There Is No Plan

The Arab Spring is giving way to a rather uncertain winter. In Egypt, the Brotherhood is bubbling, the Army is busy containing, and the people are getting restless for the change promised by the departure and trial of Mubarak. In next door Libya, the echo of the bullet that liberated the rebels from the world’s most bizarre pariah of a dictator will soon give way to reality. A fractious and bloody civil war is almost certain to ensue in this colonial afterthought of a country, that’s never known anything but a lunatic totalitarianism.

In the vacuum of Gaddafi’s death the tribal, factional power-grab will be a nasty affair, made worse by the release of a powerful Islamist faction, the rise of tribal and city militias, a split between East and west, deep distrust of collaborators, a thirst for revenge, a big pot of black gold, and a strategic position just to the south of very vulnerable Southern Europe. NATO is gone in a few days, and the Libyans will be left to their own devices, their only support being the stirring and useless rhetoric of democratic idealism. They badly need a national army but won’t get one for decades. Without a cohesive national force to rely on, securing Western oilfields will be tough sledding and the Islamists will take full advantage of that weakness to impoverish and destabilize Libya, so Allah can pick up the pieces and give succor to a disheveled and desperate population. Read the rest of this entry »

Jubilation Now. But What Happens in Ten Years?

The liberation of Libya from Gaddafi’s “Green Book” insanity is the beginning of at least a ray of hope that Arabs could begin to catch up with the rest of the developed and developing world. Saudi Arabia is tougher nut to crack, of course, but the last thing that Riyadh wants is to see Libya’s transformation be successful. They’re hoping against hope that tribalism, factionalism, and incompetence deal a blow to its hopes of transformation.

Libya’s proximity to Europe and its huge oil wealth at least give it the chance of bucking the trend so far apparent in the “Arab Spring” that it’s been a rather drab, superficial affair, in which one set of despots has merely given way to another, in uniform, usually.

But behind all the flag waving, behind the obvious success of the US and its Allies in maneuvering Gaddafi out of power with a frankly excellent display of surgical air power, and superb work giving the rebels a semblance of command and control is a horrible specter.

Time.

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About 200km east of the Egypt-Libya border begins the Qattara Depression, a vast low-lying stretch of desert banked by steep cliffs to the North. It’s essentially an impassable, virtually uninhabited world of soft, sinking sand, brittle salt-lakes, and sucking swamps. During WW2 it was regarded as a no-mans land through which any heavy vehicle would disappear into the abyss. Essentially once you were in you’d be lucky to get out.

It’s a useful metaphor for NATO’s involvement in Libya. Four months after our glorious entry in that nasty little desert dogfight, it’s starting to look like we wandered into a military and diplomatic equivalent of the Qattara Depression. By now, it’s beginning to become painfully clear that unless the “Rebels” get real lucky, we’re looking at a massive stalemate. Reports of successful bombing runs by NATO jets have reduced to a trickle. Gaddafi has almost completely adapted to not having air-superiority. Indeed his shift to non-uniformed forces operating out of pick-ups and covered Katusha trucks pretty much leaves NATO air support blind to who is and who isn’t a bad guy. NATO frequently get it wrong and their propaganda war takes a big hit every time. Read the rest of this entry »

A message from your friends at NATO HQ - This Libyan tank did not have its turret blown off during

There’s a nice news nugget rolling around the web right now to the effect that the President “overruled” two White House Constitutional wonks on what constitutes hostilities involving the United States that require the approval of Congress. The case in question was, of course, Libya, and the specifics were whether the turning of Qaddafi’s compound in Tripoli into a parking lot constituted ‘hostilities’.

From Qaddafi’s point of view, there’s no doubt that having his outhouses flattened and army tanks turned into burning hulks clearly constitutes ‘hostilities’. But war these days can be fought from a distance. It doesn’t have to be a two-way street anymore. Apart from the accidental loss of an F-15 during the early stages of the air strikes, we have suffered no battle casualties, and nor, as far as we know, have our allies. We have no boots on the ground, and will not be committing combat troops, which means we’re relying on air-power alone to sink the Libyan dictator. All that makes Obama’s and risible ‘constitutional’ argument somewhat defensible.
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It's the most famous house in Pakistan. It could have been just another house for sale in Abbottabad.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that making the killing of the Jihadist Porn King public was a big mistake. Thereisnoplan has been saying this since the attack, generating much mirth amongst friends and associates. But I stand by the notion. Obama screwed up.

If you remember, on the big night back in May, Obama made an unscheduled late night White House appearance to give us all the good news and earn a nice little approval bump in the process. Great theater. Great Politics. Sure, that poll bump has gone, but at least now nobody can accuse the President of not being decisive. He rolled the dice on the killing of UBL and won.

Unfortunately, basking in the glow of the biggest targeted assassination in history has one major strategic downside; as a result, the wheels are definitely coming off the crucial relationship with Pakistan. It needn’t have been so. Read the rest of this entry »

We likes our chances.

It’s a sure bet that Colonel Gaddafi or Qaddafi or however he spells his name isn’t the envious type. He’s too busy right now lobbing shells onto his own people for that. But if he were a jealous kind of guy, you can bet your bootstraps that he’d be full of schadenfreude for President Assad of Syria.

I mean, see it from the Colonel’s rather warped POV. There he was successfully compromising and cajoling the West into a rapprochement (including a deal with the US and handshake with Tony Blair) when suddenly Tunisia goes up in smoke, Egypt follows, and then the restive tribes around Benghazi decide to go all freedom fighter on his ass. So he does what any self-respecting dictator would do. It says it right there in the manual. Page 2. If there’s any organized dissent of any kind, crush it with obvious and public brutality. All he did was follow the book to the letter and suddenly the Brits and Frogs are down on him with everything they’ve got (which granted isn’t that much). With President Obama as a cheerleader and even the Russkis and Chinese sort of on board, everyone wants the Colonel gone, and to prove it they bomb the crap out of his compound nightly, for humanitarian purposes, of course.

One can only guess what’s going through old Muammar’s mind as he lounges about in his bunker with his Amazonian bodyguards, the soft pounding of NATO missiles thunking into his compound outhouses a hundred feet above his head.  But I’m guessing that the one word that is never uttered within earshot of the old man is “Assad”.  The very word probably brings Muammar out in hives. After all, Assad’s pretty much doing the same stuff in Syria as Gaddafi (insert your own spelling as required) is doing in Libya, and nobody is doing anything to stop the Syrian dude. Sure, the West does an awful lot of talking and whining and trots out ye olde sanctions (as if these guys didn’t prepare for that possibility), but when it comes to, well, action, they’re doing bupkis to stop Assad’s assault on his own towns and cities. Read the rest of this entry »

Lincoln, eat your heart out.

Among Thespians quoting Macbeth is seen as tempting the fates, but I hope they hold off from bringing me bad luck, because there really is no better way of describing the quintessential Obama than to borrow from the Bard.

Obama clearly loves the idea of being an orator. He stands at the podium, poised, easy, modulated, with a careful cadence to match his apparently oracular wisdom. There really is nobody around that’s better than Barack at looking the part. But it’s a con job. He seems so good at soaring rhetoric, he fools most of us that he is actually that good.

He isn’t.

His speeches are grab bags of ideas guaranteed to address every angle of every situation, the pros the cons, the acceptable, and even, flirtingly, the unacceptable. They please everyone and no-one, are both bold and conservative. And the result is that when the speeches are all added up, nobody really knows what the man has said, and thus begins the – to quote one pundit’s apt response to the recent Middle East speech – talmudic parsing of every word.

In the current round of tea-leaf sorting that’s going on over Obama’s State Department speech, many people are under the mistaken impression that he signalled a sea-change in US Middle Eastern policy, drawing together the strands of US policy up until now haphazardly expressed in the so-called “Arab Spring”.  It’s not true. Nothing has changed about US policy. It’s still the same as it was in Condi Rice’s State Department, an unseemly, and ill-coordinated compote of neo-conservative wishful thinking on the one hand, with Bismarckian realpolitik on the other. And with these two being essentially exclusive in concept, and message, we’re in the same old hot mess we’ve been in for a decade. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a whirlwind in the Middle East since the turn of the year.  Dictators toppled, others wobbled, others definitely off their appetites. There’s been a profound ‘decolonization’ of the Arab World, to the point where we can hardly talk of an “Arab World” at all. The fragmentation of the historical legacy of Western control of these disparate collections of people, most Muslim, many not is in full flow. There are and will be many changes, and the history of profound stagnation might alter for better and perhaps for worse.

Among the many truths that is emerging is this, Palestinians can no longer depend on the same friends they once had. In many respects, in Syria, Jordan, the Emirates, and in Saudi Arabia, a new-found urgency to remedy the injustices of their own populations means that the Palestinian cause isn’t quite so useful as a means of social control anymore. The Egyptian transitional government’s brokering of ‘peace’ between Fatah and Hamas, is an apparent exception, but even that is more about jockeying for domestic points with a restive Egyptian population.

Fatah and Hamas realize that without attempting to unify they can never hope to make any headway against an economically and militarily strong Israeli state that has been bolstered by the chaos outside their borders. This at a time when Fatah has made it clear it’s focused on a unilateral declaration of a Palestinian sovereign state. Ramallah knows that the world will not look kindly on the creation of that state unless the orphan status of Gaza is taken into account. Is Gaza to be a part of it or not? And if not, what will its status be. Therefore, in order to declare that state, Gaza must be part of it. Read the rest of this entry »

I am looking good.

Having essentially capitulated to the GOP / Corporate agenda on health care, financial reform and the nation’s debt “crisis”, Obama is now ‘rising above’ the fray with a savvy opening salvo in the 2012 campaign. It was a good ‘un too. Assassinating Bin Laden has bumped him up a dozen approval points in 48 hours, and put any GOP contenders on the defensive.  They can’t accuse him of being a wuss anymore.

Remove your weakness. That is what good politics is all about.

If only Obama had used more (now demonstrably popular) muscularity to do something useful when he had control of both Houses of Congress, like insist on a public option, cripple the Wall Street succubus when it was down, or raise taxes on the wealthy when he had the chance. Because that would have been ‘change’.  Sadly, instead he prefered to do things the old fashioned, unreconstructed, neo-conservative way, with a big, fat, meaningless statement that makes him look like the tough guy that everyone thinks he isn’t. Putting a bullet in the bad guy’s head is nothing if it’s not Bushlike business as usual.  Wrapping himself in the flag with a completely gratuitous visit to Ground Zero is pure Bush. It’s “Mission Accomplished” all over again, with the slight, but all important difference, that the mission – a far simpler mission – actually was accomplished.

Karl Rove must be proud. This comes right from his playbook.

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He may be crazy but he's not stupid.

Libya, a nation in name only, is in the early stages of a tribally driven and brutal civil war.  But for all the comparisons between Colonel Gaddafi and the other ranter du jour, Charlie Sheen, there is very little that’s deranged about the Colonel. Indeed, he’s probably been prepared for the eventuality that Benghazi would fall for longer than we imagine.

Gaddafi kept the army small and disorganized for precisely the reason we see now. The rebels are too poorly trained and lack the cohesion to beat Gaddafi’s family and tribal led elite units and African mercenaries in a head-on clash. They’re small but far better trained and equipped than the rebels will ever be. Gaddafi’s men also have their backs to the wall. If Tripoli falls, they are clearly dead. Which is why he’s counterattacking to head off the possibility that the urban mob in the capital will turn on him and end the game through the back door. Read the rest of this entry »