zenpundit.com

We may have to go “All Libya, All the time” here this week. We won’t, but it is tempting.

Dr. Steve Metz of SSI has a featured op-ed in The New Republic:

Libya’s Coming Insurgency 

….History offers a number of sign posts that an insurgency will occur. Unfortunately Libya has almost all of them. At this point the political objectives of the government and anti-government forces are irreconcilable. Each side wants total victory-either Qaddafi will retain total power or he will be gone. Both sides are intensely devoted to their cause; passions are high. Both have thousands of men with military training, all imbued with a traditional warrior ethos which Qaddafi himself has stoked. The country is awash with arms. Libya has extensive hinterlands with little or no government control that could serve as insurgent bases. Neighboring states are likely to provide insurgent sanctuary whether deliberately-as an act of policy-or inadvertently because a government is unable to control its territory. North Africa has a long history of insurgency, from the anti-colonial wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to more recent conflicts in Chad, Algeria, and Western Sahara. Where insurgency occurred in the past, it is more likely to occur in the future. All this means that there is no place on earth more likely to experience an insurgency in the next few years than Libya.

What is not clear is whether the coming insurgency will involve Qaddafi loyalists fighting against a new regime or anti-Qaddafi forces fighting to remove the old dictator and his patrons. In either case, a Libyan insurgency would be destructive. Because they take place within the population, insurgencies always fuel refugee problems and humanitarian crises. They provide an opportunity for extremists to hijack one or both sides. And insurgency in Libya would destabilize a region undergoing challenging political transitions

Read the rest here.

Grand Strategies by Charles Hill

Charles Hill, senior Cold War diplomat, Hoover Institution fellow and a co-founder of Yale’s popular Grand Strategy Program that amounts to a crash course in the kind of classical liberal education that universities once imparted to undergraduates but today pride themselves in doing so no longer. The popularity of Hill’s program,  therefore, is with the students moreso than campus activists or the faculty:

…Despite whispers of words like “elitist,” “conservative,” and “cult”-words considered synonyms by many at Yale-The Grand Strategy seminar, only a few years old, has become one of the university’s marquee classes. Grand Strategy, like Professor Hill, has its own myth. The liberals on campus call the class Grand Fascism. They are kidding, but only in part. Many Yale students and faculty are suspicious of the program. Students awed or repelled by Grand Strategy are the same ones who are awed or repelled by Professor Hill, and for the same reasons: the aura of power, the whiff of elitism, the promise of an answer to life’s messiest questions.

If the Grand strategy Course at Yale is a distillation of classical liberal education, Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft and World Order is Hill’s reification of the course as an education for the reader on how the evolution of the Western civilizational worldview makes possible grand strategy. The book is an intellectual tour de force by Hill, at some times an idiosyncratic one and at all times an interesting one. I have read many, though very far from all, of the classic texts that Hill critiques and uses to shape his argument but having a large library under your belt is not a prerequisite from understanding Grand Strategies. Far from it, one suspects Hill wrote the book with his seminar students in mind.

Hill examines the protean and mythopoetic relationship between cultural foundations and expressions of power and political wills in conflict represented by diplomacy and war, both navigated by grand strategy constructed from cultural vision. A recurring theme in Grand Strategies is the heroic structure of the epic tale, with the descent into the Underworld and revelation of the heroic destiny by the shades and an ascent (not always successful or as ideally envisioned) to a creative, transformative new order. The reader meets Achilles in many guises, marches upcountry with Xenophon, is cast out of Heaven by Milton, confronts Hobbes‘ Leviathan, defies Rosseau’s general will and exorcises the evil represented in Dostoyevskii’s The Possessed. And this only is a tenth of the narrative.

While I frequently found myself in agreement with Hill’s discernments of the texts, some of them struck me as strained or highly debatable, such as Hill’s reading of Plato as a wry ironist ( Hill borrows from Leo Strauss here but goes further, if I recall correctly, than Strauss did), something that Carroll Quigley, Karl Popper or many classicists would have disputed. Hill’s final chapter, “The Writer and the State” is entertaining and contains a laudatory anecdote about Hill’s former boss, the impressive SECSTATE George Schultz , but it lacked some of the gravity of earlier chapters.

Erudite and visionary, Grand Strategies is a grand synthesis by Charles Hill with lessons to learn on every page.

(Special hat tip to J. Scott Shipman who pushed me to read and review this book)

Intervention in Libya has shattered the neat little boxes into which the American Left and Right typically divides.

If you favor military intervention against the mad Colonel Gaddafi and his brood of looters, you are aligned with Hillary Clinton. And Paul Wolfowitz. And Joe Biden. And France. And John McCain. And Eliot Cohen. And John Kerry. And John Bolton. And Susan Rice.  And Samantha Power. And Fareed Zakaria. And W. Patrick Lang. And Thomas P.M. Barnett…..

If  you are against intervention in Libya, you stand alongside Robert Gates. And George Will.  And Andrew Bacevich.  And Andrew Sullivan. And Pat Buchanan.  And Ron Paul. And Marc Lynch. And Glenn Greenwald.  And Micheal Cohen. And Mattew Yglesias. And Andrew Exum…

Cognitive dissonance reigns. Several generations of American citizens who have been indoctrinated to substitute litmus tests for critical thought are now at sea without a compass or a map. Heh.

My view is pretty straightforward:

1. Libya, in and of itself, is not worth a rusty damn. If Libyans want to be ruled by quasi-demented religious cro-magnons, so be it. Sadly, they represent a moral improvement over Gaddafi. If Gaddafi’s successors sponsor terrorism agaist US interests we can declare war and destroy all of Libya in about three days.

2. I am not in favor of a formal “No fly Zone”. Too expensive. Send some F-16s and and F-18’s to shoot down a few MiG’s. Pilots as a rule are at least reasonably bright; the Libyans know their warplanes are obsolete and the pilots will stop flying ( except to flee Libya). Instead, I recommend giving military and humanitarian aid and professional military advice, if it is desired by the Libyan rebels.

3. Gaddafi has ample American blood between his fingers and he is in a jam. It is a good time for the US give circumstances a push so that he and his miserable clan die in a horrific way, possibly on live TV or youtube. His death will be a salutory lesson for others and also a measure of justice – a thing rare in the world.

4. Whatever happens, he US is not financially obligated to reconstruct Libya. Reconstructing Germany and Japan after WWII was not an act of altruism but of  strategic self-interest. The Libyans have oil. Sell it for a reconstrction fund.

5. Obama was dragged unwillingly to the current policy and personally was ok with Gaddafi’s survival. The US has a lot of options to make life hard right now for Col. Gaddafi and President Obama has delayed taking any of them for as long as he possibly could.

What are your thoughts?

Pakistani Islamist militants, with the political support of the ISI and some of Pakistan’s higher military leadership, are trodding down a path we have seen before. Assassinations of democratic or tolerant political figures at odds with Islamist extremists and the military elite has become de facto “normalized” in Pakistan.

And popular among many Pakistanis.

Bhatti Killing Should Alarm Pakistan’s Minorities

The murder last week of Shahbaz Bhatti, Pakistan’s minority affairs minister and the only Christian in the cabinet, is a reminder of how dangerous it can be to voice one’s opinion in violence-riddled Pakistan. Bhatti was a liberal who spoke often against Pakistan’s blasphemy laws and their narrow-minded application.

His murder comes just weeks after the assassination of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer, another prominent moderate. Both men were targeted by Islamic extremists because of their calls to reform the blasphemy laws. The purpose of their murders — besides depriving moderates of some of their most courageous leaders — is to frighten moderates and minorities into silence and submission.

What Salman Taseer’s assassination could mean for Pakistan …

Experts believe the outpouring of praise for the killer of Salman Taseer, the former governor of Punjab who was slain by his own security detail in Islamabad on Tuesday, reflects deep support for religious intolerance and will have a chilling effect on reform-minded public figures.

“It’s highly dangerous for these religious scholars to say things that do not fit into the legal context of [an] issue. Are they saying Taseer was guilty of blasphemy simply by criticizing a law? In that case, hundreds of thousands are guilty. This is a clear incitement to violence,” says Badar Alam, editor of Pakistan’s Herald magazine and an expert on Islamist groups.

Pakistan’s Bhutto assassinated – World news – South and Central …

NAUDERO, Pakistan – The body of Pakistan opposition leader Benazir Bhutto arrived in her family village for burial on Friday, hours after her assassination plunged the nuclear-armed country into one of the worst crises in its 60-year history.

Enraged crowds rioted across Pakistan and hopes for democracy hung by a thread after the former prime minister was gunned down as she waved to supporters from the sunroof of her armored vehicle.

The death of President Pervez Musharraf’s most powerful opponent threw the nation into chaos just 12 days before elections and threatened its already unsteady role as a key fighter against Islamic terror.

A cadre of military leaders manipulate and orchestrate civilian fanatics to methodically murder and intimidate civilian officials and radicalize the larger society, where have we seen this before? Oh, yes:

Pakistan is a Muslim version of 1930’s Japan.

US policy has hitched itself to a dangerously evolving and increasingly Fascist leadership class in Pakistan that is steadily veering away from any pretense of civilized conduct or partnership with the US, reifying a witch’s brew of Islamist extremism, militarism and anti-Indian and anti-American nationalism.  We need to disengage from and de-fund this monstrosity that bends most of it’s efforts against our interests and values. 

Pakistan is a strategic black hole of an “ally” that is going to blow up in our face someday.

Longtime blogfriend Matt “MountainRunner” Armstrong has an important explanatory article up at Foreign Policy.com:

Mind Games:

Why Rolling Stone‘s article on the military’s domestic psy-ops scandal gets it so wrong.

Rolling Stone has done it again with another scoop by Michael Hastings showing the U.S. military’s manipulation of public opinion and wanton disregard for civilian leadership. The article, “Another Runaway General: Army Deploys Psy-Ops on U.S. Senators,” is another example of an officer corps run amok, right?

Not so fast. Both stories expose an altogether different problem once you cut through the hyperbole.

Central to Hastings’s article are charges by Lt. Col. Michael Holmes that he was part of a team of “psychological operations soldiers” ordered to use psychological operations techniques to deceive and manipulate the opinion of senators and other dignitaries visiting the NATO training mission in Kabul. This was done, Holmes describes, under the orders of the commanding general, Lt. Gen. William Caldwell IV (above), and his staff.

The overstatement in the article, stemming entirely from comments by Holmes, has in turn spurred more of the same focused on alleged “mind tricks” against several senators, including John McCain (R-Ariz.), Carl Levin (D-Mich.), and Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), other members of Congress, think-tank analysts, and foreign dignitaries.

Hastings and his supporters are quick to indict the military for allowing another cowboy to go off the reservation to create support for an unpopular conflict people simply want to have disappear. Challenging the narrative by Holmes has been described as a “smear campaign.” Others reacting to these criticisms slam the media as trying to take down the military. ….