I’m catching up with a lot of good stuff from my week of traveling. Here’s David Bromwich at Huffpo, against the Libya intervention (which yes I supported):
It seems then that a long train of earlier commitments in Libya was set in motion as soon as the Egyptian uprising began. “Kinetic military action” is the term of art for a policy whose content perhaps no single person is in full possession of.
Yet one thing is clear, thanks to Mazzetti and Schmitt. “Several weeks ago, President Obama signed a secret finding authorizing the CIA to provide arms and other support to Libyan rebels.” It is said that the arms have not yet been sent; but the timing is interesting. The order was signed just about the moment that President Obama was lauding the triumph of non-violence in Egypt. The Times reporters wisely let the serial flat reiterations of “no comment” from leading officials speak for themselves.
The upshot is this. An event that we Americans were led to believe was an autonomous rising on the model of Egypt turns out to have been deeply compromised from the start, and compromised by American meddling. And the president himself, far from having been balked in mid-decision because he is a man of skeptical and hesitant mind, took a long time to decide because he was face to face with a moment such as John Kennedy recognized at the brink of the Bay of Pigs invasion, whose 50th anniversary the U.S. will mark on April 17. After three days of ill-fated support for the anti-Castro rebels, President Kennedy drew back from that disaster. Eventually, he made a public apology to the country.
All the external parties are in Libya for different reasons. Things could not have gotten this far without the CIA. But the president was also heeding pressure from Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron; and what those European leaders wanted was the assurance of oil contracts for Europe. Italy, meanwhile, is fearful of an influx of refugees. All these things President Obama knew, but he was careful to mention none when he spoke to the nation on Monday….
Many things President Obama said on Monday [March 28] were wishful. The affirmation that NATO “has taken command” was wishful. So, too, was the picture of the United States “for generations” as a unique force for justice and courageous sacrifice, in a world otherwise populated by the tyrannous, the craven, the selfish, and the weak. Many other things Obama said were half true: the suggestion for example that the consideration at the front of his mind when he gave his speech was the safety of American jets and American ships far beyond the reach of Libyan gunnery. But we have now, in this baffling administration, passed out of the twilight of ambiguity. We have entered the land of lies. It is a region where many comments add up to no comment, and where every partial truth must be parsed for legalistic reservations folded into fugitive turns of grammar.
For now, the president is committed to two propositions. Muammar Gaddafi must go. And — as if this went hand in hand with the first — major involvement by the U.S. in Libya will last for days not weeks. He has also promised there will be no “boots on the ground”. (Or does this, too, compass a mental reservation? Does it mean to exclude only official U.S. armed forces boots?)
Delusions of grandeur, which have always been the lower layer of President Obama’s wishful commandments, were made more perilous in this case by delusions of convenience. The president likes things clean. But there is nothing clean about what we are doing in Libya.
