Monday, March 14, 2011
Tuesday Preview: Neocon in Sheep's Clothing
by Jeff Huber
Paul “Iraq Debacle Wolfowitz has joined the phalanx of Pentarchs* who are calling for Young Mr. Obama to intervene in Libya. In a March 11 Wall Street Journal, dog-of-war Wolfowitz admonishes that, “One has to be morally blind not to be moved by the spectacle of brave Libyans standing up to Moammar Gadhafi's tanks and bombs and mercenaries.”
Paul Wolfowitz thinks military action in Libya is a good idea.
One has to be cognitively blind not to make a quick emend of that sentence to reflect on “the spectacle of brave Iraqis/Afghans/Pakistanis standing up to America’s tanks and bombs and mercenaries.”
Wolf Man tells us that “There are three important U.S. actions that could speed up Gadhafi's demise and stop the killing in Libya: recognize the newly formed national council in Benghazi as the government of Libya, provide assistance to the new Libyan authorities, and support the imposition of a no-fly zone over Libya.”
There are three important things wrong with that passage.
First is the main assumption, a dazzlingly false one that Wolfowitz, employing a standard neocon game propaganda tactic, flagrantly tries to fly under the radar: namely that we have any sort of legal or moral mandate to speed up or in any other way facilitate Gadhafi’s demise. Gadhafi hasn’t committed an act of war against us lately, and there’s ample reason to discredit any assertion that he ever did commit an act of war against us that justifies any sort of military action against him on our part.
The checkered history of our tit-for-tattersall game with Gadhafi probably begins with the events that let up to Operation El Dorado Canyon, our unilateral 1986 air strike on Libya. Up to that time, Gadhafi had allegedly been involved in terrorism in Europe and elsewhere, but none of those elsewheres included anywhere that might even remotely be considered United States territory. We’d had, however, a number of chesty-fights with Gadhafi’s air and naval forces over his claim that much of the Gulf of Sidrah was comprised of Libyan territorial waters and we said it wasn't, that we’d only recognize the standard parcel—12 nautical miles from shore—as Libyan territory. We said his claims didn’t stand up to the rules in the UN treaty on such things, which was true, and he said we’d made them write the rules that way to screw him out of being able to make the Gulf of Sidrah his territorial waters, which was also true.
Then he said we couldn’t fly our military planes over his territorial waters in the Gulf of Sidrah without his permission, which was true if you considered the Gulf of Sidrah to be his territorial waters (which he did) and false if you considered the Gulf of Sidrah to be international waters, which we did.
Things boiled to a head in the 1989 Gulf of Sidra Incident, where we flew Navy fighter jets over what Kadhafi claimed was his territory and shot down two of his fighter jets who flew out to intercept our fighter jets. The insider’s version of the Incident is that a bunch of kiss-up, true-believer Navy JAG lawyers sat down and wrote up a rules of engagement that defined standard radar-fighter defense tactics as hostile acts, so when the Libyan radar fighters executed the standard defensive tactics, the Navy fighters were cleared to whack them with their long-range air-to-air missiles, which they proceeded to do.
Two weeks later a bomb exploded in a West Berlin disco and killed two American servicemen. It killed and wounded a bunch of non-Americans too, but they weren’t relevant to what followed. U.S. intelligence claimed to have gotten its mitts on “cables” saying that Libyan agents in East Berlin were involved in the bombing. There’s no way of knowing if any of the intelligence officials involved in this intelligence were also involved in the intelligence that Wolfowitz and his pals used to justify the invasion of Iraq. But if there’s anything we should have learned from our Mesopotamia Mistake is that we should never believe what war mongrels like Wolfowitz tell us our intelligence says.
I guess back in the Reagan era they hadn’t figure out yet that intelligence types tended to tell them what they wanted to hear, so The Great Communicator ordered the Navy and Air Force to bomb the bejesus out of Gadhafi’s house but he wasn’t there, so we probably killed and injured more innocent people that he’d killed or injured by bombing that German disco. Shortly after El Dorado, Gadhafi squashed an internal revolt, so he already knows how to do that.
Project for the New American Century
Time passed. On August 14, 2008 Young Mr. Bush restored full diplomatic relations with Libya, a act that, by the way, officially recognized Gadhafi as the legitimate political leader of his country. So when Wolf Bob urges us to “recognize” the new “authorities” as the “government of Libya,” he’s asking us to throw out a government that his boss legitimized and back a pack of yahooligans that he and his fellow war hucksters don’t want you to know a whole lot about yet. And the last thing the New American Centurions want you think about is that a tame Gadhafi in control of Libya is a 100 percent dead cert to be a better scenario for U.S. and global security than putting a ragtag ring of radicals in charge.
And then, God help America, it looks like Paulie Walnuts even has chowder head John Kerry believing that if we put a no-fly zone over Libya, that won’t be like a real military commitment or anything. Who among us doesn’t love a no-fly zone, eh? Oh, wait, maybe Kerry is spinning some political ploy so he can say he voted for the no-fly zone before he voted against it.
Setting up a no-fly zone over the sovereign territory of a nation whose government we have recognized and that hasn’t committed a hostile act toward us is every bit as much an act of war as a bombing campaign (which we’ll have to have anyway to knock out Libya’s air defenses) or an armed invasion would be. It could not, by any measure acceptable to even marginally sane people, be even remotely justified as an act of national self-defense.
And make no mistake; once we spend a penny on setting up no-fly zone, we’re in for a pound of Pottery Barn. A no-fly zone won’t topple Gadhafi’s regime any more than two of them—that operated for over a decade, by the way--toppled Saddam Hussein. Having committed military power to regime change, we’ll keep piling it on until the mission is once again accomplished. Except, of course, the mission will never be accomplished, and we’ll have created our third and, most likely, our final quagmire.
No, fellow citizens, listening to the likes of Paul Wolfowitz and recognizing and backing the Libyan rebels would be an act of national suicide, but guess what. Neocon hag Hillary Clinton is over in Paris right now getting ready to do just that.
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance
