It’s still too soon to know how things will turn out down the road in Libya, but it’s never too early, in pundit-time, to start drawing conclusions.
I was opposed to an American role in the Libyan war. It seemed like we’d been there too often before, that we’ve constantly been bogged down in endless wars that we didn’t know how to, well, end.
That’s the lesson of Afghanistan, after all — that once you’re in, you can’t figure how to get out. Actually, it was worse than that. We spent many years fighting in Afghanistan while barely remembering that our troops were even there.
These issues are rarely easy. As John Kerry famously said of Vietnam, how do you ask someone to be the last man to die for a mistake? But you just as often hear the argument that we must ensure that our men and women didn’t die in vain. The words “honorable” gets thrown around a lot, but it often just stands for “what do we do now?”
The lesson of Libya, I think, is that Libya is not Iraq and Iraq was not Bosnia and Bosnia was not Vietnam. And on and on.
We’ve always known that, but it is easy to get confused. It seems that Barack Obama understood that much. Or maybe he just got lucky. In any case, the Libyan war has worked, so far, just the way he hoped it would — which is just the opposite of how most recent wars have worked.
The American presence was small, or small enough to ensure this didn’t look like Americans fighting against an Islamic nation. This coalition actually was a coalition. Old Europe played a leading role, which is what Obama promised.
No American boots were on the ground — or at least none you could see. No Americans have died. As I write this, the rebels have Khadafy loyalists on the run. And the Arab spring has fully become the Arab summer, and the momentum from dictatorship toward freedom has not stalled.
But even with the photo of the rebel soldier lying on Khadafy’s golden mermaid couch (yes, really), that doesn’t mean there’s a perfect ending in store, because the ending is a long way off. But a good midpoint is not a bad thing.
Where Obama was luckiest was in getting away with ignoring Congress. We were too busy with the fake debt-crisis crisis to worry about Obama’s refusal to get a Libyan war resolution. Obama should have gone to Congress, even if this Congress would have inevitably played political games with any resolution.
But when Obama said he didn’t need a resolution because the “hostilities” in Libya weren’t really “hostilities,” he moved out of Nobel territory and into Orwell’s.
There were many reasons to oppose going to Libya. The economy obviously is what needed our full attention. And we seem too prone, in the post-Vietnam-lesson world, to forget how wars often go wrong.
If we had known that we’d be in Afghanistan 10 years after we got there, we’d have simply routed the Taliban, captured Osama bin Laden and gotten out of town. We’d have never considered going to Iraq, even if Dick Cheney assured us we’d be greeted as liberators.
Cheney has a book out, and the headline from it is that he wanted to bomb Syria even as we were fighting in Iraq. He says the book will make heads “explode,” showing he still believes in shock and awe.
Victor Davis Hanson, the conservative military historian, warned against going to Libya. He wrote:
“Our decision, I’m afraid, does not mean that rebels will soon surge into Tripoli to proclaim a new democratic republic with ample gratitude to the Western planes above them. I hope I am terribly mistaken.”
I’m a liberal — and not a military historian — but I thought much the same thing.
What’s funny today is to watch the Republican presidential candidates try their hardest not to give Obama any credit. That’s politics. But, more to the point, it’s the politics of our time.
Everyone had to be rooting for the rebels as they rode into Tripoli. But that doesn’t mean it brought us any closer together. We seem to choose which wars we like according to which president is in charge.
My biggest complaint about Obama is his surprising inability to present an overarching theme for his presidency. He should be able to link government’s role in health care reform and Wall Street reform and a middle-class jobs push in a way that makes sense.
But in this case, it was Obama’s ability not to link Libya with, say, Syria that was critical.
And so, Obama has won what looks to be a major victory. Let’s just hope the lesson from Libya does not become that one victory inevitably leads to another.
E-mail Mike Littwin at mlittwin@.
