The use of military force against Gaddafi is welcome but simultaneously worrisome. Welcome in that American ground troops will not be landing in Tripoli and that US and a coalition of other nations are trying to stop Libya from a further massacre of its own people. But worrisome in that there is large uncertainties about the aims of US military force both short and long term. The leaders of France and Britain want Gaddafi removed from power. But the US says that is not our aim. But why should it not be our aim?
This debate or confusion in American policy is not unexpected. Many Americans do not believe in what became known as “regime change” in the past decade. What immediately comes to mind of course are the “liberation” of both Afghanistan and Iraq, as supporters would describe the military campaigns or two unnecessary “invasions” as they are usually described by their opponents.
Peggy Noonan writes in the Wall Street Journal that US military action inevitably leads to a long term attachment to whatever country we become involved with, with great and continued loss of American life and treasure. Great Americans such as Ralph Peters, Bing West and Tony Blankley want us out of Afghanistan. Most Americans do too.
To me everything comes back to understanding what it is we are fighting. A massacre takes place in the West Bank of an Israeli family. Tiny children are knifed to death. What was the reaction of many liberal American and European critics of Tel Aviv and proponents of a Palestinian state? The family would not have been killed had they not been living in the West Bank, “occupied territory.” They caused their own death.
Such views are part of the tapestry of the “grievance theory” of the larger misunderstanding of terrorism. John Batchelor’s ABC radio show detailed the support of Gaddafi for terror attacks against American soldiers in Iraq, especially the recruitment of Libyan youth to do his dirty work. On top of the Berlin disco attack and the explosion of the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie, what more do American “grievance” pushers need to understand there are those who are at war with the United States because they see us as an obstacle to their totalitarian aims?
We fall into this fallacy repeatedly. With North Korea, we are convinced we can put enough carrots on the table to entice its leadership to give up its terrorist ways, especially its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. But as the Yonhap news agency details on March 17, 2011, Pyongyang may have developed nuclear warheads small enough to be placed on their ballistic missiles and aircraft. That this information came from the US Director of the US Defense Intelligence Agency in Senate testimony is not surprising. That it was all but ignored by the US drive-by media is not.
What is surprising is we have not yet determined that the regime in North Korea has to be removed from power. According to DIA’s Director General Ronald Burgess, Pyongyang may be developing an ICBM capable of reaching the US mainland. That we have now known for more than a decade, although it is very useful to be repeatedly reminded of that geo-strategic reality.
But as far back as 1998, we knew that North Korea could land an ICBM launched warhead on the middle of the United States if the third stage of its Tae Po Dong missile worked. Having failed twice in ballistic missile tests, we have apparently assumed that it will never work.
According to DIA’s testimony, Pyongyang is building “a sophisticated launch site on its western coast to test fire a ballistic missile that can reach the mainland US” says the ROK news agency. According to the highest ranking North Korean defector, the regime of Kim Jong Il wants to use its nuclear weapons to reunify the Korean peninsula under its communist rule. What more of a threat do we need?
Unfortunately, we have managed to adopt a-hybrid diplomacy with the DPRK which alternatively provides the despotic regime with food, fuel and promises of normal relations, while also attempting to use sanctions and financial restrictions to make the regime give up its nukes. None of this is commensurate with the threat.
So, too, with our new Libyan enterprise. According to Politico, “The result of Obama’s late-in-the-game decision is an ungainly hybrid of a military enterprise with no guarantee of success. The UN has the mandate to create an international coalition led by France and Great Britain, with pilots from nearby Mideast countries…but its most powerful partner, the US, will likely play a backseat role.” According to one administration source, “The use-of-force resolution is focused on protecting US civilians, not removing Gaddafi from power.”
We have faced this same quandary with respect to Iran for the past 40 years. Always there are those who are convinced some imagined grievance is at the heart of terror attacks against the US. Even 9/11 we were assured flowed inevitably from the presence of American military forces in “the land of the shrines.” In 2003, New York Times reporter, Stephen Kinzer, wrote “All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror” about the US supported 1953 coup against Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran.
So, too, does Washington Post reporter David Ignatius echo a similar narrative in his recent column claiming that Hezbollah wants nothing more than a political agreement with the United States. He insists the United States no longer has to see Hezbollah as a terrorist organization now that it has a firm place in Lebanese politics–(yes, established at the point of an assassin’s bullet along with their friendly regime associates in Damascus and Tehran). For evidence he points to the IRA, Northern Ireland and Britain.
The Heritage Foundation reminds us:
America’s Founders believed that peace through strength is preferable–militarily, financially, and morally–to allowing war to come through weakness. That is why, over two hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson advised George Washington that ‘the power of making war often prevents it.’
In providing for the common defense, the goal of the Founders was to build a military sufficiently powerful and capable that America’s enemies preferred not to challenge it. In his Farewell Address, Washington hoped the day would soon come when ‘belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel.’
They further remind us that at the time, North African Muslim pirates were busy preying on US commercial ships, as they were the British and the French. We paid tribute in the millions, bribes that required expenditures nearly equal to half the US government’s annual budget. Thomas Jefferson deployed the US Navy to North Africa to stop this nonsense. He even did so without explicit approval from Congress and even used private money to finance the adventure. We took the fight to Tripoli. After the fact, Congress awarded our soldiers medals. The Marine hymn is its legacy.
For 200 years, a strong US Navy patrolled the high seas, bringing commerce to more than $3 trillion annually just to and from America. To some, of course, this was just another example of the US “militarizing the oceans”, no doubt in the service of some narrow economic interest. Just as Kinzer saw only oil politics in the coup in Iran, so do America’s critics still see only nefarious motives in the use of American military power.
There are states now at war with the United States and they have been for some time–Iran, Syria, North Korea and Libya. Our constant search for grievances as the explanation of their murderous hostility only encourages the very terrorism we want so much to explain away. From Lockerbie over Scotland to the Marine barracks in Lebanon, from Tripoli at the dawn of the 19th century to the first decade of the 21st, America is facing a choice: do we understand correctly the evil forces arrayed against us, or do we continually seek the easier, gentler way?
Early in his Presidency, Ronald Reagan explained the very nature of the evil empire that was then the Soviet Union. He wanted the commissars in Moscow to understand that he, the US President, understood exactly who they were. And he wanted our friends and the American people to know that he, the US President, was under no illusion as to the nature of the adversary–the Soviets– we faced. Our enterprise in Libya, welcome and worrisome as it is, does not yet answer that very question.
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