A Fiftieth Anniversary--And An Object Lesson For Today

Cuba went all giddy a couple of days ago.  The reason was the Fiftieth Anniversary of the failed Bay of Pigs "invasion" of Cuba by an American trained and equipped motley brigade of refugees.  The initial plan for the operation came during the closing days of the Eisenhower administration.  The plan was predicated upon highly overly optimistic projections of weakness on the part of the Castro regime plucked from the imaginations of recently arriving political refugees.

The Eisenhower administration passed the plan along to the incoming Kennedy people.  The bunch surrounding JFK was comprised of steely-eyed cold war liberals eager to show how the job of containing and rolling back communism should and could be done.  Propelled by faith in their ideology, the New Frontiersmen backed the evermore ambitious plans of CIA for their proxy army.  A glittering assemblage of unjustified assumptions and fond hopes was assembled.  By the time it was necessary to make a final go/no-go decision, all hands with the exception of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had convinced themselves that the operation would succeed.  Even the handful of doubters took comfort in the belief that should the operation stumble, the US military would come to the rescue.

When push did come to shove as it must, the belief that the cavalry would back the play of the invaders was proven false.  For reasons good or bad President Kennedy refused to allow the US Navy, which was offshore with aircraft fueled and bombed up, to take part in the rapidly failing effort.  Our aircraft were limited to making demonstration passes safely offshore, and the Marines most assuredly did not land.

Within two days it was all over.  The invaders were all dead or captured.  Castro was more firmly in control than ever.  The US was humiliated.  And, a valuable lesson should have been learned--there is no such thing as a plausibly deniable military operation after the administration of the United States had declared that a given foreign leader was unacceptable to it.

Before embarking on his strangely bifurcate effort in Libya, President Obama would have been very well advised to revisit the misadventure in Cuba.  After all Mr Obama had made it clear that the policy goal of the US was the removal of Brother Leader Gaddafi (or choose the alternative spelling you prefer.)  Once these words had passed the president's lips, the whole world knew just what the US, the purported front porch dog of the Free World, wanted in Libya.  The real deal of the attendant UN Security Council resolution, for all its diplomatic pap (inserted so that neither Russia nor China would exercise the veto) about protecting civilians, was that the US in conjunction with at least two other Great Powers, France and the UK, sought the removal of Gaddifi.  The Colonel would go, peacefully if possible, violently if that was the only option.

Every halfway thoughtful observer knows perfectly well that the removal of an obnoxious regime is not difficult.  The US did the job in a matter of days in Afghanistan and mere weeks in Iraq.  The removal part of regime change is easy to accomplish.  The problems in both Afghanistan and Iraq came later--in the bootless attempt to create a modern Western style nation-state in Afghanistan and the very difficult task of seeing Iraq create of itself a reasonable simulacrum of a functioning nation-state with some aspects of democracy and rule  of law.

In Libya the same paradigm would have applied if the Obama administration had not opted to retreat behind the screen of proxies, in this case NATO.  When this choice was made, the path to a replay of the Bay of Pigs was charted.

Showing an abysmal ignorance of history--even very recent history, Mr Obama confused the removal part of regime change with the what-next? effort of seeing a new government created by a society unused to the freedom of creating its own polity.  He also failed to understand that there is no way the US can hide the bright light of its policy under the bushel of a proxy.

Had the US gone full bore into Libya, including the use of ground forces for combat against Gaddafi's loyalist units, Brother Leader would be gone already.  It is important to note that by removing the obnoxious leader the US would not have accrued an automatic responsibility for maintaining the good order within Libya.  Nor would it have taken the burden of turning Libya into a modern, pluralistic Western style democratic nation-state.  Both of these are misapprehensions.

The sole responsibility of the US would have been the execution of its declaratory policy--removing Gaddafi and by so doing protect civilians against the harm created by his loyalist forces.  The follow-on of creating a national polity from the tribal matrix of Libya would have been up to the Libyans with whatever assistance from other states or international organizations they might request.  The doctrine of R2P does not impose an unending task upon whatever state or states removes the threat to the civilians in need of protection.

Obama like Kennedy wanted to eat his cake while retaining it intact.  Both presidents wanted to abate a nuisance to American policy interests but had no desire to carry the long term freight of reconstituting the polity.  To this end both sought to use proxies.  In part Obama has seen the rebels in Libya as the equivalent of the exile Cuban "freedom fighters" with NATO playing the role which should have been undertaken by the US at the Bay of Pigs.

The Libyan insurgents are an even weaker reed than were the exiles at the Bay of Pigs.  This implies strongly that the Libyans would need even greater amounts of outside aid than did the Cubans of a half century ago.  An acceptance of this ground truth places an even greater onus on the US to use effective military force against Gaddafi and his loyalists.  Passing the buck to a divided and force impaired NATO set the stage for a stalemate in Libya and a loss of credibility for NATO.

Fifty years ago JFK made the worst decision possible.  If Castro was as American declaratory policy had maintained completely unacceptable to us, a threat to the peace and stability of the Western Hemisphere and a potential threat to CONUS, the right decision was to send in our forces in sufficient numbers to abate the nuisance quickly and decisively.  If, on the other hand, Castro was in fact a mere annoyance, a diplomatic conundrum, an embarrassment, the proper choice was to do nothing.  The worst option by far was the unsupportable attempt at covert invasion by proxy forces.

So it is in Libya.  If Gaddafi really is a challenge to national or strategic interests as Mr Obama's rhetoric holds, then the proper option is to go in fast and hard so as to remove the man and his forces.  If, to the contrary, Gaddafi is a threat only to his own people, then the US should have stayed out.  Or, if R2P is now to be a cornerstone of US policy, the correct choice is once again to move in openly, fast, and hard and then, after the removal of Gaddafi, back out and turn affairs over to the Libyans and whatever leaders they find in their midst giving only such aid as may be requested and justified.

From that list Mr Obama had a two in three chance of getting it right.  He didn't.  He chose the only bad option in the lot--the proxy effort to achieve American declaratory policy.  He sought to justify his blunder by what must either be spectacular ignorance of recent history or flat out tergiversation.  His use of Iraq, his "we have been down that road before" remark is a complete misrepresentation of what happened in Iraq.  The regime was changed in mere weeks and the consequent internal war was in large measure the foreseeable and preventable consequence of an ill-founded effort at nation-building which could have been avoided by the simple expedient of leaving the matter up to the Iraqis and providing only such aid as they requested specifically.

The same could have been accomplished in Libya.  All that was necessary was the assurance that the political goal was carefully and narrowly defined and that military force was crafted to achieve that goal.  Bereft of any implied responsibility for giving the Libyans a turn-key modern Western style state (which they don't want in any event) the task of directly turning declaratory policy into actual events would have been easy.

JFK is one of Obama's heroes.  It is too bad that the Nice Young Man From Chicago could not learn one simple lesson from Kennedy's second biggest blunder.

Administration Makes A Smart Move--At Last.

The imposition of new economic sanctions against the Iranian Ministry of Defense as well as the Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Aerospace Industries Organisation is a well-timed, intelligent, and major foreign policy move. In and of itself, the new sanction package shows the analysis of University of Michigan professor Juan Cole misses the point.

Professor Cole writes in today's Salon.com that the current administration's foreign policy is in chaos. See, http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/10/24/kurds/index.html?source=newsletter. The professor contends that US policy in the Mideast and Northwest Asia has become a morass of ad hoc gimmicks since the start of our Adventures in Regime Change.

The Geek takes a different perspective. The Geek maintains that six years ago with both the declaration of Global War On Terrorism and the invasions first of Afghanistan and then Iraq, US policy lacked both realistic purpose and achievable goals. Forced in recent months to accept the dictates of reality by events in the two regions, US policy has been changing from its initial formless mass into something that begins to approximate a purpose and goal.

The inchoate Global War On Terrorism is being replaced (at long last!) by a focus on achieving a measure of stability in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan while reducing the potential potentency and appeal of Islamism/Jihadism. There seems to have been a small, but critical, shift in the worldview within the current administration.

"What's that?" You ask.

While defensive efforts conducted by FBI, CIA ,and other organs focus on detecting and interdicting terrorist operations aimed at the US at home and US personnel or facilities overseas, offensive American operations have been more narrowly focused on the challenges of bringing stability to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan and defanging Islamist supporting states such as Iran and Syria.

That's not much. But it is a beginning. An important beginning.

Iran is and will continue to be a major troublemaker. The mullahocracy likes ever so much to play the role of, "Let's you and him fight!" The technical term for this sort of foreign policy gambit is proxy war.

The idea is to cause endless difficulty for your actual adversary at little or no risk to yourself. The old Soviet Union played the game. They played it long and almost well in southern and eastern Africa during the Seventies.

The US has played the proxy war game too. We played it long and reasonably well during the Reagan Administration in Afghanistan. Our game fell apart only when we handed operational responsibility over to the Pakistani regime of General al-Huq. The Paks had their own proxies in mind. (Can we say, "Taliban?")

The Iranians and Syrians have been playing proxy war for decades now. These national actors prefer to use stateless groups as their pawns. But, whether a lesser state or a non-state agent, proxy war has numerous benefits for the sponsor and very few risks.

Using the Revolutionary Guard Corps foreign operating division, the al-Quds Force, as agent, the mullahocracy has been able to provide support, training, intelligence, and other services to The Party of God in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, among others. Closer to home and more recent in time, the same Iranian agency has provided the same services to anti-US, anti-regime groups in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is true that the Iranian footprint has often been light on the ground, but one does not need to be an Australian aboriginal tracker to see it.

(To those ideologues who are in a state of denial about the Iranian proxy war efforts, the Geek would like to point out that the whole purpose of proxy war is to lessen risk through plausible deniability. Just because American covert and clandestine efforts are often as well concealed as a hippopotamus in a phone booth is no reason to think that all countries are equally as inept at keeping secrets.)

While maintaining proxy operations the mullahs in Tehran have been trying to cast the largest possible shadow on the world stage. By so doing they not only divert internal attention from internal problems, they also gain influence with both Islamist entities and potentially threatened states. It is important to remember that the mullahocracy has the goal of a global caliphate--a global Shiite caliphate.

The current torrent of over-the-edge rhetoric flowing from both Tehran and Washington over Iranian nuclear ambitions is a very good way of enlarging the Iranian shadow. It is also riskier than low level proxy war.

In large measure due to Russian protection (extended for reasons to be further laid forth in a future post) as well as Chinese (see previous parenthetical expression) the mullahs have been able to follow their game plan without real pain and with real (internal political) benefit. At the same time the mullahocracy has enjoyed a collateral benefit.

The Geek hears you muttering, "Don't keep me waiting."

As a spin-off of the Iranian intransigence over matters nuclear, the neocon ninnies of the current administration have been eager to introduce unnecessary complications into American foreign policy generally. Among these are two of particular noteworthiness.

The present US-Russian standoff over the basing of a limited anti-missile system in Eastern Europe is one.

The other is the Turkey-PKK affair. As mentioned in a post yesterday, the US has been smiling on one arm of the Kurdish insurgency--the one directed against Iran--while frowning mightily on the other--the one directed against Turkey. As a result, the US has not been able or, (to err on the side of probable accuracy) willing to effectively assist in the reduction of the PKK threat with the result that Ankara is ready, willing, and able to mount destabilizing incursions into Iraq.
The prime beneficiary of these collaterals is, unsurprisingly, Iran.

The Iranian shadow must be reduced. It must be reduced so that the US can afford to pull back from the unnecessary complications. It must be reduced so that modulated diplomatic discourse might prove effective in gaining the desired end of preventing Tehran from acquiring atomic weapons in either the near- or mid-term.

It is equally necessary that Tehran feel real, even exquisite, pain to slow or stop its proxy war operations. The UN imposed sanctions have hurt. But, not enough.

The new sanctions, if imposed on foreign companies or financial institutions or governments who do business with the targeted entities as well as in the US, will add pain, perhaps intolerable amounts.

Think of it as the foreign policy equivalent of what police call a "compliance hold." The goal is to coerce compliance with dictated behavior by imposing increasing amounts of physical discomfort.

These sanctions may not prove to be sufficiently intense to force a modification on the mullah's actions and policies. They may be sufficiently unpleasant in application to force a limited change for a limited time. They may not work at all.

Those are questions that can only be answered in the next few weeks and months. The sanctions are nonetheless a strong indication that the US has today what it did not have six years ago--an actual policy that is more realistic than not as well as one more likely to achieve positive results than not.

If nothing else, these long overdue new sanctions delay the date of our next Adventure in Regime Change. For that, the Geek is grateful. So should all of us be.