"White House adviser: Regime change would mean taking `ownership’ of post-Gaddafi Libya"

[Clio the Leo]

White House adviser: Regime change would mean taking `ownership’ of post-Gaddafi Libya
By Greg Sargent

One of the most interesting aspects of Obama’s speech last night was his defense of the mission’s lack of a regime change goal. “We went down that road in Iraq,” he said. “Regime change there took eight years, thousands of American and Iraqi lives, and nearly a trillion dollars. That is not something we can afford to repeat in Libya.”

Asked to elaborate on the comparison on the blogger call, and to square this with Obama’s stated goal of seeing Gaddafi gone, White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes reiterated that the President would use diplomatic and financial pressure to push Gaddafi out, but stood by the nuance: “It’s a very important distinction that he drew last night.”

“We needed to be very clear that the military part of our policy in Libya is restricted to civilian protection,” he continued. “Therefore, we narrowly defined the military definition to establishing a no-fly zone and cutting off his forces so they couldn’t enter into population centers.”

“If you allow your military mission to creep into encompassing regime change, there would be a number of problems with that,” Rhodes continued, noting that there’s no “international mandate” for regime change and that the “costs associated with regime change are far greater,” involving the introduction of ground forces or the sort of air campaign that could lead to more civilian casualties.

Rhodes reiterated that Iraq was a cautionary tale. “We know from Iraq that when you militarily undertake regime change you have a far greater ownership over what comes next,” he said, adding that regime change would mean “being responsible for essentially replacing the government that you removed,” and would “decrease legitimacy and decrease international support for our actions.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/white-house-adviser-regime-change-would-mean-taking-ownership-of-post-gaddafi-libya/2011/03/03/AFrtSGwB_blog.html

Libyan rebels posing for a photograph hold up the old national flag as they stand on a destroyed tank formerly belonging to Libyan forces loyal to leader Moamer Kadhafi in the strategic oil town of Ajdabiya east of Tripoli, on March 29, 2011, as international powers gathered in London to map out a post-Kadhafi future for Libya.

[xchrom]

1. Oh horse shit. Means what ever the 'victor' says. Nt

[jefferson_dem]

2. Precisely.

And the "victors" should be those brave Libyans in the image in the OP, rather than any extra-national puppetmaster.

[WheelWalker]

3. 'Chickenshit' is intuitive; and, there's at least one learned treatise "On Bullshit".

But this 'horseshit' - is that merely well-formed bullshit? What does 'horseshit' imply, if anything, beyond bullshit?

[PurityOfEssence]

4. That is already writ large on the face of history and nobody can change it

HE did this. Regardless of French, English, Italian or other maneuvering and pant-leg tugging, HE did it. He has full ownership of what befalls that country.

This should not even be an issue to bring up in sentient society: we have inserted ourselves into this, and we may claim all we may--and will undoubtedly get traction for it--that we saved lives, but all the very real lives that are taken from this point on are on our hands. Any economic or political fallout in the region or world at large can be attributed to it, fair or not. Any blowback of any kind not only rests on us, but it rests on our President, due to his not involving Congress legislatively, as he should have.

Obviously, he is hoping to get away with the violation of the War Powers Act, UN Participation Act and the UN Charter, and quite frankly, there are now much bigger issues at hand. That's an astonishing thing to ponder, but it's true.

What he must do right now is to get everyone in Congress to go on the record as "fer" or "agin" it, because if they're left to play the field, ANY mishaps are deadly to our party.

This isn't just a slight footnote in an upheaval, it's intervention in a raging civil war, and it's the turning of the page, the closing of the book, and the opening of a whole new volume of the affair. It is fully his. At this point it's a bit of a dice-throw with the expectations of the Provisional Government, but war is a very, very different thing than politics; it is not, as Clausewitz said, merely "Politics by other means", it is "for keeps" and of an intensity that doesn't even compare. Half-measures and qualified approaches are lethal to one's cause in war, and the modified--and ill-defined--rules of engagement are what militaries hate for a reason: they don't work well.

Admiral Jacky Fisher put it best: "The essence of war is violence, and moderation in war is imbecility." Now our President puts himself in a situation where he will have to take back many fine things he's said and either show himself to be very willing to sell one thing and do another, or follow the path that he seems to be following that is worse: cover up the real extent of the action.

What a mess. Any version of an outcome that isn't problematic would be one that happens quickly. That may well be possible, too, but it's hard to see from here.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

5. The USA is protecting its oil and other interests in Libya