Mediocrates
10-01-2011, 05:16 PM
ABC News reports that (http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/nightmare-libya-20000-surface-air-missiles-missing/story?id=14610199) Muammar Qaddafi’s surface-to-air missile stockpiles have gone missing without much of a trace. This nightmare cuts to the most dangerous problem with Barack Obama’s lead-from-behind Libya strategy: it’s bad.
The word “triumphalism” came to be synonymous with the Bush administration and the Iraq war. But Tripoli had barely fallen when Obama supporters like Fareed Zakaria declared the effort, literally, a model victory: “The Libyan intervention offers a new model for the West,” he wrote in Time, explaining that it was “a new model in that it involved an America that insisted on legitimacy and burden sharing, that allowed the locals to own their revolution.” And to own about 20,000 of their dictator’s missiles.
“I think the probability of al-Qaeda being able to smuggle some of the stinger-like missiles out of Libya is probably pretty high,” says former White House counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke. If the great risk of American assertiveness was that it caused supposed “blowback” among impacted populations, the problem with American constraint is one of terrorist facilitation. In Libya we were only ever half in, at best. We took our time and kept our distance—and left weapons stockpiles out for the taking. At the UN last week, Obama cited Libya as “a lesson in what the international community can achieve when we stand together as one.” It sure is.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/09/30/libyan-missiles/
The word “triumphalism” came to be synonymous with the Bush administration and the Iraq war. But Tripoli had barely fallen when Obama supporters like Fareed Zakaria declared the effort, literally, a model victory: “The Libyan intervention offers a new model for the West,” he wrote in Time, explaining that it was “a new model in that it involved an America that insisted on legitimacy and burden sharing, that allowed the locals to own their revolution.” And to own about 20,000 of their dictator’s missiles.
“I think the probability of al-Qaeda being able to smuggle some of the stinger-like missiles out of Libya is probably pretty high,” says former White House counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke. If the great risk of American assertiveness was that it caused supposed “blowback” among impacted populations, the problem with American constraint is one of terrorist facilitation. In Libya we were only ever half in, at best. We took our time and kept our distance—and left weapons stockpiles out for the taking. At the UN last week, Obama cited Libya as “a lesson in what the international community can achieve when we stand together as one.” It sure is.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/09/30/libyan-missiles/