CapitalistImperialistPig

Since I'm pretty sure Obama, or at least Hillary, must read this blog, some principles of intervention: 1)If you intervene in a civil war, pick a side. 2)Make sure that side wins. 3)Quickly. That is all.

It was pretty clear at this late date that denying Gaddafi the skies would not cut it. It seems that that lesson was well appreciated. From Karim Fahim's article in The New York Times : The attack seemed to have come out of clear skies onto a field of wildflowers. Littered across the landscape, some 30 miles south of Benghazi, the detritus of the allied airstrikes on Saturday and Sunday morning offered a panorama of destruction: tanks, charred and battered, their turrets blasted clean off, one with a body still caught in its remnants; a small Toyota truck with its roof torn away; a tank transporter still on fire. But it did not end there. Full-scale war from the air.

Andrew Sullivan was a big supporter of our war on Iraq. Libya, not so much. Under the headline Dumb Dumb Dumb Dumb Dumb he quotes (blogger) Talleyrand: Several European nations, the United States and a few token others have decided to intervene militarily in a civil war on the losing side, and just at the moment when these forces were on the verge of defeat. The timing, indeed, was bizarre.

As of tonight it's not clear if intervention will have any effect on Gaddafi's reconquest of Libya. It came very late in the game - very possibly too late. More might be known tomorrow. If the intervention fails, it will be a significant failure that will be easily laid at Obama's feet. His dithering not only increased the likelyhood of failure but probably also increased it's price - and not only for the Libyian people.

It's awfully late in the game, but now, it seems, we shall see . I'm still inclined to think that this was the better of the bad choices - but I shouldn't be surprised to be proven wrong. I think that there was a moment when a feather would have toppled Quaddafi, but now I fear that it will be much harder.

Andrew Sullivan notes that Obama cooly waited until Americans were out of Libya before harshly condemning Gaddafi. He compares this behavior favorably to that of some notorious blowhards and hip shooters. Leon Wieseltier is his poster boy for the latter.