The Free Libya air force?

Having already argued that the United States' participation in the Libya campaign is illegal and that the president has announced only very muddled aims, I'll not belabor those points again. Instead, I'll respond to retired British Gen. Sir Richard Dannatt's piece in The Telegraph today that "the unspoken mission is to topple Gaddafi."

In this case, the specified task is the protection of civilians, but the implied task – and the end-state to be achieved – must be the removal of Colonel Gaddafi and his regime and the creation of conditions whereby a government more acceptable to the majority of decent-minded Libyans could be put in place.

Given events on the ground and in the air over the last 24 hours, the specified task is proving hard enough, but the implied task is going to be that much more difficult, nevertheless it must be there in the back of the minds of the military planners even if it cannot be on the lips of the politicians.

This is a typically British point of view, where the military commanders offer a nudge and a wink to the politicians, communicating, "I know what you actually said you want, but we understand what you really mean."

Well, the vaunted strategic mastermindedness of the British general staff has been far overrated since the time of Gen. Douglas Haig in World War I. Gen. Dannatt, chief of the general staff from 2006-2009, does little in this article to restore it.

What Gen. Dannatt fails to point out is that the two major problems of the Libya campiagn are:

1. The aims are very limited and are unclear to begin with, and

2. Regime change is in fact merely an implied aim rather than an explicit one - and I would argue that toppling Qaddafi is not even an implied task. US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen said explicitly on FoxNews this morning that the mission does not include toppling Qaddafi.

The folly of relying on the UN Security Council for strategic direction is that it makes resolutions that are lowest-common-denominator consensus. The push is to get votes rather than establish clarity and purpose. Meanwhile, the US Congress continues to slumber through America's latest war. What should we do before a quagmire really sets in?

If indeed we want the rebels to succeed in taking over governance of the whole of Libya, instead of the rump state it claims to have established in the eastern part of the country, then the Allies' air forces must play the same role there that the US air forces played in the first months of the Afghanistan campaign: be the air force of the indigenous army to support its offensive operations against the government army.

However, Afghanistan's anti-Taliban Northern Alliance had significant advantages over the Libyan rebels. First, the Northern Alliance had a unified chain of command and years of experience, neither of which the Libyan rebels have. The Northern Alliance was already recognized in the world as the legitimate government of the whole of the country, including occupying Afghanistan's UN seat, while the Libyan rebels have no such advantage or existing legitimacy. The Northern Alliance was Muslim but not in the slightest Islamist; Islamist Talibanism was what they were fighting. And the Libyan rebels? Far from clear.

Nonetheless, now that we've jumped into the deep end of the pool, it's too late to wonder whether we should get wet. Politically and militarily, we're already drenched. Our only choice now is whether to leave Qaddafi in power or not. If, as all the Allies' political leaders are saying, there is no intent to topple Qaddafi, then we should halt operations immediately and go home. Of course, Qaddafi will simply resume attacking the rebels and killing civilians along the way.

But for how many years are we willing to patrol Libyan skies to stop it? As I wrote here: What are the conditions of success in Libya? What must happen before American combat forces are withdrawn? In other words, how will we know when we've won? (Is "winning" even a concept in this operation? It seems not.)

We should be sending special-operations forces to coordinate with the rebel commanders about using the Allies' air forces to support their offensive against Qaddafi. This is a civil war. If Qaddafi is not defeated then he has won. If the rebels do not win, they have lost.

I am extremely skeptical about the nature of the rebel alliance in the first place and have little expectation that if they replace Qaddafi in governing all Libya that they will be any friendlier to the United States than Qaddafi has been. Qaddafi sent a letter to President Obama late last week claiming that he was fighting al Qaeda in putting down the rebellion. Of course, this is typical Qaddafi bluster, but it is still true that eastern Libya, the heart of the rebellion, has been heavily Islamist for years. No Arab country sent more fighters per capita to Iraq to fight the US than Libya, and almost all of them came from eastern Libya.

Even so, we've made our bed with the rebels and now have no choice but to lie down in it with them. "In war there is no substitute for victory," admonished Gen. Douglas MacArthur to President Truman during the Korean War. Truman dismissed his words. So we still station troops in Korea and North Korea, undefeated, is a greater threat to the world than ever.

We cannot afford to make the same mistake in Libya.

But we will.