This is more consequential than any leaked diplomatic cable. This is the opposite of Bush-Cheney unilateralism. Reuters:
Any no-fly zone over Libya must have international backing and not be a U.S.-led effort, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Tuesday.
In plain English, the United States has refused to own Libya. With the US slowly extricating itself from two wars in the Muslim world, I am put in mind of Britain’s 1947 announcement that it could no longer meet its commitments in Greece and Turkey. From Wikipedia:
Notified that British aid to Greece and Turkey would end in less than six weeks, and already hostile towards and suspicious of Soviet intentions, because of their reluctance to withdraw from Iran, the Truman administration decided that additional action was necessary. With Congress solidly in Republican hands, and with isolationist sentiment strong among the U.S. public, Truman adopted an ideological approach. In a meeting with congressional leaders, the argument of “apples in a barrel infected by one rotten one” was used to convince them of the significance in (sic) supporting Greece and Turkey. It was to become the “domino theory”.
The bipolar world of Cold War did not exist until the United Kingdom had exhausted its strength and lost its empire. Granted, the United States is nowhere near as bad off as the UK in 1947; indeed, American armed forces are more than capable of disposing of the Ghaddafi regime. But there would be cost, even if the United States was welcomed as liberators. The relatively safe job of destroying Libya’s air force and air defense network (a “no-fly zone”) is still an enormous risk, with precious little upside.
So rather than insert the United States into a civil war, America is asking Europe to do the flying. If boots on the ground become necessary, the Egyptian army is more than capable. It may become necessary to resupply rebels — especially when they
waste astonishing amounts of ammunition with theatrical shooting and machismo. Ammunition has been at a premium since a huge arms depot blew up outside Benghazi on Saturday.
Several older rebels have used loudspeakers to beg their comrades to stop wasting ammunition. They have been uniformly ignored. When the rebels reload, they leave half-filled ammunition boxes scattered in the desert.
Cold War domino theory saw the US support regimes in Greece, Iran, and Turkey against communist insurgents and Soviet influence. Bush-Cheney domino theory held that breaking Iraq would break Iran. A new Libyan domino theory — that a chain reaction of popular uprisings will succeed in transforming Oman, Yemen, the Emirates, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia — has taken hold in the public mind, and certainly has value in the minds of the courageous demonstrators in those countries.
But Libyans have to do this for themselves — and may not be able to do it all by themselves. The Obama White House has chosen a low-risk conservative option that diffuses responsibility and is guaranteed to please no partisans; it has the advantage of not making the Libyans’ war into an American one, but has the disadvantage of relying on the unreliable.
Which raises an interesting point: Europe is as unprepared for this mission as the United States was in 1947, and probably as uninterested in Libya today as they were in Albania in 1997. No one is coming to rescue Benghazi; it is nobody’s domino.
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