What the (Bleep) Just Happened? (39 page)

What a difference a few years and actually being president make.

For four decades, Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi was the Michael Jackson of the Middle East. Gadhafi often wore elaborate military uniforms, complete with decorative epaulets, favored an elite bodyguard unit made up strictly of women, sported dark shades even at night, slept in oxygenated tents, and had his plastic surgeon on speed dial. He moonwalked across the region, luxuriating in his own bizarre rituals and cult of weird personality.

Gadhafi had been a charter member of the original swingin’ Rat Pack of Terrorists, which included the Chairman of the Board Yasser Arafat (you know, if you can make it in Ramallah, you can make it anywhere). In the 1980s Libyan agents bombed the La Belle nightclub in West Berlin and blew up Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people, most of whom were Americans. Gadhafi supported various international terrorists, including the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), Carlos the Jackal and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and the Black September movement, which carried out the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, and who gave safe harbor to the convicted terrorist of Pan Am 103, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. But President Reagan’s punishing retaliatory attacks chastened Gadhafi, who never again attacked us.

Following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Gadhafi was so worried that he was going to be the next target of U.S.-led regime change that he reached out to Washington to resolve outstanding issues between his government and the United States. President George W. Bush’s team brokered a deal with Gadhafi in which he abandoned his advanced weapons programs, including his nascent nuclear program, and began providing the Bush and Obama administrations with critical intelligence about the Islamists and terrorists operating within Libya and in the region. Libya is overrun with Islamists who seek to destroy America and the West; on a per capita basis, more Libyans joined the jihad against the United States in Iraq than Islamists from any other nation. Ultimately, the State Department took Libya off the U.S. list of state sponsors of terror because Gadhafi had become “an increasingly valuable partner against terrorism.”

Gadhafi warmly engaged Bush secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and even displayed a crush on her. Gadhafi had called Obama his “Muslim brother.” Both administrations had embraced him, his regime, and his willingness to help root out Islamist enemies of America. We had even provided foreign aid to him and sent taxpayer-funded contributions to charities managed by some of Gadhafi’s sons. Libya is a major oil producer, but while Europe relies on Libyan oil, the United States does not. There were no vital American interests at stake in Libya, unlike in Iraq. But Gadhafi rightly considered himself a partner of the United States. We were at peace with his government. Imagine, then, his surprise when suddenly American bombs were falling on him.

Like Mubarak before him, Gadhafi must have thought, “What the @$%&! just happened?”

How did we go from an intelligence-sharing partnership with Gadhafi to prosecuting a “dumb” war against him in a matter of days? The Arab “Spring” had come to Libya, but not in the same magnitude that it had settled upon its neighboring countries. There were some limited demonstrations, but nothing like the mass protests that had occurred in Egypt. Gadhafi had mobilized some security forces, but there was no real need. And yet, the president who had derided Bush’s policy of preemptive war launched his
own
preemptive war with neither significant U.S. interests at stake nor real violence being committed by the regime in question.

The ideological framework for Obama’s “dumb” war came from one of his top foreign policy advisers, Samantha Power, whose concept of “responsibility to protect” was embraced by Obama and NATO as the rationale for military intervention in Libya. Obama spoke of the need to respond to humanitarian crisis: “When the entire international community almost unanimously says that there is a potential humanitarian crisis
about to take place
… that a leader has turned his military on his own people, we can’t simply stand by with empty words. We have to take some sort of action.” (Emphasis added.)

In other words, preemption. In 2006, Bush’s doctrine of preemption stated: “We do not rule out the use of force before attacks occur.... We cannot afford to stand idly by.... This is the principle and logic of pre-emption.” In 2010, Obama reworded it: “While the use of force is sometimes necessary, we will exhaust other options before war whenever we can … when force is necessary we will continue to do so in a way that reflects our values and strengthens our legitimacy.”

That last tortured phrase meant that Obama would do what Bush did and seek the blessing of the UN, NATO, the Arab League, or whatever other international institution before acting. And like Bush, Obama reserved the right to act alone if necessary. So: same policy, more gobbledygook to make it look like Obama was more “enlightened” than Bush.

“Responding to humanitarian crises” can come in many forms: economic, diplomatic, and so on. It doesn’t necessarily have to involve military action. But that’s the route Obama chose to take in Libya. Libya is a rough-and-tumble tribal society in which the removal of Gadhafi won’t stop the internal brutality. And furthermore, Obama chose
not
to intervene when tyrannies in Iran, Syria, China, Russia, and elsewhere slaughtered and repressed their people. Going into Libya was about accelerating a regime change there that would bring about “democracy,” which would, in turn, result in an Islamist government.

And so, without warning, Gadhafi, like Mubarak, went from being a valued partner of the United States to an enemy who had to be overthrown. Unlike Bush, who sought and received congressional authorization for the war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama went to war in Libya without getting that authorization. Perhaps “leading from behind” is just an excuse to avoid getting congressional support. Obama leaned only on the Arab League’s okay and a United Nations Security Council resolution that called for a no-fly zone to protect civilians. It did not call for war against Libya or regime change, and yet Obama saw to it that both were carried out. Despite assuring that there would be “no boots on the ground,” Obama sent in covert intelligence operatives to help the “rebels,” who, with our help, took up arms against Gadhafi.

Who were these Libyan “rebels”? They weren’t exactly a band of Mother Teresas, roaming Libya desperately trying to protect civilians. While there may have been some authentic democratic reformers among them, they included a large and varied mix of Islamists and violent jihadists. Among their commanders were al-Qaeda operatives, including at least one who had been held at Guantánamo Bay, and others who had recruited terrorists to fight Americans in Iraq. As the United States and NATO were targeting Gadhafi and his henchmen, our “rebels” were rounding up black Africans and lynching and beheading many of them. When they started advancing with the help of NATO firepower, they seized thousands of weapons such as shoulder-launched missiles and missile launchers and funneled many of them to their Islamist comrades in al-Qaeda and Hamas in Gaza.

In a March 2011 interview with NBC, Obama was asked about his “strategy.” He replied, “We may not be applying the same tools in each country, in every case.”

How about applying some of those tools to places that are actually strategically important to the United States? Say, Iran, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen? Obama was basically saying, “My only goal is to destroy American power and buck up our enemies. So: I may intervene. I may not. Some terror states I like; some I don’t. Some civilian protests I like; some I don’t. Some days, I’m for regime change; some days I’m not. Some places, I’ll stop genocide; some places I won’t. Some days, I eat Froot Loops; other days I eat Count Chocula.”

When asked if he was considering arming Libyan rebels—about whom we knew little beyond their ties to al-Qaeda or the Muslim Brotherhood—Obama said: “I’m not ruling it out. But I’m also not ruling it in.”

At the start of military operations against Libya, Obama told members of Congress that any U.S. military involvement would last “days not weeks.” As days stretched into weeks and weeks into months, administration lawyers began to issue warnings that Obama’s prosecution of the war was violating the constitutionally dubious 1973 War Powers Resolution, which limits the commander in chief to a ninety-day commitment to a military action before requiring him to come to Congress for further authorization. Obama turned to a fellow kook, State Department counsel Harold Koh, who conveniently argued that invading Libya, dropping bombs all over it, and trying to take out its leader didn’t amount to “hostilities,” so Obama the Nobel Peace Prize winner was free to pound Libya and try to kill Gadhafi for as long as he wanted. And so it came to pass that the man Reagan had called the “mad dog of the Middle East” met his end at the hands of a pack of mad dogs far more rabid than he.

Under Obama, Gadhafi didn’t get much due process. No Saddam Hussein–like trial by his countrymen. No stint at Guantánamo Bay, complete with ACLU lawyers and Geneva Convention protections. That kind of legalese was for loser rule-of-law guys like Bush.

Before Gadhafi’s body was cold, the leader of the Libyan Transitional National Council, Mustafa Abdul Jalil, proclaimed that sharia would be the “basic source” of Libyan law. Lenders were immediately banned from collecting interest on loans and multiple wives were instantly legal for men. Here again, Obama threw over a U.S. partner in favor of anti-American forces who pushed toward an Islamic state. To Obama, there were no foes of the United States, just friends waiting to be made. He would let every nation know, whether they wished America well or ill, that he would pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, and oppose any foe … to assure the survival of polygamy in Libya.

The Gadhafi dictatorship was hardly a basketful of puppies. But his unsavory regime had turned its back on supporting terror, was cooperating with the United States against Islamists, and was reaching out to the West economically and politically. For that help, he was overthrown by a U.S.-led military operation, dragged through the streets, and assassinated. Lesson to the Iranian ayatollahs: don’t give up your nukes and try to be friends with the U.S. or you guys could end up on a freezing cold slab of stainless steel in a random meat locker.

If Obama had a
victory
strategy, he certainly didn’t articulate one. Instead he singled out Gadhafi as ripe for overthrow, but only because the “world” was clamoring for it. He hid behind the Arab League and the UN to authorize the use of force in Libya. When Syria and Yemen blew up, he essentially justified not intervening in those places by saying, “Gosh, golly. I’d really love to help y’all, but the UN/NATO/Arab League/Congress/American people just won’t let me!”

Is there an Obama strategic doctrine, or is it an ad hoc mess? Is America’s foreign policy being done on the fly, or is it all part of a deliberate grand strategy to reduce our influence in the world and encourage the world’s dark forces to advance? The Libyan operation was sold as a mission on behalf of human rights of an aggrieved people. It ended with a U.S. partner murdered by a wild-eyed Islamist mob, the rise of al-Qaeda and other terrorist and militia groups, and an emerging violently anti-American Islamist regime. If that’s what Obama had intended all along, then his motives for the Libyan war were sinister. If it wasn’t what he intended, then his policy has been an abject failure, with U.S. interests far more threatened than they had been before.

The answer may be found in what was flying over Benghazi within days of Gadhafi’s death: the al-Qaeda flag.

For all of Obama’s Muslim “outreach,” for all of his attempts at “engagement” with our enemies and his bailing on suddenly inconvenient allies, for all of his talk about “remaking” relations with that part of the globe, he has laid an egg. A May 2011 Pew Research Center poll found that America’s favorability rating across the Arab world has
dropped
precipitously under Obama and so has his personal favorability rating to 10 percent or less. In Egypt, just 5 percent viewed the United States favorably and only 3 percent agreed with Obama’s policies. Similar bottom-of-the-barrel numbers were reported from Turkey to Pakistan. The results also showed that the United States was more popular in the Muslim world under President Bush than it is under President Obama.

Obama promised to change the world’s perceptions of us through a radical shift in policy and the force of his magical persona. Obama thought he’d just flash his megawatt smile, pass out apologies like Halloween candy, give a speech in Cairo, enlist NASA, and voilà! The Muslim world would “heart” us. After all, his middle name was Hussein. What wasn’t to love? A lot, apparently. Not only did the vast majority of Muslims around the world dislike Obama personally, but their disapproval of American foreign policy hit unprecedented levels. All of that bowing and scraping earned him gongs, not applause. And it decimated American prestige, power, and respect beyond anything previously imaginable.

The revolts that occurred across the Middle East gave us a providential opportunity to encourage real freedom in the region and reduce the threats of Islamist jihad. Instead, our strategically incomprehensible and morally vacuous policies have led much of the Middle East to exchange one form of fascism for another. Election victories simply embolden the Islamists to move faster and more aggressively to advance their agenda. As we’ve seen in Iran, Islamic theocracy breeds savage oppression, deep corruption, and terrorism. And yet, that’s where the bulk of the Middle East is heading, primarily because Obama’s version of a “freedom agenda” resembled more of an “Islamist free-for-all agenda.” If millions of people in the Middle East and North Africa end up consigned to the perpetual darkness of Islamist rule, it will be Obama who will go down in the history books as the man “who lost the Middle East.” On purpose.