Out of Moammar’s tyrannical frying pan and soon into Muhammed’s totalitarian Islamic fire.
Our adventures in Libya are another foreign policy disaster for Obama. Many are cheering the death of Gadhafi and hailing his death as a foreign policy success. But if you dig deeper and look at the Middle East as a whole, anyone can see that it is in reality a disaster of great magnitude.
Our adventures in Libya cost the taxpayer $1.1 billion. We ended up having to do most of the intelligence gathering missions as our NATO allies lack the technical expertise for modern warfare. We have the drones, the GPS packages for smart bombs and the mid-air refueling capacity. The U.S. supplied all that! No NATO campaign is possible without the U.S. And in the end Libya required “boots on the ground” to win — granted those were Libyan boots but they would still be sitting in Benghazi without lots of foreign assistance, supplies, money and training. The Libyan military was hardly up to the standards of Quds Force or Syria’s elite army.
In the end Gadhafi’s death will hurt our foreign policy — something Obama and Clinton do not understand. In 2006 after the capture of Saddam Hussein, Gadhafi an-nounced that Libya would surrender its weapons of mass destruction and submit to international inspections. He was hailed and welcomed back to the community of nations. He was received in Britain by Tony Blair and in the U.S. by Obama.
Since February, a series of uprising known as the Arab Spring broke out in the Middle East. Gadhafi moves to crush a handful of Islamist rebels in Benghazi. France and Britain, who buy oil from Libya, rushed to call for Intervention under a fig leaf supplied by the U.N. It was not in our national security interest but Obama let the U.S. get sucked into a war which he said on March 18 would last “days not weeks.” It lasted eight months and it turned out to be a lot harder than anyone thought.
But the real importance is the lessons other leaders have learned from U.S. Libyan War. The main lesson is: Never give up your WMD or the U.S. will bomb you and kill you. So anyone who thinks that Iran or North Korea will give up WMD is truly naïve. Those countries saw what happened when one leader gave up his WMD and they will not let it happen to them. Our negotiations over WMD with Iran and North Korea or Pakistan are DOA — dead on arrival.
Also, since NATO exceeded the terms of the U.N. mandate, Russia and China will be exercising their veto in the Security Council to ensure NATO never against gets U.N. authority to carry out regime change under the fig leaf of “responsibility to protect.”
Our Arab allies watched us throw our ally of 35 years, Hosni Mubarak, “under the bus.” What did we get for not supporting Mubarak or at least granting him asylum in the U.S.? We got Iranian warships sailing through Suez and into the Mediterranean — something never allowed by Mubarak. The barrier on Gaza was ripped down in support of Hamas. It is looking more and more as if we will either get a military dictatorship or an Islamist government in Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group, looks set to gain power in those countries where our allies have been booted out.
They will not be friendly to the U.S.
What is happening is an unparalleled set of diplomatic failures in the Middle East under Obama which will hurt this country for decades to come.
Dr. Judith Weller
