We've started a war we won't know how to end

Third, we’ve started a war we won’t know how to end. We have a great deal riding on the success of the Franco-British operation, assuming one actually takes shape in a hurry. If it doesn’t work, the U.S. government is very likely going to be dragged, even with the President privately kicking and screaming all the way, to a mission definition (again, the only logical one available) that will presage an open-ended commitment. As I have said, a Qaddafi left armed and dangerous when the dust settles is an unacceptable outcome. Civilian planes will likely start failing out the sky, as did the one over Lockerbie; assassination attempts will multiply, like the attempted Libyan-backed murder of the Saudi king in 2003; al-Qaeda and affiliates might be aided and abetted to do Lord-knows-what to the Italians, the French, the British and, of course, to us. With nothing to lose, and way beyond the threshold of worrying about sanctions and such, Qaddafi could well become more dangerous than ever. If I were Silvio Berlusconi, in particular, I’d pick my future whorehouses with extreme care…

These three observations do not, of course, exhaust the madness of what the Administration has done. This Libya caper will constitute a huge, compound distraction. Not only will it distract us from longer-term challenges, mainly in Asia, that will determine the success or failure of America’s grand strategy of forward presence on the flanks of Eurasia, it will also distract us from even more portentous Middle Eastern dangers. Just yesterday the head of the Yemeni army withdrew his support for President Ali Abdullah Saleh. This portends a major, multifaceted tribe-and-clan based civil war with a potential to put core U.S. security interests at risk—for an anarchic Yemen, a mountainous country with four times the population of Libya, can host a sanctuary for al-Qaeda that will make their Taliban-era digs pale by comparison. And in Yemen, al-Qaeda already has a kind of defense-in-depth across the Bab al-Mandeb in what’s left of Somalia.

Even Bahrain is more important inherently than Libya; but that’s another story.

There is more, too—albeit of a more abstract nature. Before we started this crazy war, what was going on in the region was all about the Arabs—the good Arabs, the bad Arabs, the other Arabs, all the Arabs, some of the Arabs, whatever. In both their eyes and ours, it was about them. Now it is, or will soon be, about us. Every quark’s worth of negative energy in the region will in due course be drawn as if by a magnet to us, as the Arabs resume their favorite sport of exporting responsibility for their own circumstances onto others. We will subject the region, yet again, to the equivalent of the U.S. Heisenberg Effect, especially if we’re forced to bail out our allies. We’ve seen this film before. It’s a tragedy.