The Iraq war hawks urging intervention in Libya are confident that there\u2019s no way Libya could ever be another Iraq.<\/p>\n
Of course, they never thought Iraq would be Iraq, either.<\/p>\n
All President Obama needs to do, Paul Wolfowitz asserts, is man up, arm the Libyan rebels, support setting up a no-fly zone and wait for instant democracy.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a cakewalk.<\/p>\n
Didn\u2019t we arm the rebels in Afghanistan in the \u201980s? And didn\u2019t many become Taliban and end up turning our own weapons on us? And didn\u2019t one mujahadeen from Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden, go on to lead Al Qaeda?<\/p>\n
So that worked out well.<\/p>\n
Even now, with our deficit and military groaning from two wars in Muslim countries, interventionists on the left and the right insist it\u2019s our duty to join the battle in a third Muslim country.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is both morally right and in America\u2019s strategic interest to enable the Libyans to fight for themselves,\u201d Wolfowitz wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece.<\/p>\n
You would think that a major architect of the disastrous wars and interminable occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq would have the good manners to shut up and take up horticulture. But the neo-con naif has no shame.<\/p>\n
After all, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates told West Point cadets last month, \u201cIn my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should \u2018have his head examined,\u2019 as General MacArthur so delicately put it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gates boldly batted back the Cakewalk Brigade \u2014 which includes John McCain, Joe Lieberman and John Kerry \u2014 bluntly telling Congress last week: \u201cLet\u2019s just call a spade a spade. A no-fly zone begins with an attack on Libya to destroy the air defenses. That\u2019s the way you do a no-fly zone. And then you can fly planes around the country and not worry about our guys being shot down. But that\u2019s the way it starts.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wolfowitz, Rummy\u2019s No. 2 in W.\u2019s War Department, pushed to divert attention from Afghanistan and move on to Iraq; he pressed the canards that Saddam and Osama were linked and that we were in danger from Saddam\u2019s phantom W.M.D.s; he promised that the Iraq invasion would end quickly and gleefully; he slapped back Gen. Eric Shinseki when he said securing Iraq would require several hundred thousand troops; and he claimed that rebuilding Iraq would be paid for with Iraqi oil revenues.<\/p>\n
How wrong, deceptive and deadly can you be and still get to lecture President Obama on his moral obligations?<\/p>\n
Wolfowitz was driven to invade Iraq and proselytize for the Libyan rebels partly because of his guilt over how the Bush I administration coldly deserted the Shiites and Kurds who were urged to rise up against Saddam at the end of the 1991 gulf war. Saddam sent out helicopters to slaughter thousands. (A NATO no-fly zone did not stop that.)<\/p>\n
Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi is also monstrous, slaughtering civilians and hiring mercenaries to kill rebels.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s hard to know how to proceed, but in his rush, Wolfowitz never even seems to have a good understanding of the tribal thickets he wants America to wade into. In Foreign Affairs, Frederic Wehrey notes<\/a> that \u201cfor four decades Libya has been largely terra incognita … \u2018like throwing darts at balloons in a dark room,\u2019 as one senior Western diplomat put it to me.\u201d<\/p>\n Leslie Gelb warns in The Daily Beast<\/a> that no doubt some rebels are noble fighters, but some \u201ccould turn out to be thugs, thieves, and would-be new dictators. Surely, some will be Islamic extremists. One or more might turn into another Col. Qaddafi after gaining power. Indeed, when the good colonel led the Libyan coup in 1969, many right-thinking Westerners thought him to be a modernizing democrat.\u201d<\/p>\n