Wolfowitz in Bleep's Clothing

by Jeff Huber

Paul “Iraq Debacle” Wolfowitz has joined the phalanx of Pentarchs who are calling for Young Mr. Obama to intervene in Libya.  In a March 11 Wall Street Journal regurgitation of the latest neocon talking points, Paulie Walnuts admonishes that, “One has to be morally blind not to be moved by the spectacle of brave Libyans standing up to Moammar Gadhafi's tanks and bombs and mercenaries.”

Paulie Wolfowitz wants
we should whack Gadhafi.

One has to be cognitively blind not to make a quick emend of that sentence to reflect on “the spectacle of brave Iraqis/Afghans/Pakistanis standing up to America’s tanks and bombs and mercenaries.”  

Dog-of-war Wolfowitz tells us that “There are three important U.S. actions that could speed up Gadhafi's demise and stop the killing in Libya: recognize the newly formed national council in Benghazi as the government of Libya, provide assistance to the new Libyan authorities, and support the imposition of a no-fly zone over Libya.”

There are three important things wrong with that sentence. 

First is Wolfie’s dazzlingly false main assumption that we have any sort of legal or moral mandate to speed up or in any other way facilitate Gadhafi’s demise.  Gadhafi hasn’t committed an act of war against us lately, and there’s a fairly good argument that says he never did commit one. 

The checkered history of our tit-for-tattersall game with Gadhafi probably begins with the events that let up to Operation El Dorado Canyon, our unilateral 1986 air strike on Libya.  Up to that time, Gadhafi had allegedly been involved in terrorism in Europe, but nowhere that might remotely be considered United States territory. We’d had, however, a number of chesty-fights with Gadhafi’s air and naval forces because he claimed that much of the Gulf of Sidra was Libyan territorial water and we said it wasn't.  We said his claims didn’t meet the rules in the UN treaty on such things, which was true.  He said we’d made the UN write the rules that way to screw him out of being able to claim the Gulf of Sidra as territorial water, which was also true.

Then he said we couldn’t fly our military planes over his territorial waters in the Gulf of Sidra without his permission, which was true if you considered the Gulf of Sidra to be his territorial water (which he did) and false if you considered the Gulf of Sidra to be international water, which we did.

Things boiled to a head in the 1989 Gulf of Sidra Incident, where we flew Navy fighter jets over what Gadhafi claimed was his territory and shot down two of his fighter jets that flew out to intercept our fighter jets.  The insider’s version of the Sidra Incident is that a bunch of kiss-up, true believer Navy JAG lawyers sat down and wrote up rules of engagement that defined modern fighter defensive tactics as hostile acts.  So when the Libyan fighters executed the defensive tactics the Navy fighters were cleared to whack them with long-range air-to-air missiles, which they proceeded to do.  As Navy fighter pilots like to say, if you’re not cheating, you’re not trying.  

Two weeks later a bomb exploded in a West Berlin disco and killed two American servicemen.  It killed and wounded a potful of non-Americans too, but they weren’t relevant to what followed.  U.S. intelligence claimed to have gotten its mitts on “cables” saying that Libyan agents in East Berlin were involved in the bombing.  There’s no way of knowing if any of the intelligence officials involved in this intelligence were also involved in the intelligence that Wolfowitz and his pals used to justify the invasion of Iraq.  But we should have learned from our Mesopotamia Mistake that we should never believe what prevaricators like Wolfowitz tell us our intelligence says.

I guess back in the Reagan era they hadn’t yet figure out that intelligence types tended to tell them what they wanted to hear, so The Great Communicator ordered the Navy and Air Force to bomb the bejesus out of Gadhafi’s house.  But he wasn’t there, so we probably killed and injured more innocent people that he’d killed or injured by bombing that German disco, assuming he’d actually had anything to do with that.  Shortly after El Dorado, Gadhafi squashed an internal revolt, in case you were wondering if he has any credentials in that department.  

Project for the New American Century

Time passed.  On August 14, 2008 Young Mr. Bush restored full diplomatic relations with Libya, an act that, by the way, officially recognized Gadhafi as the lawful political leader of his country.  So when Wolf Bob urges us to “recognize” the new “authorities” as the “government of Libya,” he’s asking us to throw out a government that his boss legitimized and back a pack of yahooligans that he and his fellow war hucksters don’t want you to know a whole lot about yet.  And the last thing the New American Centurions want you think about is that a tame Gadhafi in control of Libya is a 100 percent dead cert to be better for U.S. and global security than having a ragtag ring of radical religious revolutionaries take charge. 

John Kerry and Wolfie
agree on no-fly zone.

And God help America, it looks like Wolf-o-wiz even has chowder head John Kerry believing that if we put a no-fly zone over Libya, that won’t be like making a real military commitment or anything.  Who among us doesn’t love a no-fly zone, eh?  Oh, wait, maybe Kerry is spinning some political stratagem that will let him say he voted for the no-fly zone before he voted against it.  

Setting up a no-fly zone over the sovereign territory of a nation is every bit as much an act of war as a bombing campaign (which we’ll have to have anyway to knock out Libya’s air defenses) or an armed invasion would be.  A no-fly zone could not, by any measure acceptable to even marginally sane people, be even remotely justified as an act of national self-defense.  And make no mistake; once we spend a penny on setting up no-fly zone, we’re in for a pound of Pottery Barn.  A no-fly zone won’t topple Gadhafi’s regime any more than two we ran for more than a decade over Iraq, toppled Saddam Hussein.  Having committed military power to regime change, we’ll keep piling it on until Barack Obama too can declare “mission accomplished” on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln.  Except, of course, the mission will never be accomplished, and we’ll have stepped brow-ridge deep into our third and, most likely, final quagmire.

No, fellow citizens, listening to the likes of Paul Wolfowitz and recognizing and backing the Libyan rebels would be an act of national suicide, but guess what.  Neocon hag Hillary Clinton is over in Paris right now getting ready to do just that. 

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.