As for Yemen, it is an ungovernable snakepit, home to rival tribes, secessionists and a local branch of al-Qaeda. Nobody in his right mind would intervene there. ~The Economist
Of course, “intervening” in Yemen wouldn’t have to mean attacking Saleh’s regime or anything nearly so stupid. The U.S. might just stop supplying the Yemeni government with weapons, or at least suspend such supplies until Saleh stops using force against protesters. The argument that a Libyan war will keep protest movements in the region alive is a weak one to start with, but it gets even weaker when there is minimal effort to pressure allied governments to ease up on violent crackdowns at the same time that the U.S. is helping to escalate and intensify a conflict in Libya.
What exactly is the difference between Yemen and Libya? If Yemen is such an “ungovernable snakepit” in which no sane outsiders would ever intervene, what makes Libya any better? By all accounts, it is home to home to rival tribes, secessionists and al-Qaeda sympathizers. Far from providing a compelling defense of the war, this argument drives home that the war in Libya remains arbitrary, accidental, and ill-conceived.
Daniel, there are always the comforting words of Fareed Zakaria in Time to consider:
“There were Presidents who managed to keep military missions limited — Dwight Eisenhower — or even withdraw them when they were not working and live to fight another day: Kennedy with the Bay of Pigs; Reagan in Lebanon. They lived with partial success, stayed focused and husbanded America’s power and global position.”
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2061106,00.html#ixzz1HdUtUGDf
We should not forget those past military missions that “were not working” and only “partially successful”: the Bay of Pigs and Lebanon in 1983. After all, Kennedy survived the “partial success” of the Bay of Pigs in the first few months of his administraton to go on and greatly exand the number of “advisers” in South Vietnam. Maybe Obama can survive Libya to achieve similar success in Afghanistan.