The media coverage of the State Department's internal review of the Benghazi attack appears to be burying the lede.

Several of the accounts I read focused on the apparent paradox of, on the one hand, a report sharply critical of senior (actually, mid/senior-level, since the finger appears to be pointed no higher than the assistant secretary level) State Department officials for the "grossly inadequate" security that contributed to the death of the ambassador, and, on the other hand, a report that recommended no extra accountability. As the Drudge headline has it: "The Buck Stops... Nowhere." The media accounts also cover other aspects of the report, for instance that it further repudiates the infamous "talking points" that the administration was peddling in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy. But the focus of media attention clearly is on the question of accountability.

The apparent paradox was sufficiently puzzling that I decided to read the unclassified version of the report itself with one question in mind: "Why did the State Department managers tolerate such inadequate security?" One theory is that the administration was so wedded to the rosy scenario in Libya and the "lead from behind/light footprint" that they systematically misread intelligence and operational requirements to fit their preconceived image of reality. Social scientists call this a motivated bias, and I have long thought this was at work in the administration's handling of the aftermath of the Benghazi attack. Perhaps it also shaped how they went into the problem in the first place.

The State Department report provides tantalizing hints that this might be the case:

"...the Special Mission was not a high priority for Washington when it came to security-related requests..." p. 5

"...Special Mission Benghazi's uncertain future after 2012 and its 'non-status' as a temporary..." p. 5

"...the successful nature of Libya's July 7, 2012, national elections -- which exceeded expectations -- renewed Washington's optimism in Libya's future..." pp. 16-17

"...Simply put, in the months leading up to September 11, 2012, security in Benghazi was not recognized and implemented as a 'shared responsibility' in Washington, resulting in stove-piped discussions and decisions on policy and security. Key decisions, such as the extension of the State Department presence in Benghazi until December 2012, or non-decisions in Washington, such as the failure to establish standards for Benghazi and to meet them, or the lack of a cohesive staffing plan, essentially set up Benghazi as a floating TDY platform with successive principal officers often confined to the SMC due to threats and inadequate resources, and RSOs resorting to field-expedient solutions to correct security shortfalls." pp. 29-30

"...The Board found, however, that Washington showed a tendency to overemphasize the positive impact of physical security upgrades, which were often field-expedient improvements to a profoundly weak platform, while generally failing to meet Benghazi's repeated requests to augment the numbers of TDY DS personnel...." p. 33

"...The Board found that there was a tendency on the part of policy, security and other U.S. government officials to rely heavily on the probability of warning intelligence and on the absence of specific threat information. The result was possibly to overlook the usefulness of taking a hard look at accumulated, sometimes circumstantial information, and instead to fail to appreciate threats and understand trends, particularly based on increased violence and the targeting of foreign diplomats and international organizations in Benghazi...." p. 38

These and other similar data points could be pieces of a mosaic that reflects an administration too quick to declare mission accomplished and move on.  

But the authors of the State Department report have a different ultimate culprit in mind, and they are not shy about naming it: Congress.  

After a brief preamble, the report begins with two overarching context-setters:

(1) The Diplomatic Security mission is very hard these days and is doing a great job overall.

(2) The State Department has not gotten the resources it needs. Here is the money quote:

"For many years the State Department has been engaged in a struggle to obtain the resources necessary to carry out its work, with varying degrees of success. This has brought about a deep sense of the importance of husbanding resources to meet the highest priorities, laudable in the extreme in any government department. But it has also had the effect of conditioning a few State Department managers to favor restricting the use of resources as a general orientation.

There is no easy way to cut through this Gordian knot, all the more so as budgetary austerity looms large ahead. At the same time, it is imperative for the State Department to be mission-driven, rather than resource-constrained -- particularly when being present in increasingly risky areas of the world is integral to U.S. national security. The recommendations in this report attempt to grapple with these issues and err on the side of increased attention to prioritization and to fuller support for people and facilities engaged in working in high risk, high threat areas. 

The solution requires a more serious and sustained commitment from Congress to support State Department needs, which, in total, constitute a small percentage both of the full national budget and that spent for national security. One overall conclusion in this report is that Congress must do its part to meet this challenge and provide necessary resources to the State Department to address security risks and meet mission imperatives."  p. 3 (emphasis added)

In other words, the executive branch did not create the conditions for this tragedy by fundamentally misreading Libya; rather, Congress created the conditions by fundamentally underfunding the State Department.

I believe that the State Department does need more resources, so I am a comparatively sympathetic audience for this argument. I wonder, however, whether Congress might be more sympathetic to the argument that the administration bears more blame than the authors of the report seem prepared to assign.

Update: Since I filed my post, three of the State Department management figures most directly implicated in the report have resigned. Perhaps that resolves the accountability paradox, but it doesn't resolve the deeper question that animated my original post: What set the conditions for this mismanagement? 

In his second debate with Governor Romney, President Obama tried to convey the idea that his administration had treated the raid on the Benghazi consulate as if it were terrorism from the start. This was a hard sell to anyone who listened to the administration's messaging on Libya over the past month, but many Obama supporters seem inclined to buy it.

I don't buy it, but I am proud to say that I predicted it, several weeks ago.  

Here is how I sketched out the evolution of the Obama administration's actual messaging, and the rationale behind it. I think it stands up pretty well (unlike most other things you write, I hear the pseudonymous trolls telling me) some two-plus weeks later:

"Based on what is presently known, the following 5-step scenario seems far more plausible to me:

Initial reports were confusing (initial reports are always confusing) and left open myriad possibilities, ranging from the fairly benign (Youtube-inspired hooligans got out of control) to the most malignant (Zawahiri exacted his revenge).

Romney's initial messaging on the 9/11 anniversary attacks went over poorly and the media outrage, partly real and partly manufactured, eclipsed coverage of the underlying attacks.

The Obama team did everything they could to keep the media focus on Romney's stumbles. Partly this involved tut-tutting about what Romney said, but mostly this required not feeding an alternate storyline that indicated the attacks might have been linked to a resurgent Al Qaeda. They could accomplish the latter simply by repeating what was known -- there was a lot of Youtube-inspired hooliganism -- and keeping quiet about anything that might simply be suspected, even as those suspicions grow stronger and stronger.

The Obama team also responded in typical campaign mode: They protected the candidate and did not say anything that would raise doubts about Obama's foreign policy and national security prowess until the facts accumulated to the point where some concession was necessary. At that point, they conceded the minimum and insisted on waiting until the outcome of a (hopefully lengthy) investigation that (again hopefully) will not report out until well past election day.

The Obama team was bolstered in steps 3 and 4 by one further factor: wishful thinking. As David Ignatius spells out so clearly: "The administration has a lot invested in the public impression that al-Qaeda was vanquished when Osama bin Laden was killed on May 2, 2011. Obama would lose some of that luster if the public examined whether al Qaeda is adopting a new, Zawahiri-led strategy of interweaving its operations with the unrest sweeping the Arab world." In the language of political science, the Obama team had a strong motivated bias that colored the way they interpreted ambiguous data. They were receptive to information that reinforced what they wanted to believe and viewed with suspicion and skepticism information that challenged this view.

Given that 5-step scenario, the only tricky thing for the administration was navigating the evolving messaging, which they accomplished in three moves:

Initial message: A rowdy crowd was enraged by video, not a resurgent Al Qaeda.

Interim message: Anytime a ambassador is killed by armed thugs that is self-evidently a kind of terrorism.

Eventual message: We have long called the murderous attacks terrorism and we are learning more about the degree to which networks of violent extremists, some of them inspired by AQ, but not tactically controlled by AQ central, helped in those attacks."

Obama got to the "eventual message" in the town hall debate, and then built a firewall around it with self-righteous outrage at the suggestion he would ever play politics with national security. I think he is there to stay. Unless the moderator challenges him, I would be surprised if Obama  provided a more candid response at the upcoming foreign policy debate.

Vice-President Biden may have fired up his base with his sneering condescension last night, but I wonder whether he may have unintentionally fired up others as well. 

Before the debate had reached the 10 minute mark, FP.com's own Josh Rogin pointed out that Biden told a whopper on Benghazi security. This is not a trivial matter, and when even mainstream reporters are saying that Biden has some "clean up of his own to do today on Libya," Biden must know he made a grave mistake.  

Moreover, as this careful reconstruction makes clear, the administration faces very serious and troubling questions about the way they have misled the public on what happened in Libya.

The administration desperately needs a scapegoat to keep this scandal as far from the White House as possible. And that is why I think that, beyond Biden's fact-challenged statements, the more consequential thing he did last night was to try to make the intelligence community (IC) the scapegoat (and I am not the only one who picked up on this). Based on this interview with Obama's deputy campaign manager, the fingering of the IC appears to be a deliberate, coordinated strategy by the politicos -- and it is very risky.

First, as numerous fact-checkers have already pointed out, the administration did not merely go with whatever the IC told them. They went with whatever was the most politically useful story at the time. The Obama campaign keeps complaining about how Romney-Ryan have politicized this issue, but in fact the Obama campaign has played this as a political issue from the very start.

Second, the IC can fight back. Frustration has been mounting for years within the IC over the way the administration has politicized intelligence. At some point, that frustration could bubble over into retaliatory leaks and damaging revelations.

So far, the Obama campaign has been careful not to finger a specific person as the scapegoat.Last night, Biden kept it vague. But the talking points Biden was hiding behind were CIA talking points and the head of the CIA is David Petraeus, undoubtedly the person in the administration the American people trust most on national security -- and yet, paradoxically, perhaps the person the hardened partisans in the Obama White House trust the least. I have been surprised that Petraeus has not personally been drawn into the fight thus far, but I wonder if he heard Biden calling him out last night.

The CIA was not the only national security institution Biden took aim at last night. Even more troubling was the damage he did to civil-military relations, which I will take up in a later post.

Prior to the terrorist attack that killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and the subsequent anti-U.S. demonstrations throughout the Muslim world, the conventional wisdom held that President Obama was unassailable on foreign policy during the election campaign. Yet rather than tout the administration's successes -- which have produced an edge in polls as to who the public trusts on foreign affairs -- the Obama campaign and its allies seem more eager to warn voters that Mitt Romney is planning to bring back George W. Bush's foreign policy than tout the president's "successes." "Of Romney's 24 special advisors on foreign policy, 17 served in the Bush-Cheney administration," wrote Adam Smith, the most senior Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee -- and that's "a frightening prospect." Similarly, during the Democratic convention, Senator John Kerry said: "[Romney] has all these [neoconservative] advisers who know all the wrong things about foreign policy. He would rely on them." Now, noted foreign policy scholar Maureen Dowd has written not one, but TWO columns decrying "neocon" influence over Romney's foreign policy.

This is an especially odd line of attack given that most of the Obama administration's foreign policy achievements are little more than extensions of Bush administration policies.

President Obama frequently boasts that he fulfilled his promise to "end the war" in Iraq. In reality, he merely adhered to the U.S.-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement negotiated and signed by the Bush administration in 2008. What's more, as a senator Mr. Obama opposed the 2007 surge of U.S. forces that made this agreement possible. The Obama administration's only policy innovation on Iraq was last year's failure to broker a new strategic framework agreement with Iraq, a deal they had previously insisted was necessary and achievable.

Then there's the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. To be sure, the president deserves credit for launching the raid against the advice of so many of his advisors, including Vice President Joe Biden. But Mr. Obama fails to acknowledge that the intelligence chain that led to the Abbottabad raid began with detainee interrogations at Guantanamo Bay and CIA "black" sites that he vowed to close upon taking office.

What about drones? President Obama deserves credit for the successful "drone war" against al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan, but the uptick in U.S. drone attacks there began in July 2008. The Obama administration's continuation of this policy is an acknowledgment -- unspoken, of course -- that the Bush administration was correct to treat the war on terror as an actual war rather than a global law-enforcement campaign.

On Iran, President Obama brags that "Iran is under greater pressure than ever before, "and "few thought that sanctions could have an immediate bite on the Iranian regime." Putting aside the fact that these sanctions were imposed upon the president by a 100-0 Senate vote, and that Obama's State Department has granted exemptions to all 20 of Iran's major oil-trading partners, this triumphalism ignores that the Bush administration worked for years to build multilateral support for sanctions (both at the United Nations and in national capitals). The Obama administration broke from this effort for two years, attempting instead to engage the Iranian leadership. When this outreach predictably failed, the Obama administration claimed that Tehran had proven itself irrevocably committed to its nuclear program -- precisely the conclusion the Bush administration had reached years earlier.

Yes, there's more to the Obama administration's foreign-policy case, but the other "achievements" are muddled ones. Even before the Benghazi attack, post-Qaddafi Libya was so insecure that the State Department issued a travel advisory warning U.S. citizens against "all but essential travel to Libya," and NATO's intervention in Libya raised the inconvenient question of why the administration intervened to alleviate a "medieval siege" on Benghazi but sits silently as tens of thousands of civilians are slaughtered in Syria.

In Afghanistan, the surge ordered by President Obama in December 2009 had the operational effect intended. But even in taking this step, the president undermined the policy by rejecting his military commander's request for 40,000 troops, declaring the surge would end according to a fixed timeline rather than conditions on the ground, and announcing the withdrawal of the last 20,000 surge forces before the Afghan fighting season ended (but before the November election). The Bush administration veterans advising Governor Romney surely know more about the importance of seeing a policy through to its fruition.

The Bush administration made many foreign policy mistakes during its eight years in office, most notably the conduct of the Iraq War after the fall of Baghdad. And Governor Romney still needs to provide details demonstrating why he would be a better steward of U.S. national security than President Obama. But the potential devolution of the Arab Spring into anti-U.S. violence demonstrates why both candidates owe the American people a serious discussion about foreign and defense policy. Hopefully in the election campaign's waning weeks the Democrats will offer much more than the ad hominen anti-Bush attacks they have provided to date.

Benjamin Runkle served in the Department of Defense and National Security Council during the Bush administration, and is author of Wanted Dead or Alive: Manhunts from Geronimo to bin Laden.

President Obama is right to invite France's new president to the White House in the coming weeks for a series of exploratory talks. The Obama team will understandably put a positive spin on such a visit, but I bet the motivation is as much fear as opportunity. From the point of view of American foreign policy, I think Doyle McManus has it right: Obama is sure going to miss Sarkozy.

Sarkozy was the indispensable key figure in two of the more prominent policies that Obama officials tout as "successes." First, it was Sarkozy, not Obama, who led on Libya. Without Sarkozy (and British Prime Minister Cameron) pushing the agenda, it is likely that Obama's initial policy of refusing to intervene in Libya would have held. Obama joined the bandwagon somewhat belatedly, something that even White House spinners couldn't ignore, thus giving rise to the infamous "lead from behind" frame.

Likewise, it has been Sarkozy (and the U.S. Congress) more than the Obama administration out in front on using economic coercion to confront Iran's nuclear ambitions. Obama's innovative contribution to Iran policy was the unsuccessful attempt to hold unconditional talks with the Iranian leaders in 2009. However, with Sarkozy pushing hard from one end and the U.S. Congress pushing hard from the other end, eventually, after a year or so delay, the Obama administration did join in to impose tighter sanctions.

Thus, Sarkozy may well have been the indispensable figure in two of the more prominent talking points on Obama's brag sheet. If his French partner had been more of a spoiler in the mold of Sarkozy's predecessor, Jacques Chirac, is it plausible to think that President Obama would have intervened in Libya or secured new rounds of multilateral sanctions on Iran?  

Finding out what kind of partner President Hollande will be is a high priority for President Obama. And finding that out may also tell us some important things about President Obama. To borrow a sports analogy that the president would doubtless understand, we may learn that Obama is not as good a point guard when the other guys on his team can't or won't run the fast break.

The Arab League has finally begun to take the well-being of Arab peoples as seriously -- more seriously -- than its cherished dream of Arab unity. The League negotiated with Syria's dictator to produce an agreement Assad would cease violence against the people of Syria. When Assad violated his side of the deal, the Arab League held him to account, decrying his continuing aggression. At Saturday's League meeting, they formally sanctioned Syria's leader for continued violence against the Syrian people and not honoring his promises of political dialogue and release of political prisoners. They called for a meeting of Syrian dissidents and urged consensus on them to more effectively pressure Assad. The Arab League set a clock ticking for Assad to comply; if he does not within four days, further political and economic sanctions will go into effect.

The only previous time the Arab League has been willing to call out a member government was after the United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Libya's Muammar al-Qaddafi as he closed in on Benghazi. Qaddafi was a special case, having attempted to assassinate heads of other Arab governments. And the Arab League was following a U.N. lead;  in taking action on Syria, the Arab League has led where Russia and China prevent condemnation at the United Nations.

These actions constitute an admirable strategy of escalating and increasingly public pressure by regional governments. The vote in the twenty-two member Arab League was 18 condemnations of Syria (only Yemen and Lebanon voted to shield Syria; Iraq abstained). Technically, League rules require unanimity. Yet, as NATO did during the Kosovo war, the Arab League found a way to express its will rather than let itself be hamstrung by technicalities.

The shame for Americans is that the Arab League, so long a regressive force in the politics of the region, has a better Syria policy than does the Obama administration. 3,500 Syrians have been killed by their government this year; during that time, our government has adjusted its position from considering Bashar al-Assad a reformer -- Secretary Hillary Clinton's memorable phrase -- to saying "he cannot deny his people's legitimate demands indefinitely." 

The "Obama Doctrine," as the White House has termed its choices on Libya, gives to Russia and China a veto -- literally -- on U.S. support for freedom movements and human rights activists. This is disgraceful. Without a U.N. Security Council Resolution, the Obama administration will not consider significant support to the Syrians engaged in a fight to protect themselves from a despot.

Clinton outlined the rationale for treating the Syrian case different from the Obama Doctrine: "our choices also reflect other interests in the region with a real impact on Americans' lives - including our fight against al Qaeda; defense of our allies; and a secure supply of energy." One might ask the Secretary of State which of these interests would be in conflict with working to rein in the barbarism of an enemy of the United States who fosters terrorism and has killed 3,500 Syrians this year alone. Adding insult to injury, Clinton gave this explanation in a speech on promoting democracy.

Where the Arab League has been negotiating with Bashir al-Assad to curb his predations against the people of Syria, the Obama Administration fecklessly repeats that Assad must step down. And this from a President that insisted he would negotiate with anyone.

After a brave start by Ambassador Robert Ford in Syria, the State Department has recalled him because Syria is dangerous. Less so to an U.S. ambassador than to the people he was bearing witness for, though, and who now have no potent symbol of America's support for their cause. 

Withdrawing our ambassador is, in fact, the sadly appropriate symbol of Obama administration policy toward Syria. They pretend engagement but are unwilling to run risks in support of freedom. Instead they pontificate piously from a safe distance while others undertake the difficult, honorable work of bringing despots to their knees.

How fortunate are the people of Syria that they have the governments of Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Arab League to stand up for freedom and universal human rights; what a pity the Obama administration will not.

President Obama's statement supporting the action of the Arab League says it all: "the Arab League has demonstrated leadership in its effort to end the crisis and hold the Syrian government accountable."

Some weeks ago, Tom Ricks called me out for questioning NATO's Libya operation. I still have my doubts.

To begin with, the interim government is showing few signs of being "interim." In fact, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has just told the Libyan leadership that they must set a date for elections. She has also told them to honor the rule of law and not seek retribution against Muammar al-Qaddafi supporters. The regime appears to be doing just the opposite in both cases.

Many observers continue to question just who the Libyan leaders really are, and whether they are affiliated with Islamists. Whether those in power in Libya are Islamists, or whether Islamists will seize power, is simply unknowable at this time. Nevertheless, the new or emerging leaders of that country need not be Islamists to pursue policies antithetical to those of the United States. The policies of Iraqi leader Nouri al-Maliki, particularly vis-à-vis Iran and Syria, have been demonstrating that reality on a near-daily basis. 

In the meantime, in the face of a massive defense budget crisis, about which my Shadow Government colleagues rightly are debating, Washington continues to pour money into its Libyan adventure. DoD's latest estimate of expenditures, which runs through Sept. 30, already exceeds $1.1 billion. But this estimate does not include the cost of the F-15E that was downed in March, some $45 million, with a replacement cost that will be much higher. With operations still ongoing, the total cost of this exercise could well approach $1.5 billion. Some $375 million of this sum has already been "reprogrammed," meaning that the funds were taken from other, presumably important, DoD budget lines. The remainder is to be "reprioritized" within the baseline appropriation request, meaning, yet again, that other programs, previously considered sufficiently important to merit being included in the budget, no longer are all that important.

These sums do not, of course, include monies that will be spent to assist the reconstruction of Libya. It appears that Libyan bank accounts will not cover all reconstruction expenses such as programs to help Libya develop an appreciation for the rule of law, which, as noted above, its leaders still appear to lack.

The truth is that we have no idea what kind of country Libya will be in a year's time, nor who its leaders will be, nor what its posture towards the United States and its interests will be. What we do know is that the operation continues, the costs continue to mount up, and other defense programs are being sacrificed to meet those costs, and new expenditures can be expected down the road. All in all, it is hardly a pretty picture, and certainly not something about which one should call out others. 

Josh Rogin has a fascinating interview with White House national security communicator Ben Rhodes elsewhere on this site. To my eyes, it reads like the Obama Administration is continuing its unseemly end-zone dance of celebration over the toppling of Qaddafi. I understand their desire to get maximum credit while avoiding a "mission accomplished" photo-op that will come back to haunt them, and so far sympathetic reporters are obliging by reporting the braggadocio without editorializing about it much. But this interview dances close to the line of generating some "audio ops" that they may regret.

First, I am not sure that Rhodes has threaded the needle in terms of both taking credit for the things the administration did, without which this regime change would not have happened, and convincingly eschewing responsibility for whatever bad things happen from this point out. Rhodes tries to persuade the interviewer that there are only upsides to Obama's approach when in reality there are pros and cons. One of the cons is that the administration bears more responsibility for what happens next than it is willing to admit, while having less leverage over what happens next than it is willing to admit. In the long run, it may be the case that the pros will outweigh the cons in Libya, but there is a substantial amount of territory to cover between now and then and it is premature to declare this the model for all future operations. (By the way, I wish Rogin had asked Rhodes the obvious follow-up question: does this mean that the Obama Administration endorses the Doug Feith plan of light-footprint regime change in Iraq using Iraqi expats and rejects the conventional critique which holds that the Iraq operation unraveled because there were insufficient troops in the coalition invasion force and they did not establish sufficient order in the aftermath?)

Second, Rhodes continues a longstanding Democrat slur against the several dozen allies who fought, bled, and died at the American side in Afghanistan and Iraq:

Secondly, we put an emphasis on burden sharing, so that the U.S. wasn't bearing the brunt of the burden and so that you had not just international support for the effort, but also meaningful international contributions.

If I were a parent or loved one of any of the hundreds of allied soldiers who died -- according to iCasualties.org, some 179 UK troops alone in Iraq and 379 UK troops in Afghanistan -- the crack about "meaningful international contributions" would greatly anger me. In any case, it seems in exceptionally bad taste. I have never understood why Bush critics have gotten away with denigrating the contributions of allies in those two wars. Now that the critics are in office and directly responsible for maintaining good relations with our allies, I wish they would find more opportunities to praise the sacrifices that the allies made and make fewer derogatory comments about those coalition efforts.

The president of the United States makes almost unprecedented assertions of executive authority and launches a controversial war of choice* in the Middle East, targeting for regime change a dictator accused of committing atrocities against his own citizens, producing weapons of mass destruction, and sponsoring international terrorism. Amid the White House's promises of a quick victory, a compliant Congress initially goes along with the war, but months later disgruntlement sets in and Capitol Hill begins to raise concerns.

The preceding paragraph might sound like the standard left-wing critique of the Bush administration's Iraq War, of the type that was often written during the Bush years by any number of commentators. But observant readers no doubt realize that here it instead describes the Obama administration's ongoing war -- and yes, it is a war -- in Libya. These are strange times we are in. From the administration's strained interpretation of "hostilities" to contend that the War Powers Act does not apply, to last Friday's conflicting and conflicted votes in the House of Representatives, in which a bill to defund the war failed but a separate bill denying authorization of the war passed, few of our customary political categories apply. (For some expert yet accessible discussions of the legal issues involved, check out the indispensable Lawfare blog coedited by my Strauss Center colleague Bobby Chesney).

The administration sought to spin the House vote as a win because the measure to cut off war funding did not succeed. But as Josh Rogin notes, a majority of the House in fact opposes funding the war. And the power of the purse, as Peter Feaver has pointed out, is the indisputable tool granted by the constitution to Congress to express its will on matters of war-making -- and to bear the political consequences.

Read on

A few weeks ago, President Obama's military venture in Libya crossed the 60-day threshold stipulated in the War Powers Act. Nothing much happened.

If my counting is correct, this weekend the war will cross another somewhat more artificial threshold: the 78-day mark that the Kosovo War lasted in 1999 before Serbian leader Milosevic capitulated to the NATO bombing campaign. The Kosovo threshold is not totally irrelevant. After all, the Libyan operation is more like the Kosovo one than any other military venture you could name. Yet, my best guess is that crossing this threshold will not be any more consequential than crossing the War Powers Act threshold was.

These milestones are the work of pundits, not strategists, and their impact on the public is less than pundits claim.

(To be fair, the 60-day clock stipulated by the War Powers Act is also the work of legislators and so should, in theory, carry much more weight. As we are seeing, however, it does not appear to. This is because the War Powers Act is based on a profoundly false premise: that Congress can coerce the President into doing its bidding even when Congress is unwilling to wield the extraordinarily powerful levers the Constitution already grants it. Congress hoped that the War Powers Act would enable Congress to constrain the Executive branch's ability to engage in military operations without requiring that Congress engage in the politically risky business of actually voting against those military operations, for instance voting to forbid the expenditure of funds. It hasn't worked that way. Congress can indeed constrain the Executive branch, but only if Congress is willing at the same time to put its own political necks on the line. If they are unwilling to do so, the War Powers Act will not provide substitutionary constraint.)

The Kosovo mark is a handy hook for raising awkward questions, such as: Even the Kosovo war, as dodgy an affair as that was, managed to achieve its political objectives by this point, so why are we still stuck in Libya with no end in sight?

Such questions serve the purpose of refocusing the public's attention, however briefly, away from gripping tales of errant tweets and back onto strategic matters. But just as the public shrugged off the artificial milestones of body counts in Iraq that were heralded in the media -- the moment when the Iraq casualties exceeded Desert Storm casualties, the moment when Iraq casualties crossed the 1000 threshold, etc. -- the public is not likely to reflexively rule that time has been called on this particular adventure just because it is lasting longer than another war it loosely resembles.

And yet the gradual cumulation of these thresholds, and the awkward questions they raise, could have an effect. Obama and Qaddafi are racing different clocks. My best guess is that Obama has more time on his than Qaddafi has on his, but it may be a closer race than either realizes.

As many others have lamented, the administration's fecklessness on Syria is rapidly turning into a national disgrace. It represents a moral and strategic failing of major proportions. If sustained, it threatens to rival the president's tragic decision in 2009 to stand by mutely as millions of Iranians rallied to drive a stake through the heart of a regime whose quest for nuclear weapons poses perhaps the greatest current danger to vital U.S. interests.

Since Syria's uprising began two months ago, the best estimate is that the Assad regime has slaughtered close to a thousand of its own citizens -- though the actual toll may well be much higher. Entire towns have been subjected to full-blown siege by Assad's crack military units. Mass arrests and torture of innocents, including children, is in full swing. The savagery on display certainly exceeds anything witnessed in Egypt during the 18-day revolt that brought down Hosni Mubarak. Not even Qaddafi was able to inflict this level of human suffering before NATO warplanes felt compelled to stay his bloody hand.

But whereas Obama moved with relative dispatch to condemn Egypt's Pharaoh and Libya's Mad Hatter to history's dustbin (at least rhetorically), in the case of Assad -- as with Iran in 2009 -- the president and his team have gone mostly silent, timid, and reactive. When the brutality spikes sufficiently every Friday, and the administration is embarrassed into issuing a statement of disapproval, it invariably has been coupled with some pathetic blather that Assad still has time to implement reforms -- which the good ophthalmologist's thugs, quite predictably, have interpreted as a sign of profound U.S. unseriousness and a green light to continue their killing spree a bit longer.

This seeming ambivalence on the part of the administration is all the more puzzling when -- on top of the compelling moral calculus -- one also considers the potential strategic benefits to be had by the removal of the Assad family's 4-decade long criminal enterprise in anti-U.S. tyranny. The bill of indictment is too lengthy to review in its entirety. It includes a long alliance with the Soviet Union; master-minding the destruction of Lebanon; being a charter-member of the State Department's rogues gallery of terror-sponsoring states; an ever-deepening strategic relationship with Iran's Islamic Republic and its proxies in Hezbollah; playing host to the full panoply of Palestinian terror groups; perpetrating one of history's most egregious violations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty through the covert construction, with North Korean assistance, of the plutonium-producing nuclear reactor at Al Kibar; and actively supporting the multi-year effort by Sunni insurgents, Saddamists, and al Qaeda jihadists to torpedo the U.S. effort to mid-wife representative democracy in Iraq. 

Again, the contrast with Egypt's Mubarak and Libya's Qaddafi is striking. The former was a longstanding ally, a linchpin for 30 years of the Middle East's pax-Americana whose disappearance, at least in the short term, could arguably turn out to be a net detriment to U.S. policy. The latter, though a historic foe responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American innocents, had in recent years bowed to U.S. demands to dismantle his nuclear weapons program and get out of the terrorism business, thereby relegating Libya to the margins of U.S. strategic concerns. The Assad family, by contrast, pere and fils alike, have for the better part of two generations (and seven U.S. presidencies) posed a clear and present danger to Middle East peace and security, and the advancement of U.S. interests. Next to regime change in Iran itself, it's hard to think of a more devastating blow that could be struck against the Islamic Republic than the collapse of its primary partner in crime, the dictatorship in Damascus, at the hands of a popular uprising. Yet it is here, with respect to Syria, that Obama balks.

At least initially, the president's wooly-headedness could be chalked up to his faux-realist determination to "engage" Assad. The goal, articulated from the start of his presidency, was to enlist Syria in a revitalized peace process with Israel and/or to crack the Iranian-Syrian axis by persuading Assad that his true interests lay not in playing wing-man to the expansionist theocrats in Tehran, but prospering under the patronage of a U.S. superpower willing to ply Syria with economic assistance, mediate an end to its conflict with Israel, and help recover the Golan Heights,

This was, of course, a huge conceit -- Obama playing Kissinger, but even better -- one that more or less blindly disregarded the entire sorry history of the United States' unsatisfying dealings with Baathist Syria under the tutelage of the Assad clan and their minority, Alawite regime. To be fair to Obama, it was a conceit that more than one -- indeed, most -- of his predecessors had similarly indulged, and with similarly disappointing results. Forever condemned to rule with a nagging legitimacy deficit, the Assads, lo and behold, simply refused to reprise the role played by Sadat when he switched strategic allegiances from the "resistance" camp to the peace camp. Despite U.S. protestations to the contrary, Bashar, like his father before him, was of the stubborn conviction that he actually understood better than Washington the formula for ensuring the survival of the family business -- and it most assuredly did not include permanently ending the conflict with Israel and addressing the real political, economic, and social needs of Syria's beleaguered citizenry. Not even Barack Obama's arrival on the world stage, which his most delusional acolytes promised would transform the very nature of international politics, proved capable of changing the cruel and sordid reality that was the Assad dictatorship and the type of Middle East it stood for. 

As proved tragically the case with Iran in 2009, Obama's insistence on sticking to his engagement strategy with Syria long past its sell-by date was also driven by an unfortunate brew of ideology and egotism. Obama seemed determined to show himself, evidence to the contrary be damned, the un-Bush -- sophisticated, nuanced, worldly-wise to the gray areas of world affairs inhabited by true statesmen like the one he fancied himself to be, in contrast to the boorish, black-and-white cowboy-ism of his dim-witted predecessor. Never mind that, truth be told, Bush himself spent the first few years of his administration on the fool's errand of reaching out to Assad the Younger in hopes of testing his alleged reformist instincts. And never mind that the West's most important breakthroughs with the Assad dynasty -- from Kissinger's disengagement agreement to Syria's participation in the Madrid peace process; from the eviction of PKK terrorist Abdullah Ocalan to the 2005 withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon -- all could be sourced to moments when the regime felt itself most profoundly weakened and under threat, its very survival possibly in play.

With all the carnage of the past two months, one hopes that the president and his advisors prove capable of realizing that the chance of converting Assad into a viable strategic partner, if it ever existed, has long since passed. Reportedly, that moment of illumination did eventually come in the case of Iran, though only belatedly -- long after the Green Movement had been effectively crushed and an historic opportunity to advance U.S. interests had passed, perhaps indefinitely. It would be tragic, indeed, if a similar mistake was made in the case of Syria. 

Instead, the administration needs quickly to move off the sidelines, declare its full-fledged support for the aspirations of the Syrian people, and develop a serious strategy to expedite the collapse of Assad's rule and a peaceful transition to a new, more democratic order. Barring such an effort, we seem likely on a course that will lead to one of two highly undesirable outcomes: either the total suppression of the uprising (most likely), or a sectarian-based civil war that pits the largely Sunni forces of the regular army against the much smaller, but heavily-armed Alawite shock troops and security services whose very raison d'etre is ensuring the regime's survival. 

The key to a soft landing will be fracturing the regime's elite, particularly by convincing prominent figures in the Alawite community, especially within the security services, that their interests lie not in continuing to support Assad and his family in the commission of their crimes against the Syrian people, but in abandoning them and throwing their weight behind the popular movement for peaceful change. Such an effort would require assembling a diplomatic coalition of states most capable of influencing Syrian events, including the United States, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and perhaps Egypt. The office of the United Nations' Secretary General might come in handy as well, particularly in the form of its shrewd and energetic envoy, Terje Larsen, the Norwegian diplomat who proved such a useful ally in helping coerce Syrian troops out of Lebanon in 2005.

The network of contacts, political, military, and intelligence, that these states possess across the Syrian elite would need to be discretely tapped. Inducements -- financial, political, and otherwise -- would need to be offered. Assurances -- both in terms of a future role in the post-Assad order and security protections for the broader Alawite community as well as other minorities -- would need to be provided. Punishments in the form of economic sanctions, travel bans, and international prosecutions would need to be threatened and, as necessary, imposed.

Such commitments at the international level would ideally be matched by pledges from some representative group of Syrians that could credibly claim to speak in the name of the protest movement. That likely means supporting an opposition conference somewhere in Europe or the Middle East. While such an event would unavoidably be dominated by Syrians in exile, provision could be made to solicit through every means possible the views and preferences of those still inside. A visionary, inclusive platform for Syria's democratic future could be developed, one that reaches out to all Syria's communities as well as members of the current regime in a spirit of national reconciliation. A transitional leadership council might be elected -- with half its seats reserved for insiders who will be appointed once Assad is gone, if not before -- whose primary task would be working with the United Nations to draft a provisional constitution and organize free and fair elections. To underscore their selfless commitment to the nation, members of the transitional council might pledge not to stand in the first post-Assad elections.

Implementing such a strategy would no doubt be enormously challenging, requiring a major commitment of diplomatic resources, including the sustained involvement of the president himself. But the fact that it is hard and offers no guarantee of success cannot become an excuse for policymakers to abdicate their moral and strategic responsibilities to act on behalf of U.S. vital interests and core values. The bitter fact is that the administration's current non-policy almost certainly has us on a path that ends in national shame for the United States, national disaster for Syria, and a festering sore of instability and violence in the heart of a region vital to U.S. interests. We can, we must, try to do better.

The Obama administration has received a lot of ribbing over its use of the euphemism "kinetic military action" -- inartful spin in an attempt to avoid describing the Libyan operation as a war. Many observers have suggested that this fussiness over language may betray the president's discomfort with the idea of war.

There may be something to that critique, but there is another perhaps more important way it is revealing. To a remarkable extent, this president has embraced the kinetic aspects of war. It is the non-kinetic aspects, and especially the overall strategic dimension that harnesses kinetic and non-kinetic lines of action into a coherent strategy, that the president has failed to use.

The clumsy spin may thus be betraying the administration's a-strategic approach to the wielding of military power.

If war and coercive diplomacy only involved kinetic military action, this would be one of our most bellicose of presidents. Look at the kinetic military action he has authorized:

• In the GWOT, more targeted drone strikes over more territory -- including territory where we are not officially conducting combat operations -- than President Bush.
• In Afghanistan, a surge in military forces -- actually several escalations - that in absolute numbers exceeds Bush' Iraq surge and in proportional terms dwarfs it.
• In Iraq, a meticulous implementation of the Status of Forces drawdown that the Bush administration handed over to Obama -- no meaningful acceleration of troop withdrawals.
• In Libya, a massive aerial/missile bombardment of Qaddafi's forces, the largest U.S. air/missile strike since the opening days of the Iraq War.

Compared with his last two Democratic predecessors, Clinton and Carter, and measured only in kinetic military terms, this is dramatically more hawkish behavior.

Read on

My first reaction to the President Obama's speech is that he should have given it ten days ago. He didn't say anything tonight that he couldn't have said when he ordered combat operations to commence. Waiting for NATO to agree to take on the mission became a good reason for the White House to delay the Commander in Chief explaining his volte face to the nation. But it didn't actually mask the president not wanting to detract from his prior obligations in Latin America or give the appearance that Americans were running the show (even when Americans were running the show).

That slight of hand feeling pervaded the president's speech; I still don't know whether he thinks we have a national interest in Libya. In the past 36 hours, the Secretary of Defense has said we do not have a national interest in the war in Libya, the Secretary of State has said our national interest is our humanitarian interest and helping our allies who really do have national interests. In an effort to break the tie, the president described our national interests in the Libyan war as: preventing a stain on our conscience (from doing nothing), stopping Qaddafi's advance on Benghazi, preventing refugees destabilizing fragile governments in Egypt and Tunisia, showing other repressive regimes we not allow them to use force, and upholding the United Nations. Which sounds like he's siding with Secretary Gates' description but Secretary Clinton's prescription.

President Obama's checklist of why we acted consisted of: the scale of potential harm, America's unique ability to stop it, having an international mandate, and it was achievable without ground troops. The Obama Doctrine, as exposited in this speech appears to be "we care enough to prevent you from losing, but we don't care enough to help you win." That's fair enough as a risk-minimizing framework for United States foreign policy, but it is wildly at variance with the soaring language the president offered up about our commitment to freedom. And it doesn't provide very satisfying answers to what next in Libya or whether we will do this again.

I thought the comparisons to the Balkans and Iraq were both unfair. The complicated dissolution of Yugoslavia, the timing of its occurrence, and the lack of precedent made the degree of difficulty higher intervening in the Balkans (and, incidentally, the Clinton Administration delivered Germany). Iraq raises much weightier national interest arguments than the president acknowledged.

The president has taken an awful lot of credit for a pretty stingy commitment to advancing freedom -- which is not to say he should make every war of liberation an American war, just that I couldn't help wondering how it sounded to Iranian dissidents in prison since July of 2009 or voters in Ivory Coast where stolen elections are unresolved or in Darfur, wishing now for years that we cared enough to prevent militia raping and killing, to hear the President of the United States say so proudly "some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different."

The United States, its allies, and its coalition partners have been at war for over a week now. For political, ideological, and legal reasons, the White House is reluctant to use the terminology of warfare, so Obama administration spokesman Jay Carney resorted to acts of linguistic contortion, terming the conflict "kinetic military action" and "time-limited, scope-limited military action." But make no mistake; we are at war. If we are to prevail, we must be clear-headed in articulating our aims and formulating a strategy to meet them.

Like most, I'm eager to hear what President Obama has to say in his speech on Libya tonight. As someone who has devoted the better part of his career teaching and practicing strategy, here are four questions I will be looking to him to answer.

What changed? For a month, as opposition to the Qaddafi regime in Libya swelled, Obama and his advisors pooh-poohed the notion of a no-fly-zone over Libya. Then, a week and a half ago, with momentum having shifted in favor of Qaddafi and his mercenaries, he seemingly had a sudden change of heart. I, like others, will be looking to the president for an explanation as to why military action makes sense now, as opposed to two weeks ago.

What are our aims? What is our strategy? The great Prussian philosopher of war, Carl von Clausewitz, wrote nearly two centuries ago, "No one starts a war -- or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so -- without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it." It appears that we have done just that.

Read on