Look, let's be blunt -- as a responsible foreign policy blogger, I should be trying to divert your attention away from the tawdriness that is the David Petraeus scandal.  There's no shortage of other interesting stuff happening in the world.  Things like Argentina's slow-moving debt debacle, or the discord between the EU and IMF over Greece, or even the possibility of the United States overtaking Saudi Arabia as the world's top oil producer. 

The thing is, I can't, I just can't.  I'm weak, and the way this scandal has metastasized is friggin' incredible.  The best summary of where things stand right now comes from Ace of Spades' Gabriel Malor: 

Jill Kelley, the woman who was (allegedly) threatened by Gen. Petraeus's squeeze Paula Broadwell and who (apparently) started the FBI investigation that led to Petraeus' ouster, who went to the FBI for help after the threats and then (allegedly) had a relationship with the FBI agent in charge of her own case, who (allegedly) sent her shirtless pics of himself, also (apparently, allegedly) had "compromising" communications with Gen. John Allen, the Big Damn Commander of our war effort in Afghanistan.

Yeah, that's about where we are now, and I'm afraid of checking my Twitter feed because there might have been new developments. 

Look, America's foreign policy community is gonna be transfixed on this for a spell.  Because it's got that car-crash quality that means it is just impossible to look away.  This is the kind of scandal that causes the Daily Beast's writing style to go so over the top that it actually published the following sentence:  "Broadwell may be able to run a six-minute mile with Petraeus, but Kelley looks like a woman who lets the guys do all the running—and in her direction."  I'm surprised they didn't embed a whip sound at the end of that sentence. 

And that's the interesting thing if one steps back for a second.  To repeat a theme, the American people by and large don't care much about foreign policy and national security.  But, based on my deep immersion into supermarket checkout literature, they do appear to be very interested in tawdry sex scandals and reality television.  Well, this scandal has copious amounts of this -- plus, you know, power. 

So unlike, say, questions about drone warfare or counterterrorism policy or homeland security or civil liberties, Americans will pay attention to this stuff.  Which is interesting, because over the past decade the military has been the one institution to inspire significant amounts of trust in Americans.  The less that the public trusts the military, the less that they will trust what the military is doing.  And as Thom Shanker notes in the New York Times, this scandal might affect that trust: 

[A] worrisomely large number of senior officers have been investigated and even fired for poor judgment, malfeasance and sexual improprieties or sexual violence — and that is just in the last year....

Long list of scandas involving top brass]

The episodes have prompted concern that something may be broken, or at least fractured, across the military’s culture of leadership. Some wonder whether its top officers have forgotten the lessons of Bathsheba: The crown of command should not be worn with arrogance, and while rank has its privileges, remember that infallibility and entitlement are not among them.

And this doesn't even get into other scandals at  various homeland security agencies *cough* Secret Servivce *cough*.

The military and intelligence communities have been doing a lot of things over the past decade that fall outside the bounds of traditional American foreign policy practices.  I'm not saying all of these things are bad -- it's a new century, new kinds of threats, and so forth.  But most Americans have passively gifted these agencies a lot of goodwill for them to do what they want.  I wonder whether a silly sex scandal will change all that.  

Developing...

I know that Daniel Klaidman's Newsweek cover story on the Navy SEALs is supposed to make me feel all warm and safe because of the uber-competence of SEAL Team Six and President Obama's comfort with using them adroitly: 

This is a Special Ops moment. The Navy SEALs, in particular, have never appeared so heroic and effective. They killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan last year, and just last month rescued two aid workers held hostage in Somalia. At a time when many Americans think their government is incompetent, the SEALs are public employees who often get the job done. They’re a morale booster, and they know it.

The thing is, one of Klaidman's more detailed anecdotes actually gives me great pause about the decision-making process within the Obama administration about the use of force:

The CIA and military had been hunting Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan for years. He was a suspect in the 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and had been directly implicated in other deadly terrorist attacks in East Africa, including a suicide bombing of an Israeli-owned resort in Mombasa. He was an important link between al Qaeda and its Somalia-based affiliate, and a potential wealth of information on how the jihadist networks operate. Killing him would have been a significant victory, but capturing him alive could have been even better.

After months of patiently watching him, American intelligence officers suddenly learned that Nabhan was preparing to travel along a remote desert road in southern Somalia....

McRaven told the group that Nabhan’s convoy would soon be setting out from the capital, Mogadishu, on its way to a meeting of Islamic militants in the coastal town of Baraawe. The square-jawed Texan and former Navy SEAL crisply laid out the “Concepts of Operation” that had been developed in anticipation of this moment. Several options were spelled out, along with the military hardware that would be required for each, as well as collateral-damage estimates:

The military could fire Tomahawk cruise missiles from a warship off the Somali coast. This was the least dangerous option in terms of U.S. casualties but not the most precise. (Missiles have gone astray, hitting civilians, and even when they strike their target, they don’t always take it out.) Such missile strikes had been a hallmark of the Bush administration. For all of its “dead or alive” rhetoric, the Bush White House was generally cautious when it came to antiterrorist operations in anarchic areas like Somalia. The second option was a helicopter-borne assault on Nabhan’s convoy. There was less chance of error there: small attack helicopters would allow the commandos to “look the target in the eye and make sure it was the right guy,” according to one military planner. The final option was a “snatch and grab,” a daring attempt to take Nabhan alive. From a purely tactical standpoint, this was the most attractive alternative. Intelligence from high-value targets was the coin of the realm in the terror wars. But it was also the riskiest option.

Unstated but hanging heavily over the group that evening was the memory of another attempted capture in Somalia. Many on the call had been in key national-security posts in October 1993 during the ill-fated attempt to capture a Somali warlord that became known as “Black Hawk Down,” after a book of the same name. That debacle left 18 dead Army Rangers on the streets of Mogadishu, and inspired al Qaeda leaders to think they could defeat the American superpower. As Daniel Benjamin, the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism, said during the meeting: “Somalia, helicopters, capture. I just don’t like the sound of this.”

As everyone left the meeting late that evening, it was clear that the only viable plan was the lethal one (emphasis added).

The mission was a success, and I'm sure that there's more to this decision than is in Klaidman's story.  That said, based on the story, this decison-making process seems flawed.  The deciding factor appears to have been that the more aggressive option had echoes of the 1993 Black Hawk Down fiasco.  Because the situations seemed analagous ("Somalia, helicopters") the worst-case outcome -- a botched raid -- also seemed likely. 

Here's the thing though -- as analogies go, this one seems somewhat ill-suited.  The most obvious difference was that this raid wasn't going to take place in a city but a remote desert road.  It was extremely difficult and bloody for U.S. forces to battle their adversaries in the urban anarchy of Mogadishu.  In the open, with no civilians to use as shields, I would think JSOC has the advantage.  Even if the snatch-and-grab option was the riskiest option, it does not seem as risky as U.S. efforts to rescue the downed Black Hawk crew back in 1993.  In this instance, the worst-case scenario would have been some JSOC soldiers killed -- but given the terrain, the lack of civilians and cover, and the likely firepower advantage held by the Americans, a Black Hawk Down II outcome sounds unlikely. 

Despite these differences, analogical reasong triumphed.  The mission succeeded in taking out Nabhan, but it sounds like the slightly riskier option would have yielded greater rewards.

Let me stress, yet again, that I'm not an expert on special ops.  I'd welcome commenters explaining to me why I don't know what the hell I'm talking about.  Still, based on this story, the guiding factor in this case appears to have been a poor analogy.  I hope this is the exception and not the rule for the current administration. 

Am I missing anything? 

As I type this, most of Tripoli is now in the hands of Transitional National Council forces and supporters, two of Muammar Khaddafi's sons are in custody, and the backbone of Khaddafi's military has been broken. TNC forces do not control all of Libya, but they control an ever-increasing amount of it, including all of its oil infrastructuire. The whereabouts of Gaddafi, Khaddafy, and Qaddafi are still unknown, however.

So, six months after a spontaneous protest movement morphed into armed resistance and NATO got involved.... what does this all mean? With events on the ground still evolving, let me suggest the following list of tentative winners and losers from this operation:

WINNERS

1) The people of Libya. I think it's safe to say that an overwhelming majority of Libyans are pretty pleased that they're no longer living under the thumb of the Qaddafi family. Juan Cole has a pretty triumphalist post up about how this is playing out. He's a bit overoptimistic in places, but this point rings true -- appearances to the contrary, this was not a civil war:

It was not, if by that is meant a fight between two big groups within the body politic. There was nothing like the vicious sectarian civilian-on-civilian fighting in Baghdad in 2006. The revolution began as peaceful public protests, and only when the urban crowds were subjected to artillery, tank, mortar and cluster bomb barrages did the revolutionaries begin arming themselves. When fighting began, it was volunteer combatants representing their city quarters taking on trained regular army troops and mercenaries. That is a revolution, not a civil war. Only in a few small pockets of territory, such as Sirte and its environs, did pro-Qaddafi civilians oppose the revolutionaries, but it would be wrong to magnify a handful of skirmishes of that sort into a civil war. Qaddafi’s support was too limited, too thin, and too centered in the professional military, to allow us to speak of a civil war.

Brian Whitaker makes similar points in The Guardian. This fact does not necessarily mean that an armed insurgency won't persist, but even if it does, it would lack domestic political legitimacy.

2) NATO. Quick, was the 1999 Kosovo operation a NATO success or a failure? During the operation, it seemed like a failure, as a) everyone thought it was taking too long; and b) the operation expost the operational gaps between the U.S. and European forces. After Kosovo ended, however, it seemed like a victory... because it was.

This operation parallels the rhythms of the Kosovo intervention, but in many ways represents a bigger victory. The UK and France shouldered a greater share of the burden, there were no casualties in the alliance, and this operation directly led to regime change (whereas Kosovo had only an indirect effect on Serbia). As Blake Hounshell has observed, at the cost of $1 billion, Western involvement was totally worth it.

3) Air power advocates. Eric Schmitt and Steven Lee Myers' New York Times account of the march into Tripoli suggests the ways in which NATO air power played a critical role in aiding TNC forces on the ground. Stepping back, one has to conclude that NATO's air power was a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for Libya to play out the way it did. Despite some neoconservative calls for even heavier intervention, however, Western boots on the ground were not necessary.

4) Tunisia and Egypt. If TNC forces are able to consolidate their hold on Libya and restore some semblance of law and order, that means the return of more than 680,000 Libyan refugees. This would be good not just for Libya proper, but for the countries housing most of these refugees -- namely, Egypt and Tunisia. These countries are attempt their own transition into more representative regimes. Eliminating the socioeconomic pressure of displaced Libyans is an unalloyed good thing for the political development of Libya's neighbors.

5) President Obama.  To quote Eli Lake: "President Birth Certificate has done what Reagan and W could not: end Gadhafi's reign and kill bin Laden." It's worth noting that oth operations took more than six months to play out. While he won't necessarily be this blunt about it, Obama can now credibly argue that patience + determinaion = badass military statecraft.

LOSERS

1) Other authoritarian despots, particularly in Africa.  I don't want to overstate this -- I'm skeptical that the scenes from Tripoli will lead to spontaneous uprisings in Damascus and elsewhere. Still, this is the kind of event that will always make other despots nervous.

In the case of African authoritarians or quasi-authoritarians, the fall of Khaddafi also leads to the permanent end of a pipeline of cash from Libya to his friends in Africa.

2) U.S. cable news networks. Useless. Totally f$%*ing useless. Seriously, until FOX news started airing live footage from its SkyNews partner, I got vastly more information from my Twitter feed than any of the cable news nets. That's when they were even covering events in Tripoli -- I think it took MSNBC something like five hours to realize there was something worth covering. Yesterday's performance was just embarrassing.

3) Realists. The United States should never have intervened!! It's a civil war!!! Libya is an example of the militarization of American foreign policy!! The U.S. will be drawn into an expensive quagmire that is not a core national interest!! Air power alone will never work!! Many, many other realist cliches!!

Oops.

Readers are warmly welomed to provide realist rationalizations for why they are still right/will be proven right in the future in the comments.

4) KT McFarland. There has been a lot of stupid American punditry on Libya, but I think McFarland's FoxNews.com essay from last Friday takes the cake as the Dumbest Thing I've Read on Libya in the past month.  Thankfully, it's also completely obsolete.

5) President Obama.  [Wait, how is he a winner and a loser?!--ed.] On the one hand, Obama certainly wins by insulating himself against foreign policy criticism. On the other hand, foreign policy victories in the bank are quickly forgotten -- just look at the way in which bin Laden's death translated into a transitory blip for Obama's popularity.

In 2012, the only issue any voter cares about is the economy. A successful operation in Libya will mean less news coverage about Libya and even more coverage of the economy … which is not exactly Obama's strong suit at the moment.

The "this week" portion of the blog post title suggests tentativeness of these assessments (see also Peter Feaver and Steve Walt on this point). Nevertheless... am I missing anything?

Kim Sengupta and Solomon Hughes have one of those exclusives in The Independent that's an equal mixture of intriguing and dubious on the current situation in Libya.  Here's the lead: 

The Libyan regime is preparing to make a fresh overture to the international community, offering concessions designed to end the bloodshed of the three-month-long civil war.

 

The Independent has obtained a copy of a letter from the country's Prime Minister, Al-Baghdadi al-Mahmoudi, being sent to a number of foreign governments. It proposes an immediate ceasefire to be monitored by the United Nations and the African Union, unconditional talks with the opposition, amnesty for both sides in the conflict, and the drafting of a new constitution.

David Cameron and Barack Obama met yesterday to try to find an exit strategy from a conflict increasingly appearing to have no definitive military solution in sight. The US President acknowledged that the allies now seem to face a long, attritional campaign.

Reading through the whole story, I certainly believe that Libya sent out a cease-fire proposal.  What I don't buy is the notion that various NATO countries are eager to accept such a deal.  That part seems much less clearly sourced. 

There's also this interesting Financial Times story by Michael Peel and Sam Jones suggesting that Libya's sovereign wealth fund has less money that previously anticipated: 

Libya lost billions of dollars on sophisticated financial products sold to Muammer Gaddafi’s sovereign wealth fund by some of the world’s leading financial institutions, according to a confidential Libyan government document.

Banks and hedge funds led by France’s Société Générale are named in about $5bn (£3bn) of deals involving the oil-rich nation, some of which had resulted in heavy losses by the middle of last year.

One of the most striking losses, outlined in an internal report for the Libyan Investment Authority, was a 98.5 per cent fall in the value of the sovereign wealth fund’s $1.2bn equity and currency derivatives portfolio....

The report for managers of Libya’s sovereign wealth fund, dated June 30 last year, said its bank and hedge fund investment products had fallen in value from about $5bn to roughly $3.5bn, out of the body’s total assets of $53.3bn.

This is an interesting strategic dilemma for NATO.  On the one hand accepting a cease-fire would potentially end an intervention that has lasted longer that top policymakers apparently expected.*  On the other hand, a cease-fire doesn't exactly scream "geopolitical win."  There's always an incentive to hold firm and count on the Gaddafi regime to crack. 

If you were Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy, or David Cameron, which bet would you make?  A cease-fire now or rolling the dice for a more complete victory?    

OK, apparently the Wall Street Journal now has a policy to publish an op-ed every quarter asserting that:

1)  U.S. defense spending is woefully inadequate compared to the Cold War era;

2)  Those advocating further defense cuts are advocating taking the United States back to the 1930's; and

3)  Today's threat environment is really, really bad. 

Last quarter it was the Arthur Brooks/Edwin Feulner/William Kristol op-ed.  Today it's Mark Helprin.  The gist of his argument:

Based upon nothing and ignoring the cautionary example of World War II, we are told that we will never face two major enemies at once. Despite the orders of battle of our potential adversaries and the fact that our response to insurgency has been primarily conventional, we are told that the era of conventional warfare is over. And we are told that we can rest easy because military spending is an accurate index of military power, and we spend as much as the next however many nations combined.

But this takes no account of the nature of our commitments, the fading contributions of our allies, geography, this nation's size and that of its economy, conscription or its absence, purchasing power parity, exchange rate distortions, the military trajectories of our rivals individually or in combination, and the masking effects of off-budget outlays and unreported expenditures. Though military spending comparisons are of lesser utility than assessing actual capabilities, they are useful nonetheless for determining a country's progress relative to itself.

Doing so reveals that from 1940 to 2000, average annual American defense expenditure was 8.5% of GDP; in war and mobilization years 13.3%; under Democratic administration 9.4%; under Republican 7.3%; and, most significantly, in the years of peace 5.7%. Today we spend just 4.6% of GDP—minus purely operational war costs, 3.8%. That is, 66% of the traditional peacetime outlays. We have been, and we are, steadily disarming even as we are at war.

Hmm... I'll concede Helprin's point about fading contributions from allies from Western Europe -- but not elsewhere.  Furthermore, I'm pretty sure that if a sober analyst took into account geography, purchasing power parity, off-budget outlays, conscription, and actual military readiness, the argument in favor of moderated defense spending becomes stronger and not weaker.  When the closest great power rival to the United States has difficulties supplying an anti-piracy flotilla, I think it's safe to say that the gap in capabilities is not going to shrink all that dramatically anytime soon. 

More, importantly, it's not the same threat environment as the Cold War.  If the Wall Street Journal is going to recycle the same tired argument about going back to Cold War era defense spending, then I'll just cut and paste what I said the first time this argument was made:

Terrorism and piracy are certainly security concerns -- but they don't compare to the Cold War. A nuclear Iran is a major regional headache, but it's not the Cold War. A generation from now, maybe China poses as serious a threat as the Cold War Soviet Union. Maybe. That's a generation away, however.... 

I'm about to say something that might be controversial for people under the age of 25, but here goes. You know the threats posed to the United States by a rising China, a nuclear Iran, terrorists and piracy? You could put all of them together and they don't equal the perceived threat posed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. And until I see another hostile country in the world that poses a military threat in Europe, the Middle East and Asia at the same time, I'm thinking that current defense spending should be lower than Cold War levels by a fair amount. 

The "we're-not-spending-enough-on-defense" argument reminds me that I'd like to see the foreign policy community make some New Year's resolutions.  To be specific, there are arguments and memes that commentators have made over the past year that I'd like to see less of in 2011.  More about this later. 

Am I missing anything? 

Hmmm.... which magazine should I peruse online this AM.... maybe TNR?  The National Interest?  Nah, I'm not in the mood for deep thinking.  I'll just look at Rolling Stone, that won't take much intellectual heavy lifting.... oh, look, a profile of General McChrystal.... hmmm.... um.... holy cats.

Since everyone and their mother has their take on this Mongolian clusterf**k imbroglio already, I'm not going to bother linking to the rest of the blogosphere.  Instead, just a few measured and a few off the cuff reactions: 

1.  Doris Kearns Goodwin makes the case in today's New York Times that Obama doesn't have to fire McChrystal, pointing out that Union General George McClellan was far ruder to Lincoln, and yet was not fired.  This is historically true, but I'm not sure it's really the best example.  To put it gently, McClellan was a lousy, timid general -- by letting him stay on, Lincoln accomplished little but to prolong the war. 

2.  I find myself in agreement with Tom Donnelly and William Kristol: 

McChrystal should not be the only one to go.  Ambassador Karl Eikenberry and “AfPak” czar Richard Holbrooke should likewise either submit their resignations or be fired by President Obama.  Vice President Biden and his surrogates should be told to sit down and be quiet, to stop fighting policy battles in the press.  The administration's "team of rivals" approach is producing only rivalry.

They're right (see also David Ignatius).  McChrystal did himself no favors in the RS article, but he's hardly the only Afghan policy heavyweight to be tarnished by the essay.  Eikenberry poisoned the well with his press leaks last year, and Holbrooke is, well, Holbrooke.  A clean sweep might be the best move Obama could make. 

3)  Speaking of neoconservatives, it's worth noting that, contra Josh Rogin's take, GOP policy wonks are reacting the way you would expect a loyal opposition to react.  That is to say, sure, they're making hay of the problems with the Afghan strategy, but they're also quite firm in saying that Obama should dire McChrystal.  See Kristol,  Eliot Cohen, John McCain, Joe Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham. 

This should not be terribly surprising.  Neoconservatives have been pretty clear all along about civilian control of the military, and McChrystal's gaffes cut right to the heart of this issue. 

4)  One final point:  beyond the descriptions of McChrystal and his aides acting like jackasses in Paris, the RS article was of little use.  It presented a slanted portrait of COIN and it's advocates, and seemed determined to paint McChrystal in the worst light possible.  As Blake Hounshell observed, it failed to note that at this stage it's impossible to evaluate the COIN strategy, because these approaches tend to have "darkest before the dawn" qualities. 

What do you think?