“The Obama Doctrine”: Libya

The Atlantic has published a lengthy (actually, very lengthy) article by Jeffrey Goldberg in its April issue on “The Obama Doctrine.”  As the subtitle of the article says, “The U.S. president talks through his hardest decisions about America’s role in the world.”  The article is definitely worth reading; I strongly recommend it.  There are also a number of comments to make on the article, the “Obama Doctrine,” and the President.  Let me start with Libya. 

It seems to me President Obama misses the reason why our intervention in Libya failed – because he missed some of the lessons of Iraq.  President Obama famously opposed the invasion of Iraq in a speech in 2002.  The problem may be that, having been proved right, in his opinion, with respect to the question of going into Iraq, he didn’t look at what may be considered the lesser failures of Iraq; i.e., things that were failures even if you supported going into Iraq in the first place. 

From this point of view, the initial invasion of Iraq was not a failure.  From a military point of view, the invasion was a great success.  The problem was we didn’t plan for day two; i.e., what would happen after the invasion.  Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld argued for the Defense Department to be responsible for Iraq after the invasion, and President Bush agreed.  But the Defense Department didn’t make any plans (or waited too long to start making them and didn’t do a good enough job).  It ultimately wasn’t until David Petraeus took command in early 2007 that we had a plan for day two.

It appears this is what happened in Libya.  According to Mr. Goldberg, “[t]he U.S., [President Obama] believes, planned the Libya operation carefully – and yet the country is still a disaster.”  Just as the initial invasion in Iraq was a success, the bombing, etc., in Libya was well done.  Mr. Goldberg quotes President Obama:

“So we actually executed this plan as well as I could have expected: We got a UN mandate, we built a coalition, it cost us $1 billion – which, when it comes to military operations, is very cheap.  We averted large-scale civilian casualties, we prevented what almost surely would have been a prolonged and bloody civil conflict.  And despite all that, Libya is a mess.”

What President Obama seems to be missing is that, just as the U.S. had no plan for what would happen after the invasion succeeded in Iraq, we no plan for what would happen after the bombing succeeded in Libya.  President Bush relied on Secretary Rumsfeld.  He failed.  It may be that President Obama relied on Europe or it may be that everybody just assumed that, once Gadhafi was gone, everything would be hunky dory.  In any case, there was no day two plan.

This was definitely a lesson that could have been learned from Iraq, but apparently, it wasn’t.