History shows that the U.S. government earnestly believes military intervention and war can solve any problem.
“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” stipulates the unbreakable Law of the Instrument. The military is the imperial hammer; any problem empire sees, it crushes with that hammer.
Even while it is presently waging wars (some of which have not officially been declared) in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia, the U.S. military is itching to crush a few more nails in Libya, just over four years after it pummeled the North African nation.
“The Pentagon is ramping up intelligence-gathering in Libya as the Obama administration draws up plans to open a third front in the war against the Islamic State,” the New York Times reported this week. “This significant escalation is being planned without a meaningful debate in Congress about the merits and risks of a military campaign that is expected to include airstrikes and raids by elite American troops.”
“That is deeply troubling,” the Times editorial board conceded. “A new military intervention in Libya would represent a significant progression of a war that could easily spread to other countries on the continent. It is being planned as the American military burrows more deeply into battlegrounds in Syria and Iraq, where American ground troops are being asked to play an increasingly hands-on role in the fight.”
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told the Times that military officials are “looking to take decisive military action” against the growing presence of ISIS in Libya.
But in order to defeat ISIS, we should be asking ourselves: Why is ISIS even there in the first place? The answer, of course, is the 2011 U.S.-backed NATO war on Libya, which was led by Hillary Clinton.
Creating your enemies
The Obama administration authorized the military to wage war on Libya on shaky legal grounds. Lawyer turned Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald argued at the time that it was illegal. Former congresswoman Cynthia McKinney wrote an entire book detailing why.
The NATO war overthrew dictator Muammar Gadhafi and destroyed the government, leaving a power vacuum, large chunks of which were — surprise, surprise — filled by extremist groups including ISIS.
Numerous militant groups are fighting for control of the country. Some of the extremist rebel groups the U.S. previously supported have turned against it. The internationally recognized government in the east is fighting ISIS affiliates in the north, along with numerous Islamist rebels in the west and tribal militias in the southwest.
The project Libya Body Count, which creates very conservatives estimates of casualty figures based on media reports, documented more than 4,300 deaths in 2014 and 2015.
Clinton was grilled by Republicans for her response to the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, but what was largely ignored is the fact that downtown Benghazi is now in ruins; enormous swaths of the city are under the control of Ansar al-Sharia, an extremist Salafi Islamist militia that the U.S. deems a terrorist organization.Before the U.S.’s first war in Libya, ISIS was not present in the country. That is to say, it was the disastrous U.S.-backed NATO war that brought ISIS into Libya. What would possibly make the military think another war is a good idea?
The same is true of Iraq. It was the U.S. war on Iraq — which the U.N. explicitly said was illegal — that led to the rise of ISIS. Al-Qaida was not even in ISIS before American troops invaded. Now not just al-Qaida, but its even more violent and demented sibling has metastasized throughout the region like a cancer.
Mission creep
There is a term for all of this: mission creep. There are countless examples — and one need not look far back historically.
The Obama administration insisted throughout the first half of 2015 that it would not deploy ground troops to Syria and Iraq. First it just had to carry out airstrikes to save the Yazidis, and we were assured there would be no boots on the ground. Then it just had to carry out months of airstrikes to support groups fighting ISIS, and we were assured there would be no boots on the ground — well, except for those military advisors on the ground. Now, of course, the U.S. is moving toward deploying boots on the ground.
The trajectory in the disastrous U.S. war in Afghanistan has been the same. President Obama promised countless times he would end the war in Afghanistan by 2014. He was reelected on the promise — which he subsequently broke, twice, expanding the war in 2014 and then, in 2015, announcing that U.S. troops would remain until 2017.
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.
Donate
1 Comment
What Norton says is true of course. And the fact is that the hammer has not succeeded in any of its military adventures since WW2 unless you consider the great “victories” against Panama and Grenada.