Right Wing Nut House

I’ve got another Libya update at FrontPage.com. This one looks at the clusterfark this military adventure is becoming.

A sample:

So do we protect the pro-Gaddafi civilians or not? General Ham couldn’t answer that question, which is why this entire operation couldn’t be more muddled. We don’t know exactly who we are fighting, or even who we are fighting to protect, although it is likely that some of the rebel forces are made up of al-Qaeda fighters and other affiliated terrorist groups. We don’t know who we can bomb and who we should leave alone. We don’t know how to unite the rebel forces under a unified command to make them more effective. One rebel told Reuters, when asked who was in charge, “Nobody is. We are volunteers. We just come here. There is no plan.”

The same might be said for the United Nations’ forces themselves. The question of the day is: who is in charge? President Obama is determined that it won’t be America for much longer. “When this transition takes place, it is not going to be our planes that are maintaining the no-fly zone,” the president said in a news conference from El Salvador. “It is not going to be our ships that are necessarily enforcing the arms embargo. That’s precisely what the other nations are going to do,” he added.

The president can say that, but is NATO buying it? The administration is working very hard to “handoff” responsibility for the war to a NATO command structure, but the Daily Mail is reporting that NATO’s unity is coming more unraveled by the hour. The Germans have pulled assets out of the Mediterranean, expressing the fear that NATO would be drawn into the conflict even more heavily than they are engaged now. Turkey has made it clear that they believe coalition military action has exceeded their UN mandate. The Italians have accused the French of fighting for oil contracts, while making it clear they would support a NATO-led coalition or no coalition at all. Italy’s support is vital because we are using their air bases to launch attacks into Libya.

War is the definition of confusion. But this is incredible. After only four days, the coalition appears to be fraying badly, and it is not at all clear how much longer support among our allies and the Arab League can be maintained for the kind of bombing operations that we’re doing right now to support the rebels.

Regime change? Not on the table says everyone in the administration from Obama on down. Praytell, then, how do you “protect civilians” which is the ostensible rationale for the military action?

My head hurts.

I sum it up thusly:

There simply aren’t any answers coming from President Obama, the United Nations, the Arab League, or any other coalition member. The “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine under which the United Nations has authorized this action is silent about such messy endings. The unfortunate fact is that the United States committed to this war between breakfast and dinner a week ago, with apparently little thought given to any of these issues, except how the US could escape responsibility for the military action as quickly as possible — and how any political fallout from failure would miss hitting the president, who is now gearing up for a re-election fight.

When all is said and done, this adventure may go down as one of the most careless, reckless, incompetently prosecuted military actions in US history.

I support the president in this action but Holey Moley, Batman - this is getting ridiculous! The president said at a press conference yesterday that Gaddafi might be able to stay in power if he “reforms” his government. This, after nearly a month of insisting that Gaddafi has to go. What are they thinking up there? What is their plan? Do they have one?

Some on the right are saying we’re “outsourcing” our foreign policy. Not at all. In order to do that, you need a policy to begin with. And for this administration, if there is a policy, they are keeping it well hidden from friend and foe alike.