Neo-Con Hawks Take Flight over Libya
The appeal, which came in the form of a letter signed by 40 policy analysts, including more than a dozen former senior officials who served under President George W. Bush, was organized and released by the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), a two-year-old neo-conservative group that is widely seen as the successor to the more-famous – or infamous – Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
In particular, it called for Washington to press
NATO to "develop operational plans to urgently deploy warplanes to
prevent the regime from using fighter jets and helicopter gunships
against civilians and carry out other missions as required; (and) move
naval assets into Libyan waters" to "aid evacuation efforts and prepare
for possible contingencies;" as well as "(e)stablish the capability to
disable Libyan naval vessels used to attack civilians."
Among the letter's signers were former Bush
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Bush's top global democracy and
Middle East adviser; Elliott Abrams; former Bush speechwriters Marc
Thiessen and Peter Wehner; Vice President Dick Cheney's former deputy
national security adviser, John Hannah, as well as FPI's four directors:
Weekly Standard editor William Kristol; Brookings Institution fellow
Robert Kagan; former Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority spokesman Dan
Senor; and former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and Ambassador to
Turkey, Eric Edelman.
It was Kagan and Kristol who co-founded and
directed PNAC in its heyday from 1997 to the end of Bush's term in 2005.
The letter comes amid growing pressure on Obama,
including from liberal hawks, to take stronger action against Gaddafi.
Two prominent senators whose foreign policy views
often reflect neo-conservative thinking, Republican John McCain and
Independent Democrat Joseph Lieberman, called Friday in Tel Aviv for
Washington to supply Libyan rebels with arms, among other steps,
including establishing a no-fly zone over the country.
On Wednesday, Obama said his staff was preparing a
"full range of options" for action. He also announced that Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton will meet fly to Geneva Monday for a foreign
ministers' meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Council to discuss possible
multilateral actions.
"They want to keep open the idea that there's a
mix of capabilities they can deploy – whether it's a no-fly zone,
freezing foreign assets of Gaddafi's family, doing something to prevent
the transport of mercenaries (hired by Gaddafi) to Libya, targeting
sanctions against some of his supporters to persuade them to abandon
him," said Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation, who took part in
a meeting of independent foreign policy analysts, including Abrams,
with senior National Security Council staff at the White House Thursday.
During the 1990s, neo-conservatives consistently
lobbied for military pressure to be deployed against so-called "rogue
states", especially in the Middle East.
After the 1991 Gulf War, for example, many
"neo-cons" expressed bitter disappointment that U.S. troops stopped at
the Kuwaiti border instead of marching to Baghdad and overthrowing the
regime of Saddam Hussein.
When the Iraqi president then unleashed his
forces against Kurdish rebels in the north and Shia insurgents in the
south, they – along with many liberal interventionist allies – pressed
President George H.W. Bush to impose "no-fly zones" over both regions
and take additional actions - much as they are now proposing for Libya -
designed to weaken the regime's military repressive capacity.
Those actions set the pattern for the 1990s. To
the end of the decade, neo-conservatives, often operating under the
auspices of a so-called "letterhead organization", such as PNAC, worked –
often with the help of some liberal internationalists eager to
establish a right of humanitarian intervention - to press President Bill
Clinton to take military action against adversaries in the Balkans – in
Bosnia and then Kosovo – as well as Iraq.
Within days of 9/11, for example, PNAC issued a
letter signed by 41 prominent individuals – almost all neo-
conservatives, including 10 of the Libya letter's signers – that called
for military action to "remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq", as
well as retaliation against Iran and Syria if they did not immediately
end their support for Hezbollah in Lebanon.
PNAC and its associates subsequently worked
closely with neo-conservatives inside the Bush administration, including
Abrams, Wolfowitz, and Edelman, to achieve those aims.
While neo-conservatives were among the first to
call for military action against Gaddafi in the past week, some
prominent liberals and rights activists have rallied to the call,
including three of the letter's signatories: Neil Hicks of Human Rights
First; Bill Clinton's human rights chief, John Shattuck; and Leon
Wieseltier of The New Republic, who also signed the PNAC Iraq letter 10
years ago.
In addition, Anne-Marie Slaughter, until last
month the influential director of the State Department's Policy Planning
office, cited the U.S.-NATO Kosovo campaign as a possible precedent.
"The international community cannot stand by and watch the massacre of
Libyan protesters," she wrote on Twitter. "In Rwanda we watched. In
Kosovo we acted."
Such comments evoked strong reactions from some military experts, however.
"I'm horrified to read liberal interventionists
continue to suggest the ease with which humanitarian crises and regional
conflicts can be solved by the application of military power," wrote
Andrew Exum, a counter-insurgency specialist at the Center for a New
American Security, whose Abu Muqawama blog is widely read here. "To
speak so glibly of such things reflects a very immature understanding of
the limits of force and the difficulties and complexities of
contemporary military operations."
Other commentators noted that a renewed coalition
of neo- conservatives and liberal interventionists would be much harder
to put together now than during the Balkan wars of the 1990s.
"We now have Iraq and Afghanistan as warning
signs, as well as our fiscal crisis, so I don't think there's an
enormous appetite on Capitol Hill or among the public for yet another
military engagement," said Charles Kupchan, a foreign policy specialist
at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
"I support diplomatic and economic sanctions, but
I would stop well short of advocating military action, including the
imposition of a no-fly zone," he added, noting, in any event, that most
of the killing in Libya this week has been carried out by mercenaries
and paramilitaries on foot or from vehicles.
"There may be some things we can do – such as
airlifting humanitarian supplies to border regions where there are
growing number of refugees, but I would do so only with the full support
of the Arab League and African Union, if not the U.N.," said Clemons.
"(The neo-conservatives) are essentially
pro-intervention, pro-war, without regard to the costs to the country,"
he told IPS. "They don't recognize that we're incredibly over-extended
and that the kinds of things they want us to do actually further weaken
our already-eroded stock of American power."
© 2011 Inter Press Service