Yes, the Syria crisis does, as is often noted, illustrate the greatest of the many follies associated with the frustrating saga of Western intervention in Libya. That is, of course, that by intervening in Libya ineffectively, we have now made it impossible for anyone to believe we will intervene anywhere else, even when, as in Syria’s case, more credible threats of punishing Assad would have been helpful arrows to have in our quiver. ~David Rothkopf

This puts far too much importance on the execution of the Libyan war. Like the already tiresome criticism of “leading from behind,” it assumes that if only the policy in question had been implemented more “effectively” it would be yielding much better results. Missing from this is any consideration of the real political constraints that limited how the Libyan war would be fought. The ineffectiveness of the Libyan war was to some extent guaranteed as soon as the allies adopted quite limited means to achieve maximalist goals. There is also no consideration that even greater constraints would have applied in the Syrian case. Perhaps most important, Rothkopf neglects that it is the pursuit of regime change in Libya itself that has made any U.N. action on Syria difficult if not impossible. That the U.S. and its allies have badly mismatched their goal and the means available to achieve it doesn’t help, but it isn’t the main problem. As many Security Council members see it, the Libyan war long ago exceeded the U.N. mandate in Libya, and they are wary of traveling down the same road again in a country that everyone acknowledges to be more strategically significant and potentially much more destabilizing to the region if the regime collapses.

When the Libyan intervention began, the administration went out of its way to state publicly that it was a one-time thing. The conditions that made a U.N.-sanctioned, Arab League-approved Libyan intervention possible did not and never would apply in Syria. For all the talk in favor of or against Libya setting a precedent for humanitarian intervention in the future, the intervening governments made it clear early on that they were not going to apply this precedent elsewhere anytime soon. Saying this publicly was probably a mistake, since it removed all ambiguity about what the Western response would be in Syria, but it was something that the administration in particular felt obliged to say to counter critics who feared that Libya would mark the beginning of a new round of interventions wherever an authoritarian government cracked down on its opposition. In the end, Western governments could not have made credible threats to “punish” Assad with military action. Intervening in Libya has created some additional obstacles to any coordinated response to the Syrian crackdown, but the major obstacles to military action would have been there either way.

Earlier in the post, Rothkopf writes:

The cost of this double standard is painfully apparent today. Just look at the headlines. In Syria, all America can do is make earnest but impotent shows of solidarity with opposition leaders and search for new adjectives to add to our denunciations of the illegitimate Assad regime. But because of our double standard, because of the fact that we dare not call out the Arab nations we have supported for so long at such a high cost, because we can’t count on them as our allies to do the right thing and add pressure on Assad to go, we are forced to treat this grave humanitarian crisis as though it were happening on the moon, far from any real ability of us to influence it.

Suppose that Washington did “call out” other Arab governments. That would get rid of the double standard, but it wouldn’t enhance the government’s ability to influence events in Syria one bit. The failure to “call out” these governments in the past did not prevent their support for Western intervention in Libya, because their support for the Libyan rebel cause was entirely opportunistic and directed against a leader they all loathed. Getting rid of the double standard and criticizing Arab allied governments in the same terms usually reserved for Assad or Gaddafi would not make them more willing to support action against Syria. If the U.S. were more consistent in its denunciations, it would simply leave the U.S. with more alienated or former allies, and its “earnest but impotent shows of solidarity” would be multiplied many times over.

NATO’s commitment to the mission faces a key test in September when the operation’s second 90-day mandate comes to an end.

The United States is floating the idea of asking NATO ambassadors to consider an open-ended mandate this time, sources familiar with the discussions told AFP [bold mine-DL].

“This would put our procedures in tune with our message,” said a senior NATO official. “It would be logical because we say that we will stay as long as it’s necessary.”

A NATO diplomat said an indefinite mandate would be a tough sell as some nations would require parliamentary approval.

“There will be a hot debate,” the diplomat said, adding that the alliance will likely back a renewal of at least 90 days, however, because “what is at stake is the credibility of NATO, so common sense will prevail.” ~AFP

Via NATO Source

If common sense prevailed, the vast majority of NATO governments not involved in bombing Libya would stop lending it political support by extending NATO’s mandate. The purpose of having limited mandates is presumably so that alliance members can reassess and reconsider whether it makes sense to continue a particular mission. An indefinite mandate would require alliance members to approve continuing the mission without having another opportunity to put an end to the it if it went on too long. Then again, if the alliance keeps approving 90-day extensions as a matter of course for the sake of “credibility,” the end result is much the same: a bad policy will be continued because it would be too embarrassing to put a stop to it.

Sen. Tom Coburn explains why he voted against the debt deal (via Suderman):

I voted against this agreement because it does nothing to address the real drivers of our debt. It eliminates no program, consolidates no duplicative programs, cuts no tax earmarks and reforms no entitlement program. The specter of default or a credit downgrade will still hang over our economy after this deal becomes law.

Politicians on both sides are misleading the country by calling a slowdown in the growth rate of new spending a “cut.” Spending will increase at a time when real cuts are necessary to make us live within our means, repair our economy and preserve our credit rating.

It is true that next year there will be a genuine cut of $7?billion when discretionary spending drops from $1.05?trillion to $1.043?trillion. But with our government borrowing $4.5?billion a day, that $7?billion is enough to fund the government for about 36 hours. And after our day and a half of restraint, spending will increase $830?billion over 10 years.

Supporters say the real savings will come when the joint committee the deal empowers makes recommendations to reduce the deficit by at least $1.2?trillion (as we increase the debt limit by the same amount). But the enforcement mechanism designed to force these hard decisions — across-the-board cuts to defense and nondefense programs — will never work. Congress will easily evade these caps. In the Senate, all it will take is 60 votes — the threshold for passing anything. Some have complained about defense cuts, but everyone in Washington knows those cuts can be avoided through supplemental or “emergency” spending bills.

If there is one fact proven again and again in the Middle East, it is that what happens in one country affects other countries as well. Back in 2003, for example, when U.S. forces had just taken down the Baathist regime in Iraq and pulled Saddam Hussein out of his spider hole, Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi was eager to deal away his weapons of mass destruction and support for terrorism in order to avoid a similar fate. ~Max Boot

If there is one falsehood repeated again and again about “the Middle East,” it is that invading Iraq prompted Gaddafi to make this deal. Paul Pillar set the record straight a few months ago:

The particular mistake among Krauthammer’s assertions I feel especially moved to correct—because I was personally involved in the relevant diplomacy—is that “Qadhafi was so terrified by what we did to Saddam & Sons that he plea-bargained away his weapons of mass destruction.” In fact, the Libyan ruler’s dramatic turnabout, in which he gave up his involvement in international terrorism and instead became a counterterrorist partner of the West, as well as giving up his unconventional weapons programs, had begun years earlier. Qadhafi was responding to the pressure and ostracism of multilateral sanctions and to the prospect of an improved international standing if he came clean about the bombing of Pan Am 103 and was willing to deal seriously with the United States on the issues of most concern to the United States. The secret negotiations that confirmed and codified all this were begun in 1999, under the Clinton Administration. It was the willingness of the United States to engage Qadhafi’s regime that made this all possible, not some prospect that military force would be used to remove him—let alone, as with the ouster of Saddam, that force would be used to oust him no matter how he tried to adjust his policies.

It isn’t surprising that hawks who despise diplomatic engagement would want to credit the Iraq war for Gaddafi’s decision to abandon unconventional weapons and terrorism, not least since war advocates’ claims about Iraqi WMDs and links to Al Qaeda were bogus, but it is completely untrue. Ending Libya’s international isolation in exchange for Gaddafi’s concessions achieved far more for counter-terrorism and non-proliferation than the Iraq war, and it did so at little or no cost to the U.S. and our European allies. It was one of the few genuine foreign policy successes of the Bush administration, and it was remarkable for being so unlike Bush administration policy toward other authoritarian pariah states.

But for all the justified focus on Syria, the single event that would most help bring down the Assads would be the fall of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya. It still isn’t clear today if the lesson of the Arab Spring is that dictators are doomed or that dictators willing to shoot peaceful protesters can win. Once Gadhafi goes, the oxygen Libya is sucking from the Arab struggle for democracy will circulate again. The NATO effort—however poorly implemented—will have finally been a success, and threats of possible military action to protect civilians, especially refugees, will have some credibility. ~Elliott Abrams

Threats of military action against Syria aren’t going to have any credibility, because Assad and everyone else will understand them to be empty threats. France has ruled out military intervention in Syria, it is hard to imagine that Turkey will have any interest in hastening Syria’s collapse (which is what military action would accomplish), and there is no appetite in the U.S. for a fourth war in a predominantly Muslim country. Britain’s military is badly overstretched as it is, Libya has badly dented the government’s credibility at home, and there will be little enthusiasm for another campaign so soon. There will certainly be no appeal from the Arab League. Members of the Security Council may be willing to discuss Syria in the future, but authorizing military action will be out of the question for those members that see how the Libyan intervention has evolved in ways they don’t like. That will remain the case whether or not Gaddafi falls from power.

I won’t go so far as to say that Gaddafi’s fall would have no influence on events in Syria, but we have heard many times that the Libyan war will send a message to other authoritarian governments, and they never seem to receive the message that Western governments are trying to send them. Attacking Libya was supposed to deter Assad and others like him from brutally repressing anti-regime protesters. That obviously didn’t happen. Now toppling Gaddafi will supposedly send the message that Assad’s days are numbered, but it’s not clear why that would be the case. Regime change in Libya has become possible only because of outside forces. The reality that the rebels in Libya desperately needed Western intervention to avoid defeat is a kind of encouragement for Assad. The “lesson” Assad has probably taken from this is that Gaddafi was exposed to intervention because he had sufficiently alienated all of the states that would have normally opposed foreign intervention. As long as Syria does not lose all of its powerful patrons, it will not be exposed in the same way.

The Syrian opposition won’t be able to count on the same assistance, and so the “lesson” of Libya will be that a weak opposition won’t succeed unless it has foreign patrons. For their part, Syrian opposition leaders flatly reject foreign military intervention in their country. If the Syrian opposition doesn’t want military intervention, it probably doesn’t want Western governments to issue threats of military action. Once we understand this, we can see that Gaddafi’s fall is not the “single event that would most help bring down the Assads.” It will have no significant effect on the outcome in Syria.

Sens. Kirk, Lieberman, and Gillibrand are sponsoring new sanctions legislation that would target foreign companies that do business with Syria’s oil and gas sector (via Rubin). Sen. Kirk states on his Senate website:

Sanctions on individuals or entities include prohibition on certain export licenses, blocking access to U.S. financial institutions and markets and federal contracts to violators, and imposing a three-year ban on government contracts against companies who falsely claim they do not conduct business with Syria. Currently, the U.S. bans most export and import trade with Syria, but sanctions do not extend to foreign companies.

Unlike sanctions on Iran, these sanctions appear to be welcomed by the Syrian opposition. Like other sanctions regimes, it has the potential to create hardships for the population without dealing the crippling blow that its advocates expect. The Financial Timesreports:

But European officials maintain that hitting the oil sector would provoke criticism that sanctions are hurting the livelihood of the Syrian people. “We’re keen that sanctions are targeted to companies financing the Assad regime, the justification for adding names [or entities] has to be watertight,” said a European official. “The US has greater appetite for oil sanctions but they [the sanctions] also won’t affect American companies,” the official added.

Activists insist that oil profits are bankrolling the crackdown, and that cutting off the supply would not hurt the Syrian people. “We don’t get a penny from the oil,” said one protester in the Damascus suburbs.

But while Syria is not economically dependent on oil in the way that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was, analysts warn that an oil boycott could provoke wider damage if it did not succeed in accelerating the regime’s demise, and such measures were difficult to reverse once in place.

Benjamin Friedman explains why the possible reductions in military spending are unlikely to materialize:

The deal’s legislation offers two kinds of potential defense cuts. First, it caps “security” spending at $684 billion for this fiscal year and $686 for the next. After that, there is no security cap; all discretionary spending is under one cap.

This process will barely cut anything. 2011 spending on the categories that the bill counts as security—the Pentagon, State, foreign aid, the Department of Homeland Security, and the discretionary spending for Veterans—is only $4.5 billion above the 2012 cap and $2.5 billion above the 2013 cap. So this method of cuts guarantees less than $10 billion in security savings. And none of these cuts need be from the Pentagon; the other security agencies could absorb them. You get a slightly higher saving estimate using the bill’s accounting method, which compares its future spending to the Congressional Budget Office’s latest projections.

The White House claims that the security caps will generate $350 billion in savings from base (non-war) defense spending over ten years. That number, contained in a White House press release and repeated in countless media reports, is a PR invention. It replaces the also phony $400 billion in defense cuts that the President recently proposed over twelve years. The administration produced the $350 billion figure, I’m told, by projecting security spending at the capped level across the decade, even after the caps expire, and counting as savings the difference between that spending trajectory and CBO projections, which assume growth above inflation. Then they assigned most of the savings to defense. The total is nonsense because the bill neither holds down security spending after two years nor offers any basis to assign the Pentagon a portion of those imaginary savings.

The second set of potential defense cuts occur automatically if Congress fails to enact an additional $1.2 trillion in savings recommended by the Joint Congressional Committee that the bill establishes. This sequestration process could cut actual defense spending (budget function 050) by up to $534 billion over nine years—half of the $1.2 billion that the bill automatically cuts minus lowered debt-servicing costs. The sequestration amount drops by whatever savings Congress generates from the Joint Committee’s recommendations. Because none of those cuts must come from defense, this process also guarantees no defense cuts.

Just as the maximum $850 billion in reductions would not represent the “gutting” of the military, the deal that created this process is hardly proof of a “return of isolationism” as one Democracy in America blogger has put it in one of the laziest posts of the year. Perhaps the reason why there aren’t that many Republican complaints about military spending cuts is that these cuts will probably never happen.

Simon Jenkins notices that there has been more accountability in Britain for the phone-hacking scandal than there has been for the Libyan war:

Parliament, silent and feeble over interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, has spent three weeks beating its chest over the Murdoch press, even summoning the prime minister back from abroad to answer for his actions. It never summoned him over Libya, where every night people die. Parliament fiddles while Libya burns.

This is something that occurred to me when the phone-hacking story was at its height. Cameron was associated with some disreputable Murdoch people who engaged in criminal activity before he employed one of them, and the press was filled with damning editorials and scathing criticism of Cameron’s bad judgment. Murdoch, too, has faced more scrutiny and accountability for the illegal activities of his employees than he ever did when his media empire was pushing for the invasion of Iraq. As outrageous as the phone-hacking scandal was, as far as I know no one ever died as a result, and Cameron’s personal responsibility in the entire scandal was negligible if he had any at all. When it came to deciding to initiate a war against another government, Cameron was there leading the charge. Instead of grilling him over his planning (or lack thereof) for how the war would be won or what would follow the conclusion of the war Parliament lamely acquiesced in everything his government has done. Then again, at least Cameron sought and received approval from Parliament for his misadventure. As the Libyan war drags on into day 137, the same cannot be said for Obama.

Fouad Ajami has a new op-ed expanding on the two recurring, tedious memes about Obama administration foreign policy: Obama does not believe in American exceptionalism, and Obama has “failed” to support the Arab Spring with sufficient enthusiasm (via Duss). Ajami and Ambassador Charles Hill previewed this silly argument in a conversation with National Review‘s Peter Robinson last week. According to Hill:

It’s going to hell. Because primarily, frankly, the United States has stepped back from its support of freedom and democracy…

It is debatable that the U.S. has “stepped back” at all. Arguably, the U.S. has been too much of the wrong thing (i.e., bombing Libya), but the idea that it has “stepped back” is misleading. What is clearly untenable is the claim that this is the primary reason why the so-called Arab Spring is “going to hell.” A much more plausible explanation is that the so-called Arab Spring is faltering because of the inherent weaknesses of the protest movements, the staying power of entrenched interests, and the deterioration of some of the protests into violent conflicts.

Ajami weaves Hill’s nonsense together with the more well-established lie that Republicans have circulated for the last two years:

Asked whether he believed in the school of “American exceptionalism” that sees America as “uniquely qualified to lead the world,” he gave a lawyerly answer: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” We were not always going to be right, he added, “all have to compromise and that includes us.”

Events would supply evidence of Mr. Obama’s break with the history of America’s faith in liberty in distant lands. The herald of change was at heart a man who doubted the ability of political freedom to skip borders, and to bring about the emancipation of peoples subjected to brutal tyrannies. The great upheaval in Iran in the first summer of his presidency exposed the flaws and contradictions of the Obama diplomacy.

A people had risen against their tyrannical rulers, but Mr. Obama was out to conciliate these rulers. America’s support wouldn’t have altered that cruel balance of force on the ground [bold mine-DL]. But henceforth it would become part of the narrative of liberty that when Iran rose in rebellion, the pre-eminent liberal power sat out a seminal moment in Middle Eastern history.

Ajami only quoted the first part of Obama’s answer, since the rest of the answer would demonstrate how dishonest Ajami is being in his representation. Obama went on to say this:

I’m enormously proud of my country and its role and history in the world. If you think about the site of this summit and what it means, I don’t think America should be embarrassed to see evidence of the sacrifices of our troops, the enormous amount of resources that were put into Europe postwar, and our leadership in crafting an Alliance that ultimately led to the unification of Europe. We should take great pride in that.

And if you think of our current situation, the United States remains the largest economy in the world. We have unmatched military capability. And I think that we have a core set of values that are enshrined in our Constitution, in our body of law, in our democratic practices, in our belief in free speech and equality, that, though imperfect, are exceptional.

Now, the fact that I am very proud of my country and I think that we’ve got a whole lot to offer the world does not lessen my interest in recognizing the value and wonderful qualities of other countries, or recognizing that we’re not always going to be right, or that other people may have good ideas, or that in order for us to work collectively, all parties have to compromise and that includes us.

And so I see no contradiction between believing that America has a continued extraordinary role in leading the world towards peace and prosperity and recognizing that that leadership is incumbent, depends on, our ability to create partnerships because we create partnerships because we can’t solve these problems alone.

As for Iran, the protests in 2009 and afterwards weren’t a rebellion aimed at toppling the regime, and the protest movement didn’t want U.S. help. It is unusual that Ajami acknowledges that U.S. support would have made no difference. Most critics of Obama’s response to the Iranian protests in 2009 promote the fiction that the Iranian government might have been overthrown or seriously destabilized if only the administration had thrown its rhetorical support fully behind the protesters, but Ajami has conceded that this was not going to happen. So there isn’t much reason to credit the idea that the fortunes of the so-called Arab Spring depend on the extent of U.S. backing for protest movements.

If it is possible, the rest of Ajami’s argument is even harder to take seriously. Duss put it well when he said:

It should be obvious that the idea that Ambassador Ford’s warm reception by embattled Syrian protesters disproves American unpopularity in the region is ridiculous on its face. Opinions may vary on how, exactly, the U.S. should proceed with regard to the Arab uprisings, but that there is widespread hostility among Arabs to American intervention and interference in the Middle East is simply not a matter of serious dispute.

Hawkish democratists such as Ajami inevitably put too much faith in the importance of U.S. signals of support for dissidents and protest movements, because they cannot believe that U.S. support could be seen as anything other than desirable and welcome. The reality that a vast majority of Syrians views the U.S. unfavorably must be inconceivable. That the vast majority of Syrians views the U.S. this way because of many of the policies that Ajami and his fellow hawks endorse is even harder to accept, and so they are reduced to concocting fantasies about a pessimistic Obama who rejects American exceptionalism as a catch-all explanation.

P.S. We might wish for a pessimistic Obama who appreciates the limits of American power, but there has so far been no sign of him.