Were Obama and NATO engaged in Machiavellian brilliance?
Bookworm on Apr 10 2011 at 8:09 am | Filed under: Barack Obama, Libya
Looking back over the past few weeks, one can see a little history play out:
People rose up against Gaddafi. The West dithered.
The tide was in favor of the Libya rebels. The West dithered.
The tide turned in Gaddafi’s favor. The West — i.e., a few NATO states plus Obama — intervened.
Obama was utterly unable to give a coherent explanation for why the U.S. intervened.
A short time after the U.S. committed to Libya (air strikes now, the increased possibility of ground troops later), we learned that the rebels our military is supporting in Libya are al Qaeda members, the same people our military fighting against in Afghanistan and Iraq.
So far so clear. Here’s where the Machiavellian stuff comes in:
We’re doing a lousy job helping the rebels. We keep killing them in “accidental” air strikes. Also, Gaddafi is winning. Ordinary ineptitude because of a war that has no discernible mission and a lousy NATO command structure? I don’t think so. (Cue impressive introductory music.)
I’ve decided that Obama and the NATO states knew all along what was going on. In the very first instance, when the rebels appeared, they knew that they were al Qaeda. Obama’s/NATO’s first instinct was to sit on the sidelines, and let Gaddafi and al Qaeda fight it out. However, when Gaddafi was already winning, Obama and NATO had their brilliant idea: take advantage of the fact that al Qaeda fighters were being drawn out into the open, pretend to befriend them, and then “accidentally” kill them, all the while making sure that Gaddafi and his troops lead the slaughter on the ground.
It’s this Machivellian motive that explains Obama’s incoherence when he tried to tell the American people why it benefits us to spend millions a day fighting a war in which we have no clearly articulated national interest, even as we’re fighting a war on two other fronts. It also prevented him from telling us why it’s perfectly reasonable to ally ourselves in Libya with the same people we’re trying to kill in Afghanistan. If he’d told the truth, his beautiful scheme would have been destroyed.
When you have a president as brilliant as Obama, you just need to understand that everything he does is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. (And if you don’t know that I’m being sarcastic here, you don’t know me very well.)
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(And if you don’t know that I’m being sarcastic here, you don’t know me very well.)
You gave the game away when you started praising Obama too much at the end there. Otherwise, it was a perfectly plausible scenario Book ; )
NATO is incompetent as hell. Without correct ground support and designators, it is very likely the air force have no idea what is or is not ally/enemy. We ourselves dropped a bomb on an SF A-Team in Afghanistan during the invasion, killing many of them and their allied Afghanistani platoon they had with them. The US Air Force has bombed the Chinese embassy by accident.
These kinds of things do and will happen when there are NO ADEQUATE GROUND FORCES in range to get ground intel on targets. And even when there are, lack of experience in WAR (war, not parades. War and sitting around collecting your fat political paycheck while holding a sinecure position as an officer is not the same thing) will increase the likeyhood of accidents.
Since NATO has been diminishing their capacity for war and most of their stuff is in Afghanistan, the experienced ones at least, what do you think they sent to Libya? Either the incompetents they kept out of Afghanistan or the cowards that didn’t want to go to Afghanistan. NATO forces are composed mostly of the US. That means if other countries are involved other than the US, they are stretched even more than we are.
And given this entire thing is run by incompetent idiots called the Obama administration, I’m pretty sure “Joint Operations” between “allied nations” disappeared before it even came up on discussion. So not only do you have chaos and confusion on the ground, you have divided command structures and “debate societies” going up in the alliance itself. Woah, that’s always nice to have in a war. The French under their non-Chirac PM seems to be motivated, but they opted out of Afghanistan (air told not to do anything) AND Iraq. They HAVE NO EXPERIENCE bombing the hell out of people, other than well Algiers and what not. But that’s nowhere close to the combat experience they would have gained fighting with the US in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And of course, Obama has cut the military funding to the bone and is trying to dig the bone up and feed it to his monkeys or dogs or whatever. That means less maintenance cycles for aircraft maintenance, which means more human and systems error. That’s a great way to run a bombing campaign.
Of course, this doesn’t mention Murphy’s law or that the US armed forces know who the rebels are and might be doing the “accidents” on purpose. Assuming it was US planes involved.
There is very little clarity surrounding the incident, but an anti-aircraft gun may have been fired in celebration, our correspondent says.
Muslim idiots. They brought down the thunder on themselves.
The other side effect of this Machiavellian genius is that the fat Saudis are in China at the moment, and cozying up to the Chicoms – and the Russians. We’re not going to be their favorite butt-boys any more.
Why? Because they’re middle eastern autocrats. Gaddafi is a middle eastern autocrat. Mubarak was a middle eastern autocrat. Saddam Hussein was a middle eastern autocrat.
We dumped Saddam Hussein. We did not hold out a hand to our old ally Mubarak. Now we are actively engaged in helping dump Gaddafi. (We are in fact aiding our sworn enemies to do it.) Our president has shown himself mindless, and that inarticulate, sophomoric, absolutely world-class, galactically stupid announcement of his “principles” on TV the other night has, obviously, scared the living s*** out of them. Who knows what this half-wait is going to do under the stress of however he defines America and its reaction to poor struggling underclasses at any particular moment?
The Saudis do not give a rodent’s rectum about the poor struggling underclasses yearning to breathe free: they are autocrats. They are kings. If there’s going to be a pyramid they damned well expect to be on top of it. They do not need their main physical (read: “military”) ally to start mouthing BS about the goddam “people,” and their goddam “aspirations,” and their goddam yearning for freedom. They know we don’t like their anti-democratic society, but they also know – or thought they knew, or once-upon-a-time knew – that we knew enough to recognize our own best interests and only bring it up quietly, in private, behind closed doors. They believe in realpolitik – between adults. We need them kindly disposed toward us, they know it, we know it, the world turns.
They recognized – not cheerfully, not happily, because they didn’t like the idea getting around that a middle eastern autocrat can be dumped – that Hussein had to go. But Mubarak – who was our ally? Gaddafi – who acquiesced with our wishes and ended his weapons programs, and owned up and paid damages to the families of Pan Am 800? They would have thought that Mubarak and Gaddafi were, in their eyes, on the positive side of the ledger and seen by us as good guys.
Apparently not. So what does that make them? They’re nothing more than another bunch of despots who sit astride the aspirations of their people – when are we going to start dropping bombs on them? Can they trust us?
Of course not – so there they are, in Beijing this week, next stop Moscow. They’re looking for assured markets, and allies they can trust, who will still mean on Wednesday what they said on Monday. OF course China and Russia have nothing but our best interests at heart.
So the Machiavellian genius in the white house has us on shaky ground with, and no longer trusted by, the world’s biggest oil producer in a time of rising prices, and growing shortages. Wow – what a genius this guy is!
What is scary is how the various pieces of the world puzzle are beginning to align against the West.
This is definitely not good.
In a nutshell (BHO’s head) he’s micro-managing global politics as if it they were a PBS production of Sesame Street. We’ve got Jim Henson and DC Comics instead of Bruce Willis in the Die Hard series.
http://sheikyermami.com/2011/04/10/cookie-monster-vs-suicide-bombers/
Let’s all go back to the nostalgic days of 2008, back when people were talking about how Obama was going to be smart, unlike Bush. Obama was going to make the world like us again!
“(And if you don’t know that I’m being sarcastic here, you don’t know me very well.)”
Well, you almost had me fooled with this post. Wonderful April Fools Day post! (being a liitle over a week late for that; Do you belong to a Procrastinators Club?)
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