If
the Western air strike campaign continues to fail in stopping Qaddafi's
forward march, President Obama, as well as European leaders, will be
forced to choose between two similarly unattractive options. Either
escalate Western involvement in the civil war, as many are urging him to
do, and risk entangling the U.S., and possibly American lives, in a
conflict with no clear outcome or end-point. Or decline to escalate,
allowing Qaddafi to continue toward a victory, and toward the "house to
house" slaughter he so openly promised, in which the U.S. would appear
complicit. Obama now owns this war, whether he wants to or not, and that
means owning its outcome. On the one hand, a worst-case that could look
a great like Afghanistan; on the other, Rwanda.
The calls for
Obama to escalate in Libya started coming even before Qaddafi regained
the momentum. Leading members of the Senate are calling for the U.S. to begin arming rebels,
despite that very same policy having helped foment decades of brutal
violence in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton has been careful to leave that option open, telling
the London-based international conference on Libya, "There could be
legitimate transfer of arms if a country were to choose to do that."
Writing in the Baltimore Sun, U.S. Naval Academy professor Deane-Peter
Baker makes the case for the U.S. to fund mercenaries
from "private companies" to fight alongside the rebels. New York Times
columnist Thomas Friedman today became the first major U.S. figure to call for,
as he put it, "boots on the ground -- either as military help for the
rebels to oust Qaddafi as we want, or as post-Qaddafi peacekeepers and
referees between tribes and factions to help with any transition to
democracy."
There's a risk of committing ground troops even
without intending to. In 1950, President Truman established the Military
Assistance Advisory Group to oversee the money and arms he was
funneling into the conflict in Vietnam. But what began as a contingent of military
advisers gradually but inexorably became something much more. The
advisers needed guards, of course, and as the number of advisers grew so
did the number of guards. Eventually, North Vietnamese guerrillas began
targeting the advisers, and the contingent of U.S. advisers and guards
began to look a lot more like a military. By August 1964, when the Gulf
of Tonkin incident provoked the U.S. to commit to a full-on ground war
against North Vietnam, it was only an escalation of a conflict that had
already been ongoing for years.
Obama, wary of escalating a
U.S.-Libya conflict that could risk becoming our third war, and possibly
a very costly and prolonged war, could very well decide that air
strikes, even if they are not enough to guide the rebels to victory, are
the limit of U.S. involvement. This path has its own risks. After
taking such a public stand against Qaddafi, placing the U.S. firmly on
the side of the rebels, any defeat will not only cement Qaddafi's rule
but could deeply mar an American image that is already abysmally low in
the Middle East and throughout much of the world. Public criticism at
home, the year before he will seek reelection, could be the least of
Obama's problems. After his crucial, if delayed, support for Egyptian
protesters against President Hosni Mubarak positioned the U.S. as a
force for Middle Eastern democracy and popular will, after years of U.S.
support for the much-loathed status quo, Obama has gained a bit of
credibility in a region where his country badly needs it. If Qaddafi's
forces roll into Benghazi and begin massacring civilians, as they have
done in the past and as Qaddafi and his son Saif have both pledged to do
in the future, and if images of that slaughter inevitably make it onto
Al Jazeera and CNN and the BBC, then many outraged viewers in the Arab
world and beyond will ask, whether fairly or unfairly, why the U.S. was
willing to topple Saddam Hussein but not to stop Qaddafi.