Libya has embarassed the hawks.
John Yoo thinks non-existent "isolationists" should feel embarrassed by Gaddafi's imminent downfall:
Obama did the right thing to order U.S. forces in, but it was done reluctantly, with the administration claiming it was not really at â??war,â? limiting the U.S. and its allies to enforcing a no-fly zone only, and then trying to reduce our participation in airstrikes. Obamaâ??s foot-dragging prolonged the Libyan civil war and will reduce our ability to influence the post-Qaddafi regime, which may well have strong extremist elements.But I think the new Republican isolationists in the House (and among the presidential candidates) will come out looking even worse. They opposed the presidentâ??s constitutional authority to use force abroad to protect U.S. national-security interests, yet they failed to put forward any serious proposals of their own for U.S. foreign policy in the region (aside from pulling out wholesale, I suppose). They not only contradicted the consistent position of Republican administrations on the war-powers issue, but they had no alternatives to put forward on what to do about Libya.
Question for Yoo: what national security issues where at stake in Libya? In my view, as well as the view of former Defense Secretary Gates, there were none, at least not "vital" ones. In fact, the Obama administration didn't believe there were either - they framed the intervention almost exclusively on the humanitarian stakes, with some additional nonsense about "spillovers" into Egypt and Tunisia. Now it's true that many in Washington's foreign policy community have different thresholds when it comes to risking other people's lives and tax dollars on foreign wars. It's also true that how "vital" a particular interest is can be in the eye of the beholder. Still, I think it's a stretch to conclude that the security of the United States would have been intolerably threatened had the U.S. not stepped into the middle of Libya's revolution.
Second, seeing as there was no national security threat to the United States, it's absurd to claim that House Republicans should nevertheless have concocted a "serious policy" proposal for how to deal with it. Why? Should they craft one for Zimbabwe too? The House of Representatives can barely govern the United States effectively, we should be gratified that they did not further distract themselves worrying about Libya.
Finally, it doesn't seemed to have dawned on the president's hawkish critics that the only reason the Libya war can even be considered a success is because he ignored their advice. We heard a lot of tedious harping about how the Libyan campaign showed the limits of "leading from behind" - but if anything, it was the opposite. The Libyan war was successful for the U.S. insofar as we incurred no casualties or larger financial costs. If the U.S. is able to stay out of a potentially messy and prolonged post-conflict nation building operation in Libya (something his critics insist he embark on), then Libya may well be marked as success in that we achieved a limited goal with limited means.
(AP Photo)
