They're losing because the No Fly Zone was built on an illusion. The Libyan air force was never a major factor in anything. In the 1980's, it lost to African fighters in Toyotas brandishing Stinger missiles. And the entire Libyan army is mostly useless too. Arabs make terrible soldiers, but good skirmishers. The entire history of the Arab-Israeli wars should amply testify to that. An Arab country with a thousand tanks and jets is no threat to anyone. But a thousand fighters can cause serious havoc. Even win a war.
This makes no sense to First Worlders who have grown on images of massive armies clashing on the battlefield. But this is not the modern world. The Libyan civil war is primitive even by Arab standards. It's a typical African civil war, complete with pickup trucks and swords. A battle is won when a dozen men die and the other side runs away.
Once the Libyan army stopped pretending it was a modern military force, and whoever is in the field began ignoring whatever crazy orders were being issued by Gaddafi and his loyalists, and just started fighting this the old fashioned way-- the tide began to turn. A modern army is a complex instrument. If you don't use it properly, then it's worse than useless. But turn a couple of thousand fighters loose with machine guns and some artillery, and manpower becomes the crucial factor. And this time the African fighters are on Gaddafi's side, while the rebels are Arabs from different factions who don't trust each other.
This is no longer a war between an army and guerrillas, but between militias, some of whom wear uniforms, most of whom don't.
Gaddafi's men are handing out AK-47's to anyone willing to fight the rebels. We went in to protect civilians, but how do we do that when the civilians are massacring other civilians. Gaddafi is a butcher,
the Arab rebels are violent racists. This is not a conflict between democracy and tyranny, but between tribes, clans and ethnicities. It is exactly the type of war we should have avoided like the plague because there is no up side to it. There is no right and wrong, just an explosion of tensions reined in by a tyrant, as every faction scrambles for power.
This is the dumb war we stumbled into with our new administration's smart power. We're tossing cruise missiles into a war being fought with pickup trucks. And we don't even quite know why we're here. Our intervention will drag out the conflict, perhaps indefinitely if we choose it. NATO forces may be enlisted to guard a few rebel strongholds, dividing Libya between the rebels and Gaddafi. And with Al Qaeda fighters pouring in to take advantage of our air strikes, that will make for a pretty picture.
Our unclear mission objectives mean that we've become a peacekeeping force with no goal or exit strategy. The
Obama Administration is now warning Libyan rebels that if they kill civilians we will bomb them too. So not only are we at war with Gaddafi, we may now also be obligated to fight the rebels too. And how do we tell civilians from soldiers anyway. Once a weapon is picked up as loot, one body looks the same as any other. We could assume that all men are fighting men, but we went into Kosovo, because we treated Serbian executions of Muslim fighters as atrocities. Even though they were all men. If we apply the same rules to Libya, we'll have to start bombing everyone. Including ourselves.
This is what happens when you start a war without thinking it through.
Liberals have an ideological approach to war, as to all things. They are not concerned with whether a war can be won-- only whether it should be won. Either a war is right or it's not. If the war is not right, then it's also unwinnable. And if a war is right, then it is also winnable. Reality must comply with their ideology. That's how we came to have a 15 trillion dollar deficit to aid a 'recovery' in which families are struggling to put food on the table. And a democratic revolution in which the Islamists are set to take over. Reality meets ideology-- and their ideology crumbles every time.
From the 1860's, Democrats have been a party ideologically averse to war, and yet the party most likely to get into a war without really knowing what they're doing. JFK and LBJ got into Vietnam with tens of thousands of advisers and before they knew it there was a war on. The enthusiastic college students who came out for JFK, did their best to denounce Nixon for the war, but it was their man who had done it. The Vietnam War was a disaster for the simple reason that we lacked clear goals and tactics from the start. It was not a war we chose, but a war we stumbled into.
After World War II, liberal intellectuals fancied a new order in which military force would be used to enforce international law. Instead of wars, there would be police actions. And police actions are vague things. Euphemisms for war without its clarity. We know how to fight and win wars by applying force to achieve the destruction of enemy forces. But what is a police action. What are its goals? Implicitly it is to keep the peace. Not to win, but to stand as the Union Nation's towering beat cop on the block, waving our armed forces around like a billy club.
This is why we lost in Iraq and Afghanistan, because we defined the objective not as the defeat of the Axis of Evil, but as rebuilding the target countries into havens of peace and democracy. The vaguer the objectives, the harder it is to accomplish them.
Obama treated Libya like an adventure, announcing a war from sunny Brazil, and ignoring congress and the public, until they forcefully made their objections clear. The war turned goalless, confused and contradictory-- with military leaders saying one thing and political leaders saying another. The coalition is confused and at odds with each other, packed full of frightened European and Arab leaders who are afraid that the world is changing, but have no idea what to do about it. Now Obama is running away from the war that he started. And Mr. Obama's Libyan Adventure is what happens when liberal leaders start wars with no idea how to see them through.
