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THE CONSERVATIVE REVIEW - April 5, 2011
A Community Organizer Goes to War
by: Pat Buchanan
Townhall.com
Now that Benghazi has been spared what we were assured
would be a massacre by Moammar Gadhafi's army, why are
the U.S. Air Force, Navy, CIA and Special Forces still
attacking in Libya?
If our objective was to spare the defenseless people of
Benghazi from slaughter, why, mission accomplished, did
we not stop bombing? Why are we plunging deeper in?
Did Gadhafi attack us? Did he attack a NATO country,
thereby triggering Article 5 of the treaty requiring us
to go to war? Have his forces carried out massacres of
such magnitude in recaptured towns and cities as to
morally mandate our humanitarian intervention?
Where? What has Gadhafi done in any rebel city that has
fallen to him to compare with what Syria's Hafez al-Assad
did in Hama, when he rolled up his artillery in 1982 and
slaughtered between 10,000 and 20,000 to teach the Moslem
Brotherhood a lesson in loyalty?
Not a decade after Hama, Assad was the welcome ally of
George H.W. Bush in Desert Storm.
With Benghazi secure, by what right did we attack the
Libyan soldiers defending Ras Januf, Brega and Sirte?
What crimes were they committing by defending their
cities from rebel attack and their government from being
overthrown by force and violence?
Is this not what all soldiers take an oath to do?
None of this is written in defense of Gadhafi, a loathsome
man and murderer of innocents, but to ask: Why is this
small civil war in a North African desert country America's
war?
The White House will not even concede America is at war.
And understandably so. For that would trigger follow-up
questions.
If we are at war with Libya, who started it? What was the
casus belli requiring us to go to war? Did Libyan troops
attack U.S. citizens or ships in the Mediterranean? Who is
the aggressor in this war?
The truth: America is fighting another war of choice in
Libya, and this one without any constitutional sanction.
Congress not only did not declare this war, Congress was
not even consulted.
Yet, once begun, wars create new political realities.
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Now that Obama and Hillary Clinton have declared that
Gadhafi must go, and U.S. military power has been put
massively in on the side of the rebels, Gadhafi cannot
win without Obama losing face and the United States being
humiliated.
Saving Obama's face and preserving our superpower image
may be the cause for which we kill a number of Libyans
who did nothing to us.
There is, however, a more compelling reason Gadhafi must
go.
Should he survive our drive to dethrone and kill him with
that cruise missile into his compound the first night of
our attack, he is likely to return the favor, as he did
at Lockerbie after Ronald Reagan's 1986 attack on his
compound.
Should Gadhafi retain power at the end of this war, with
friends and family dead, how safe will U.S. airliners be
on the North Atlantic run? If, as Reagan rightly said,
Gadhafi is the "mad dog of the Middle East," can you
leave such a wounded and rabid animal alive?
Our intervention raises other questions that should have
been asked and answered before Obama plunged us into this
civil war.
Absent some lucky air or cruise missile strike, how do we
remove him from power? How do we de-claw him so we do not
awaken some morning to a horrific reprisal on U.S. citizens
for what we did to him?
The rebel army is not up to it. It did not just retreat
from Sirte after tribal forces joined the Libyan army to
repel them. It fled in a Mad Max rout, abandoning town
after town until some rebels had fled all the way back to
Benghazi.
Even with the United States and NATO imposing a no-fly and
no-drive zone on Gadhafi's army, the rebel army is not a
force that can march to Tripoli and depose him. And it is
unlikely to become such a force anytime soon. The rebels
lack the arms, training, equipment and numbers to march
600 miles and capture and hold half a dozen towns along
the way against hostile tribes and Libyan troops.
Who, then, is going to do it?
Obama has said we will not put boots on the ground. But
if we don't put U.S. advisers in, who will train, arm
and lead the rebels? The Germans and Turks want no part
of this war. The most bellicose allies, Britain and
France, had a hellish time in Bosnia before the Americans
came and pulled their chestnuts out of the fire.
As for the Arab League, Qatar has sent a few planes, but
where is the Egyptian army, half a million strong and
right next door? Why is Arabs fighting Arabs an American
rather than an Arab problem?
The truth: There is no "international community." There
is Uncle Sam. He does it, or it does not get done.
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