Europeans use a lot of oil. They have plenty of military power to deal with whatever Libya has to offer. The U.S. has a military sized for a global conflict. This seems to be a local or regional conflict and we’re not part of that region.
Yeah amazing how quickly Europe and America reacted to Libya than Rwanda or Sudan or a dozen other geologically-challenged places. Couldn’t possibly be the 1.5mn b/d of light, sweet crude oil Libya produces. What a joke. I hate all poltiicians, but Obama is somehow even more transparently fake.
Why spend a dollar on a that fkg place anyway. There is plenty of oil around, regardless of what the whackos say.
> Why then is the U.S. at war once again?
Under this criterion (performing targeted attempts at peacekeeping when civilians are attacked by their military), how many wars would you say we’re in now, out of curiosity? I suspect most people would say two, and your answer would have to be above five, so I think your definition is idiosyncratic.
> Separately, since there was no urgency about this war (the Libyan uprising started on February 15)
I read that the security council justification was that they needed to act in the next 48 hours from their decision because of Gaddafi’s credible threat to “show no mercy” to Benghazi. The worry was that he would simply kill civilians indiscriminately in Libya’s second largest city.
> couldn’t Nobel Peace Laureate Obama have gotten approval from Congress
Again, seems like idiosyncratic definitions; he did meet with congress leadership and get their approval, as I understand it. Do you think we need a full vote of congress before all similar operations? Does that usually happen, under other presidents?
– Chris.
Cynical POV is that the USA is involved because while the USD used to be backed by gold and silver, it is now (effectively) backed by barrels of oil.
Michael: As far as I know, the U.S. hasn’t done business with Libya in decades. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libya_%E2%80%93_United_States_relations says that we haven’t traded with them, for oil or anything else, since the mid-1980s. The Europeans are the folks who’ve invested in Libyan and purchased their oil (and indirectly financed whatever weapons the Libyan government now has). If the Europeans no longer wish to do business with the current Libyan government and would prefer to install some other ruler or rulers, why can’t they arrange that on their own?
Chris: “targeted attempts at peacekeeping when civilians are attacked by their military”? Is that what we’re calling our war against Libya? I think that we have killed our share of civilians in our various wars. What proof do we have that the Libyan government is attacking civilians? Wouldn’t it make more sense for them to target armed rebels seeking to take over the government? In an effort to maintain its power and dominance over the South, the U.S. government fought a very bloody civil war in which civilians were killed. The Libyans didn’t come over here and bomb Washington, D.C. during that conflict.
Would I like a full vote of Congress before the president can go ahead and spend $1+ billion of our tax dollars and put American lives at risk? Yes I would! Did other presidents wait for this? I’m not sure. I thought that King Bush II did get Congress to vote for our ill-fated Iraq adventure. In any case, if King Bush II did something stupid and wasted a lot of tax dollars, how is that an argument in favor of subsequent presidents being able to do similar things?
Perhaps we are happy with Obama’s wise and benevolent dictatorship. Why then do we pay the costs of running Congress? If electing a Nobel Peace laureate guarantees excellent governance without Congressional advice, why not shut down Congress for 8 years and save money (http://washminster.blogspot.com/2007/06/how-much-does-it-cost-to-run-congress.html says it was $4.3 billion in 2008; probably the cost is much higher now… http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41214.pdf says it has grown to $5.12 billion for 2011; good thing that we don’t have inflation in the United States or this cost trajectory would be alarming).
How tough is it to get Congress to vote on something? http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/112/senate/1/votes/ says that the full Senate voted on 19 bills so far in March. One of these was “To strike the Federal authorization of the National Veterans Business Development Corporation”. This corporation seems to have been started around 2000 and given $3 million/year in funding. The Senate was able to vote on whether or not to keep spending $3 million per year. Why would it not have been practical to get them to vote “yes” or “no” on going to war against Libya?
A relatively few million for public radio? Bad. Untold billions to intervene in Libya? Ok. Why? If you need a hidden reason why we did it, I think Matt’s is as good as any. Plus, we had the pretext of being asked by the “rebels,” whom the press has deemed the “good guys” from Day One. I think it ultimately all gets back to what Justice Holmes said often in his amazing collected letters to Laski and to Pollock — if you have the power, you do things you otherwise wouldn’t/couldn’t do. C. Wright Mills (“The Power Elite”) & Ike (“Farewell Address”) both hit upon the fact that there are semi-hidden elites who run this country & who you vote for often doesn’t always correlate with what they say & what your expectations are. Although I’m a Republican, I voted for Johnson my first time around cuz he was portrayed as the saner, more pacific candidate (remember the anti-Goldwater “H-Bomb” ads?). I voted for Obama because he was supposedly the peace guy. You really can’t win. The only President in the last 60 years who knew how to handle the military was Ike….
Because we’re now internationalist, multilateral and the Europeans asked… Libya may not have very nice planes, but they also have anti-aircraft guns. Aside from British no-one else has the tomahawks or as many ships and subs to launch from, maybe not enough survailance or command-control type awacs. Europe can build very nice military hardware, but so far they’ve been focusing on selling it to China rather than buy for themselves, while having US to both kick around for militarism and to “defend” them. I would have at least asked for the name and commitment of the european/(Arab?) general who could assume the figurehead control of the war. Now we have US control, US weapons, EU interests and Arab league talking out of both sides of their mouth for intervention and plausible deniability (so does GOP – some were egging Obama on but nobody wanted to vote on it and if things turn bad, Cheney or Rumsfeld will turn up to offer their wisdom). Somebody is a sucker here.
Burton: Thanks for the historical perspective. If Johnson escalated JFK’s Vietnam War, I don’t see how that makes Obama’s latest wars inevitable. The 1960s were a very different time. The U.S. spent approximately 30 percent of GDP on government compared to 40 percent today (see http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_20th_century_chart.html ). http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/federal_debt_chart.html shows that federal debt as a percentage of GDP was much lower in the 1960s than now. Medicare was brand-new and its cost was low. Public employees were only beginning to unionize and bargain for enormously expensive pensions. A new war might have seemed like a fun spree for U.S. taxpayers in the 1960s, but we can’t afford sprees anymore.
LT: The Libyans have anti-aircraft guns and therefore the Europeans can’t handle this war against their former business partner themselves? If true, perhaps they should invest more in their military or stop going to war against their former business partners. But I doubt that this is true. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Air_Force says the French have 874 air force planes. They are presumably in good repair. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Air_Force says the British have 1,114. The Italians have 551 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Air_Force ). If these guys can’t handle Libya with that kind of numerical superiority, perhaps they should follow Costa Rica’s example and get out of the military business.
Hi Phil,
You didn’t answer my question about how many wars you think the US is currently engaged in; I’d be interested to hear your view.
I think I agree with you about congress. We give a lot of direct military authority to the “Commander-in-chief”, and maybe we shouldn’t. That said, Obama did meet with congressional leadership and I presume we would have heard about it if many members of congress were opposed to intervening. The criticisms I’ve been hearing have been more that he wavered for too long and then announced our involvement without specifying what our final goal is (are we trying to remove Gaddafi, or not?) and an exit strategy, and that the task will be much harder after the initial successes of Gaddafi’s troops in other cities.
The rest of your post reads like you’re an intervention-skeptic, and think that each country should basically mind its own business — is that a fair summary? Do you feel that our intervention in the Kosovo Conflict should have been avoided too, or in WW2? Or is there something substantially different about these cases in your mind?
– Chris.
Chris: Your question about how many wars the U.S. is involved in right now doesn’t seem relevant. My answer would be “at least two (Iraq and Afghanistan)” and “however many it is right now, we don’t need N+1 wars”.
Am I an “intervention-skeptic”? What we’re doing isn’t “intervention”. It is dropping bombs on peoples’ heads and killing them. We’re doing it in a place where, since we don’t speak the language or understand the culture, we have no idea whether or not the people we’re killing are likely to be friendly to the U.S. I don’t see how it serves our interest to be “Team America: World Police” in a region where people complain that the U.S. is constantly meddling in their affairs.
How does this relate to World War II? Our territory was bombed and/or invaded by Japan and then Germany declared war on us. So we never had to make a decision about whether it made sense to be involved (though I suppose you could argue that we gave the British a lot of help before Pearl Harbor). As for Kosovo, I haven’t looked at that war, but I don’t see why the Europeans couldn’t have handled it themselves. Nor do I see what benefit the U.S. has derived from having been involved. (If the answer is “we helped some people in Kosovo”, that would justify our going to war in another 50 or so places around the world right now because we could certainly help one side or the other in every armed conflict.)
I’m not a pacifist. If Congress had decided that Libya should be flattened in 1988 after the Libyans blew up Pan Am Flight 103, I would not have protested that decision. But what we’re doing now is not retaliation for Libyans past attacks on the U.S. In fact, those Libyans who were involved in the attacks have all comfortably retired and if we put some money into “nation-building” we’ll have Americans working overtime to pay additional taxes to help those retired Libyans enjoy a better lifestyle.
Phil, just type “exxon libya” into Google.
All of the US majors have affiliates or direct deals post-2005, and our European allies are safeguarding Eni, Repsol, and Total’s interests. They would hardly mind if US companies were shut out by the new government, so long as production didn’t take a big hit.
BBC, 6 December 2005: “ExxonMobil, the world’s largest energy producer, is returning to Libya after an absence of almost 25 years.”
Dallas Business Journal, 17 March 2011: “Libya war has little effect on Exxon” – “foreign national employees working for Exxon in Libya have left the country, but Libyan employees remain in place.”
I think one of the reasons Ike managed to balance the budget was that people like my parents, who came into the work force in the 1930s, got a lesson in economics like the one some people (but not all) have taken from the multiple bubble bursts in recent years. They elected Ike & expected pay-as-you-go government. I was fortunate to be taught the lessons they learned; indeed, they taught those lessons in 9th grade civics in my hometown in MN (where they also taught every student to balance a checkbook). Recent books on Ike’s presidency have shown his advisers urged intervention on a number of occasions & Ike said no. It’s true he sent a very small number of advisers to Viet Nam, but that’s all he actually DID. In grumblings to friends he opposed JFK’s escalation, although as good, loyal soldier that he was, he offered public support at one point when JFK asked for it. There WAS considerable opposition to LBJ’s we-can-have-both-guns-and-butter (defer the cost of paying for Viet Nam) approach. That led to the hyper-inflation under Carter (one always has to pay the bill). Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman “public philosopher” — whom Johnson adored — said America never really loses if it throws its weight around in the world. I really think that mentality hasn’t disappeared & I doubt it will… I don’t like it but I don’t have any way of proving it hurts us more than it helps us in the long run.
Regardless of motives, I find it a little odd (concerning?) that the allies are interceding in what has been labeled as a “civil war”. Let’s face it – we’re not good at picking sides, and even if we were it, doesn’t seem to be our place to do so. I couldn’t imagine if Britain had chosen to attack Union troops in Washington during the American Civil War, or blockade or destroy the Union Navy.
Assuming sovereign funds of Arab countries, wont affect their investement decisions in United States, of fear of the 30 bil. assets being frozen*1 in the U.S (Libyan goverment + personal assets of the regime family) –which is unevidable under the obvious/claimed conditons, the assets including personal, according to U.N after situation stabilizes (who knows when?), will be returned in favor of the Libyan people.
Can income not paid for the frozen assets that will stay in the Federal Reserve Bank be enough to pay back for those missiles and few more?
Not being a zero sum-game, this obviously has also macroeconomic effects if Libyan people can spend more money in the future (it would be helpful to know the median income but is certainly currently uneven*2).
Also, a large portion of the global 200 bil. assets seems to have been in Italy –which has also frozen not only the personal assets, and which is not suprisignly highly active in this.
Why Germany opt out but France didn’t?
*1 http://www.iie.com/publications/interviews/pp20110303truman.pdf
*2 http://www.slate.com/id/2287598/
Here’s one theory: http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/libya/
I won’t bother with the whys as they exceed my patience, but Europe and the Arab Coalition is contributing, with France, England, Belgium, Italy, and now Qatar engaging in aerial combat operations alongside the US. The French have flown the majority of the close air suppourt missions against Libyan ground forces.
The US remains the premier SEAD (supression of enemy air defenses) operator in the world, and so far that is where most of its mission tasking has been.
Fred: The fact that the U.S. is good at waging war or some aspect of war should not be an argument in favor of us joining every war, should it?
It’s the Cesar Millan theory of diplomacy. Nothing important happens unless pack leader gives the okay and leads the way. Gadhafi had just enough standing in the global pack to be allowed probationary pack member status. (Where Idi Amin did not.) Gadhafi violated his probation. Pack leader gives the okay and sends in his lieutenants to remind the rest of the pack what happens to those who violate probation. Same thing happened to Saddam Husain. Pack leader makes the rules for probation. The rules are arbitrary and capricious depending on pack leader’s mood.
Philg: Sidenote for the record, America does import (a small) amount of Libyan oil. http://www.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/PET_MOVE_IMPCUS_A2_NUS_EPC0_IM0_MBBLPD_A.htm
Yes, 60kbd is a pittance — barely the size of a tiny refiner’s single daily consumption.
But what really matters is that global sweet crude is now in short supply, so the Mediterranean refiners, who are designed to run Libyan crude primarily, instead pull on West African cargoes to substitute. Now suddenly US refiners have more competition for these gasoline-rich crudes like Bonny Light. Angolan crude is now extremely relatively expensive.
Anyway, yes, they all suck. When they thought Qadaffi was on the ropes, Britain and France spoke up. (Italy wisely kept quiet). But when everyone realized Qadaffi does know how to survive, and he was going to give payback to Britain and France once he finished off his indigenous Rebel Scum, those two countries were cornered into a situation where they must make sure Qadaffi gets finished off, otherwise risking their in-country investment.
How USA allows itself to be pulled into said mess is beyond me. A 14yo playing Axis and Allies has better strategic sense than the State Department.
I found this about it:
http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/military-293677-gadhafi-way.html
JFYI
One thing: we don’t have a few billion extra to spend, even if it makes us feel better. The G-Man in North Africa has always been crazy, it’s not our crazy.
What I don’t get here is the lack of outcry from the American public. Where is the outrage at spurting near 1 billion dollars of hardware into Libya in the first day of “action”?
We support a military industrial complex which is like an anthrax on our country. It’s eating us from the inside. But it provides jobs! But it eats near 1/3 of our tax dollars. But it provides jobs! But it makes more people WANT to attack us! So we grow it bigger! Ad infinitum.