It’s getting ever worse, the mess that Obama and some European leaders have made with their interference in Libya “to protect civilians”.

The “civilians” include al-Qaeda operatives and murderous mobs which use the upheaval of war to hunt down and kill “aliens” in their country whose ethnicity they don’t like.

And now Omar al-Bashir, the mass-murderer tyrant of Sudan, has been let in to help the most powerful military alliance in the world with their failing campaign against the tin-pot dictator of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi.

Stephen Brown writes at Front Page:

While the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) says it is protecting civilians in Libya from Muammar Gaddafi, an International Criminal Court (ICC)-indicted fugitive, it has allowed another ICC-wanted criminal to send his army into the country.

In an under-reported event, Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir, currently under indictment by the ICC for genocide in Darfur, recently sent troops across the Libyan-Sudanese border into southern Libya to occupy Kufra, a town located in an important oil-producing area. Only last May in his own country, Bashir, who could teach Gaddafi lessons on killing civilians, had used the same army to ethnically cleanse 60,000 Dinka tribesmen with tanks from Abyei, while his air force is currently bombing Nuba civilians indiscriminately in their mountain villages in possible preparation for a new genocide. Indicating that a deal with the devil may have been made prior to the Sudanese army’s cross-border move, NATO, which controls Libyan airspace, did not oppose the occupation.

“Our surveillance shows that they are not moving the oil, so it is not about money in the short term,” one Western official was quoted as saying.

What the Sudanese intervention most likely is about, however, is oil. More specifically, it is about getting it flowing again, a NATO priority. British officials are reported to “have worked closely” with the rebels in Benghazi to this end.

The role of the Sudanese troops in achieving this goal, it seems, is to provide the oil-producing area around Kufra with protection from Gaddafi’s forces. The Libyan leader’s fighters have been attacking oil facilities around Kufra and elsewhere to prevent the rebels from selling the oil and using the proceeds to prosecute the war against him. Without money, the rebels say they are “incapable of battling Gaddafi.” …

The Sudanese army moved into Kufra only days after the last attack by Gaddafi forces on the area’s oil fields on June 12. Prior to the Sudanese arrival, there had been a lot fighting around the town. What Sudan’s government expects to receive for its help in Kufra is unclear. But one can rest assured that Bashir is not helping out for nothing.

If NATO acquiesced or assisted in hiring the army of a war criminal and mass murderer like Bashir for use against a similarly indicted criminal, as appears likely, it throws a hypocritical shadow over the military alliance’s oft stated mission statement of protecting Libyan civilians. Enlisting Bashir proves protecting civilians from a brutal dictator was never NATO’s priority; rather it proves, as has long been suspected, the war is primarily about oil.

In our opinion, oil is a very good reason for going to war. Oil is the lifeblood of our commerce, essential to our civilization. We regret that the US did not take possession of the major Middle East oil-fields long ago – in 1973 at the latest.

It’s a much more respectable reason than “protecting civilians”, even if that were a genuine reason, and not the hypocritical pretext that it is.

What does it say about our culture that a sentimental lie is thought necessary to justify a war that is actually being fought for the vital interest of at least some of the NATO powers (chiefly France)?

One African columnist, Obi Nwakanma, has most likely discerned the true reason for NATO’s involvement in the Libyan civil war. Britain and France, Nwakanma maintains, feared being shut out of the Libyan oil fields in favour of China and India. Libya contains the largest oil reserves in Africa.

“It is no longer a secret that behind this NATO alliance war on Libya, and far beyond the ‘do-good’ face it …wears…as its reason for bombing Libya to smithereens is the quest to control the oil fields of Libya, guarantee Western access to energy sources in the face of growing concern over the rise of China and India and their…emerging gluttony for oil…,” Nwakanma writes.

It would be just like the sadistic Gaddafi to turn around and make oil exploration deals with China and India after Britain and France had suffered humiliation at his hands in expectation of getting such agreements. But NATO is running out of options in bringing a quick end to the bloody mess the Libyan war has become. The rebels are no closer to deposing Gaddafi than they were last February when the rebellion began. Facing a stalemate in eastern Libya, they have also not advanced from Misrata in western Libya despite having the advantage of NATO air support. As an indication of their weakness, and perhaps of their desperation, the rebels’ ruling council in Benghazi has now offered to allow Gaddafi to stay in Libya, if he would only step down. This offer was promptly rejected.

A possible sign of NATO’s desperation occurred when it was revealed last week France had air-dropped arms to anti-Gaddafi Berber rebels in Libya’s western mountains, defying the UN resolution banning the supplying of weapons to either side. The French defended their actions, saying the weapons, “rocket-propelled grenades, assault rifles, machine guns and, above all, anti-tank missiles,” were to protect the rebels against Gaddafi’s troops. Frustratingly for NATO, the French weapons have not helped so far. The French-armed Berber rebel force, now positioned 50 miles south of Tripoli, first offensive failed. Fighting on flat plains is not the same as mountain warfare.

Failing is bad enough, but making common cause with a blood-soaked savage like al-Bashir is worse. If they weren’t pretending not to be fighting for oil, the Western powers could send an army in and take it. It’s the sentimental pretense that has landed them in a disgusting alliance with al-Bashir.

And to what further depravities and slaughter is it all leading?

Even if NATO does prevail, one must question what kind of democracy does it expect to appear in Libya after Gaddafi’s downfall? The rebel forces are not very united, except in their desire to get rid of Gaddafi, and some have even been accused of war crimes, especially against black Africans. Made up largely of tribes, the opposition forces may eventually start to fight each other over power and control of oil revenues after Gaddafi’s demise, setting the stage for a never-ending, multi-phase civil war like happened in Afghanistan after the 1989 Soviet withdrawal. If this is the case, NATO may inadvertently have created more candidates for the ICC, against which it will again eventually have to act “to protect Libyan civilians.”

Should the United States refrain from any intervention in the world beyond its borders except in its own incontrovertible interest?

Or should it act as the world’s policeman? Does it have a “responsibility to protect”- if so, whom from what? Populations from their rulers? Vulnerable groups from any and all attackers?

To bring the debate to the moment and the actual, should the US keep its forces in Afghanistan after 10 years of fighting savage peasants and failing to crush them? Should there still be a US military presence in Iraq? In Germany? In South Korea? Should the US be fighting – as it is –  in Libya, Pakistan, and Yemen?

Should it not be using force to stop Iran becoming a nuclear power? And immediately against Iran’s ally, Bashar Assad, the bloody tyrant of Syria?

Should it not be outspending China on defense?

Should it not be helping Georgia liberate two of its provinces from Russia?

Should it be protecting South Sudan from its northern neighbors and their Ugandan proxies? Or the Nigerian Christians from their Muslim persecutors? Or the ethnic African Muslims of Dafur from the Arab Muslims who are raping, robbing, hounding and massacring them? Or destroying the pirates of Somalia? Or putting an end to the Arab/African slave trade?

Can those who answer yes to the first question fairly be called “isolationists”?

David Harsanyi considers, in a column at Townhall, whether the label is apt when applied to those who want America to withdraw from Afghanistan and refrain from any further participation in the NATO intervention in Libya:

There’s been a lot of talk about an alleged turn in American public opinion — particularly among Republicans — toward “isolationism.”

In a recent debate among GOP presidential hopefuls, there was some discussion about ending the United States’ commitment to the tribal warlords and medieval shamans of the Afghan wilderness. This induced John McCain to complain about the rise of a new “strain of isolationism” … McCain sidekick Lindsey Graham went on to notify Congress that it “should sort of shut up and not empower Gadhafi” when the topic of the House’s potentially defunding the military — er, kinetic, non-warlike bombing activity over Libya — came up. It would be a mistake, he vented, for Republican candidates to sit “to the left” of President Barack Obama on national security.

So if you don’t shut up and stop carping about this non-war war of ours, you are abetting North African strongmen. Makes sense. It’s the return of Teddy Roosevelt-style Republicanism, in which arbitrary power (and John McCain’s singular wisdom) matters a lot more than any democratic institution.

Sure, some on the far right and swaths of the protectionist, union-driven left oppose international trade agreements and [are] endlessly freaking us out about foreign influences.

Our interpolation: Is this protectionist section of the left aware of the left-elite’s longing for world government?

But isolationists? Judging from our conduct in the real world of economy, we’re anything but insular. So perhaps McCain simply meant noninterventionists — as in folks who have an unwavering ideological aversion to any and all overseas entanglement.

That can’t be it, either. Maybe, like many Americans, some in the GOP are simply grappling with wars that never end and a war that never started.

And with plenty of troubles here at home, it’s not surprising that Americans have turned their attention inward.

We can’t be in a constant state of war. Then again, Afghanistan is not a war per se, but a precarious social engineering project that asks our best and bravest (or, as our ally Hamid Karzai calls them, “occupiers”) to die for the Afghan Constitution, which is roundly ignored — except for the parts codifying Islamic law, that is. But all these conflicts come with the price of endless involvement. We almost always win.

When and where? Since World War Two, where has America won a hot war? Oh yes – against Granada.

But we never really go home. …

Did sometimes. From Granada after victory. From Vietnam after defeat.

This week, we learned that Obama rejected the advice of lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department who questioned his legal authority to continue this nonmilitary military involvement in Libya without congressional authorization. Instead, the administration offered a string of euphemisms concocted to bypass the Constitution.

Without any tangible evidence that this conflict furthers our national interests or any real proof that we are preventing a wide-scale humanitarian crisis, it’s not a surprise that Defense Secretary Robert Gates says we’re “leading from behind” — which is, in fact, as stupid and deceptive as the case it doesn’t make.

Are you an isolationist for questioning those who continue to weaken the Constitution? … Are you an isolationist for questioning this brand of obfuscation? Are you an isolationist for wanting American forces to win and leave the battlefield rather than hang around for decades of baby-sitting duty?

And Tony Blankley writes, also  at Townhall:

I was one of the first GOP internationalist-oriented commentators or politicians to conclude that the Afghanistan War effort had served its initial purpose and that it was time to phase out the war. As a punitive raid against the regime that gave succor to Osama bin Laden, we had removed the Taliban government and killed as many al-Qaida and Taliban fighters as possible. …

But as the purpose of that war turned into nation building, even GOP internationalists had a duty to reassess whether, given the resources and strategy being brought to the new purpose, such policy was likely to be effective.

Now many others in the GOP and in the non-isolationist wing of the Democratic Party are likewise judging failure in Afghanistan to be almost inevitable. That is not a judgment driven by isolationism. Neither are we isolationist in our judgment (along with the opinion of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and almost the entire uniformed chain of command) that we see no national interest in Libya.

This is not isolationism; it is a rational effort at judging how best to advance American values and interests in an ever-more witheringly dangerous world.

Both Harsanyi’s and Blankley ‘s opinions are apt as far as they go.

But  the problem is deeper, the questions that need to be raised about foreign policy harder than those they are answering.

Can America have a coherent foreign policy that America itself and the other states of the world can depend upon for any useful length of time? The two political parties are now so divided ideologically that foreign policy will depend on whether the president is a Republican or a Democrat. It will necessarily chop and change. Or if relations with some states stay more or less the same for a while, they will do so unreliably.

Could the very uncertainty characterize foreign policy usefully? No foreign state being secure in its relations with the US, each would have to be vigilant, tack according to the US wind, adjust to the changes. A case could be made that a Machiavellian preference to be feared by other nations rather than loved might serve America well.

But there are other developments to be considered. In countries throughout the world – led in this by Europe –  there is an ideological tendency towards world government. The nation state is not liked: new political alignments, such as the European Union, are trying to phase it out. Democrats, for the most part, are in sympathy with the movement; Republicans are not. Democrats – like most leftists everywhere – have a vision of the UN turning into a world government; Republicans – many of them at least – would be happy to see the monstrous institution disbanded. It cannot continue long as it is: being a house of lies, it must fall down.

NATO is weakening. Letting Turkey into it was fatal. No longer secular, Turkey is now in the camp of Islam, inimical to the West.

The world as it was conceived to be after World War Two is changing kaleidoscopically under our eyes.

In relation to the rest of the world, what are American interests? How should they be pursued?

Should America concentrate on preserving itself as a fenced-in area of freedom on an otherwise unfree planet?  That would be isolationism. Should it form a union with other as-yet-free nation-states: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel? India perhaps? Honduras? Papau? …

What would such a union do, what would be in its joint interest – “spreading democracy”, “protecting civilians”, “building nations”? The questions troubling America now would trouble it jointly, and the answers remain as hard to find.

All Mark Steyn‘s columns are so good, so funny however serious and important the point he is making, that it’s hard to say this one or that one is the best or the funniest. But a recent article titled Too Big To Win, on the highly important subject of America’s wars, must surely be among his best and funniest.

We are picking sentences and passages from it to give our readers a taste, but we hope they’ll be enticed to read the whole thing here and enjoy the feast.

Why can’t America win wars? …

Afghanistan? The “good war” is now “America’s longest war.” Our forces have been there longer than the Red Army was. The “hearts and minds” strategy is going so well that American troops are now being killed by the Afghans who know us best. …

Libya? The good news is that we’ve vastly reduced the time it takes us to get quagmired. I believe the Libyan campaign is already in The Guinness Book of World Records as the fastest quagmire on record. In an inspired move, we’ve chosen to back the one Arab liberation movement incapable of knocking off the local strongman even when you lend them every NATO air force. But not to worry: President Obama, cooed an administration official to The New Yorker, is “leading from behind.” Indeed. What could be more impeccably multilateral than a coalition pantomime horse composed entirely of rear ends? Apparently it would be “illegal” to target Colonel Qaddafi, so our strategic objective is to kill him by accident. So far we’ve killed a son and a couple of grandkids. Maybe by the time you read this we’ll have added a maiden aunt or two to the trophy room. It’s not precisely clear why offing the old pock-skinned transvestite should be a priority of the U.S. right now, but let’s hope it happens soon, because otherwise there’ll be no way of telling when this “war” is “ended.”

According to partisan taste, one can blame the trio of current morasses on Bush or Obama, but in the bigger picture they’re part of a pattern of behavior that predates either man, stretching back through non-victories great and small — Somalia, Gulf War One, Vietnam, Korea. On the more conclusive side of the ledger, we have . . . well, lemme see: Grenada, 1983. And, given that that was a bit of post-colonial housekeeping Britain should have taken care of but declined to, one could argue that even that lone bright spot supports a broader narrative of Western enfeeblement. At any rate, America’s only unambiguous military triumph since 1945 is a small Caribbean island with Queen Elizabeth II as head of state. For 43 percent of global military expenditure, that’s not much bang for the buck. …

At the dawn of the so-called American era, Washington chose to downplay U.S. hegemony and instead created and funded transnational institutions in which the non-imperial superpower was so self-deprecating it artificially inflated everybody else’s status in a kind of geopolitical affirmative-action program. …   In 1950, America had a unique dominance of the “free world” and it could afford to be generous, so it was: We had more money than we knew what to do with, so we absolved our allies of paying for their own defense. …

By the time the Cold War ended … U.S.–Soviet nuclear standoff of mutual deterrence decayed into a unipolar world of U.S. auto-deterrence. …

At a certain level, credible deterrence depends on a credible enemy. The Soviet Union disintegrated, but the surviving superpower’s instinct to de-escalate intensified: In Kirkuk as in Kandahar, every Lilliputian warlord quickly grasped that you could provoke the infidel Gulliver with relative impunity. Mutually Assured Destruction had curdled into Massively Applied Desultoriness. …

The Pentagon outspends the Chinese, British, French, Russian, Japanese, German, Saudi, Indian, Italian, South Korean, Brazilian, Canadian, Australian, Spanish, Turkish, and Israeli militaries combined. So why doesn’t it feel like that?

Well, for exactly that reason: If you outspend every serious rival combined, you’re obviously something other than the soldiery of a conventional nation state. But what exactly? In the Nineties, the French liked to complain that “globalization” was a euphemism for “Americanization.” But one can just as easily invert the formulation: “Americanization” is a euphemism for “globalization,” in which the geopolitical sugar daddy is so busy picking up the tab for the global order he loses all sense of national interest. … The Pentagon now makes war for the world. …

An army has to wage war on behalf of something real. For better or worse, “king and country” is real, and so, mostly for worse, are the tribal loyalties of Africa’s blood-drenched civil wars. But it’s hardly surprising that it’s difficult to win wars waged on behalf of something so chimerical as “the international community.” If you’re making war on behalf of an illusory concept, is it even possible to have war aims? What’s ours? “[We] are in Afghanistan to help the Afghan people,” General Petraeus said in April. Somewhere generations of old-school imperialists are roaring their heads off, not least at the concept of “the Afghan people.” But when you’re the expeditionary force of the parliament of man, what else is there? …

Nation building in Afghanistan is the ne plus ultra of a fool’s errand. But even if one were so disposed, effective “nation building” is done in the national interest of the builder. The British rebuilt India in their own image, with a Westminster parliament, common law, and an English education system. In whose image are we building Afghanistan? Eight months after Petraeus announced his latest folly, the Afghan Local Police initiative, Oxfam reported that the newly formed ALP was a hotbed of torture and pederasty. Almost every Afghan institution is, of course. But for most of human history they’ve managed to practice both enthusiasms without international subvention. The U.S. taxpayer accepts wearily the burden of subsidy for Nevada’s cowboy poets and San Francisco’s mime companies, but, even by those generous standards of cultural preservation, it’s hard to see why he should be facilitating the traditional predilections of Pashtun men with an eye for the “dancing boys of Kandahar.” …

So the Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity is building schoolhouses in Afghanistan. Big deal. The problem, in Kandahar as in Kansas, is not the buildings but what’s being taught inside them — and we’ve no stomach for getting into that. So what’s the point of building better infrastructure for Afghanistan’s wretched tribal culture? What’s our interest in state-of-the-art backwardness?

Transnational do-gooding is political correctness on tour. It takes the relativist assumptions of the multiculti varsity and applies them geopolitically: The white man’s burden meets liberal guilt. No wealthy developed nation should have a national interest, because a national interest is a selfish interest. Afghanistan started out selfishly — a daringly original military campaign, brilliantly executed, to remove your enemies from power and kill as many of the bad guys as possible. Then America sobered up and gradually brought a freakish exception into compliance with the rule. In Libya as in Kosovo, war is legitimate only if you have no conceivable national interest in whatever conflict you’re fighting. The fact that you have no stake in it justifies your getting into it. The principal rationale is that there’s no rationale, and who could object to that? Applied globally, political correctness obliges us to forswear sovereignty. …

On we stagger, with Cold War institutions, transnational sensibilities, politically correct solicitousness, fraudulent preening pseudo–nation building, expensive gizmos, little will, and no war aims . . . but real American lives. … Sixty-six years after V-J Day, the American way of war needs top-to-toe reinvention.

Is Qaddafi victorious against the combined forces of France, Britain, and the US (aka NATO)?

According to this report he is. We can’t vouch for its reliability, but from the look of things we think it may be right.

Neither the US nor Russia sees anyone in the Libyan rebel political or military leadership capable of taking over the reins of power in Tripoli. It is therefore assumed that a member of the Qaddafi clan will be chosen as Libya’s interim ruler.

Obama and Medvedev also quietly agreed, those sources say, that French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron, despite their excessive involvement in the Libyan war, were wasting their time because they had no chance of making Qaddafi leave.

According to the information the Russian president offered Obama, NATO attacks had not disabled a single one of Qaddafi’s five brigades. Obama confirmed this from his own sources.

Qaddafi might not, however, be able to hang on to power:

The same report claims  that Medvedev and Obama “traded” Assad for Qaddafi – ie. they agreed that Bashar Assad, the tyrant of Syria, would stay in power as the Russian leadership wishes him to, and Qaddafi would go as the Obama administration desires.

Word [is] going round that President Barak Obama and President Dmitry Medvedev Friday, May 27, came to a reciprocal understanding on the sidelines of the G8 summit in Deauville about the fate of the Syrian and Libyan rulers.

Obama is reported to have promised Medvedev to let Assad finish off the uprising against him without too much pressure from the US and the West. In return, the Russian president undertook to help the US draw the Libyan war to a close by means of an effort to bring about Muammar Qaddafi’s exit from power – in a word, the two big powers traded Qaddafi for Assad.

What sort of man is it that Obama is protecting, if the report is true?

This story graphically confirms what the world should already know about Bashar Assad:

Hamza al Khateeb, a 13 years old boy … was detained among hundreds of Syrian during the massacre of Siada.

After weeks of absence Hamza was returned to his family as a dead body … with scars testifying to the torture … bruises, burns to the feet, elbows, face and knees and his genitals removed. …  wounds consistent with those seen of victims of electric shock devices and cable whippings. The child’s eyes [were] swollen and black, and both arms showed identical bullet wounds. …

After receiving his body, Khatib’s family was visited by Syrian secret police, who arrested the boy’s father. The boy’s mother said officers ordered her husband to say the boy was killed by armed Salafists, or ultra-conservative Muslims, whom Assad has claimed as being behind the unrest.

She said the secret police had warned her not to speak to the press, threatening, “You know what would happen if we heard you had spoken to the media.”

What is more, Assad is a tool of Iran, and Obama knows it:

Washington Post has quoted unnamed US officials as saying that Iran has been sending trainers and consultants to Syria to help the Syrian regime in its brutal crackdown against the protesters .

The paper also reported that this is in addition to special equipment the Iranians sent to the Syrian authorities to help them in identifying and tracking down the protesters that use Facebook and Twitter.

This means that the Syrian and Iranian regimes, far from being targeted as enemies of the US, are enjoying a form of protection by the Obama administration.

Obama, under the spell of the three witches, Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power, and Susan Rice (see our post, Round about the cauldron go, April 18, 2011), cannot weep enough crocodile tears for the “civilians” that America has the “responsibility to protect” in Libya, or drop enough alms into their outstretched hands. But circumspectly, adhering strictly to politically correct rules.

From Yahoo! News:

The Obama administration plans to give the Libyan opposition $25 million in non-lethal assistance in the first direct U.S. aid to the rebels after weeks of assessing their capabilities and intentions, officials said Wednesday.

Amid a debate over whether to offer the rebels broader assistance, including cash and possibly weapons and ammunition, the administration has informed Congress that President Barack Obama intends to use his so-called drawdown authority to give the opposition, led by the Transitional National Council in Benghazi, up to $25 million in surplus American goods to help protect civilians in rebel-held areas threatened by Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s forces.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who recommended that Obama authorize the assistance, said the aid would go to support the council and “our efforts to protect civilians and the civilian populated areas that are under threat of attack from their own government in Libya.” She said the aid “will be drawn down from items already in government stocks that correspond with the needs that we have heard from the Transitional National Council.”

The list is still being revised but now covers items such as medical supplies, uniforms, boots, tents, personal protective gear, radios and Halal meals … Most of the items are expected to come from Pentagon stocks …

Initially, the administration had proposed supplying the rebels with vehicles and portable fuel storage tanks but those items were dropped from the list of potential aid on Wednesday after concerns were expressed that those could be converted into offensive military assets. …

Hillary must be awfully careful not to go against the pacifist sentiments of the Democratic Party, while yet satisfying its goodie-goodie need to give cast-offs to those vulnerable “civilians”. Or “rebels”.

“This is not a blank check,” Clinton told reporters, adding that the move was consistent with the U.N. mandate that authorized international action to protect Libyan civilians and acknowledging that the opposition is in dire need of help.

Wouldn’t do a damned thing the UN didn’t approve of!

“This opposition, which has held its own against a brutal assault by the Gadhafi forces was not an organized militia,” she said. “It was not a group that had been planning to oppose the rule of Gadhafi for years. It was a spontaneous response within the context of the broader Arab spring. These are mostly business people, students, lawyers, doctors, professors who have very bravely moved to defend their communities and to call for an end to the regime in Libya.”

Oh, yes. She’s sure of that. Respectable, professional people, those civilians in dire need. Not an organized militia. Perfectly harmless, innocent. Give them the cast-offs, for the sake of Jesus!

“The Europeans” – namely Britain, France and Italy – are sending “military advisers”.

Because the military intervention by the US and Nato didn’t stop Gaddafi’s army.

From the Washington Post:

The arrival of European military advisers and U.S. uniforms is unlikely to rapidly change the trajectory of the conflict … and NATO and its Arab partners in the Libya operation continue to count on their economic and diplomatic war of attrition against Gaddafi paying off in the end.

“We are dealing with a set of imperfect options,” a senior administration official said, noting that the measure of success is not “where things stand” but “where they would have stood had we done nothing.” The NATO airstrikes and a no-fly zone enforced by NATO and Arab countries “have essentially frozen the battle space in terms of the advance of Gaddafi’s forces,” he said, and “if you work all the other levers, you can make time work against Gaddafi.”

Ah, Time. The West’s last, best weapon.

The official emphasized that Obama has no intention of sending U.S. ground forces — including noncombat military advisers — to Libya. But the administration’s attempts to firmly limit its involvement have also contributed to an image of disarray within NATO.

Only the image of disarray? Inside NATO all is harmony and sweet accord?

A senior European official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid antagonizing the Americans, said that Obama’s eagerness to turn over command of the Libyan air operation to NATO late last month, and the withdrawal of U.S. fighter planes from ground-strike missions, had undermined the strength of their united front against Gaddafi. …

The brilliant, well-informed Vice-President of the United States had an answer to that:

In a feisty response to any suggestion that the U.S. move to the back seat had undermined the NATO campaign, Vice President Biden said the alliance was perfectly capable of handling the air attack mission itself.

“It is bizarre to suggest that NATO and the rest of the world lacks the capacity to deal with Libya — it does not,” Biden said in an interview with the Financial Times.

“Occasionally other countries lack the will,” he said, “but this is not about capacity.”

Biden said U.S. resources were better spent trying to guide Egypt’s transition toward democracy. He denied that U.S. public reluctance to become deeply involved in another conflict in the Muslim world had anything to do with Obama’s decisions.

“This is about our strategic interest and it is not based upon a situation of what can the traffic bear politically at home,” Biden said. “The traffic can bear politically more in Libya,” he said, because “everybody knows [Gaddafi] is a bad guy.”

But it’s better not to risk it, hey Joe?

But as the situation in Libya has continued without resolution, popular disapproval of the president’s handling of the situation has shot up 15 percentage points, from 34 to 49, since mid-March, shining a light on the political risks Obama faces on the issue amid a host of domestic problems, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. Among political independents, disapproval jumped to 51 percent. …

Those sending advisers or other assistance to the rebel forces are doing so as individual nations, in coordination with but outside the NATO command structure.

Why would that be? Don’t tell us that NATO as a whole would not approve!

No, no, it’s not that. God or someone forbid!  It’s because, you see, the “rebels” – not to be confused with the “civilians” please – don’t want the Western help they asked for to be too obvious:

“The rebels themselves are afraid of being accused by other Arab countries of having allowed ‘crusaders’ on their land,” said an Italian official who was not authorized to discuss the issue on the record.

Turns out the US administration didn’t feel too comfortable with the “rebels” at first, but it’s okay now:

Obama administration officials said their comfort level with the rebel council had grown in recent weeks, after high-level meetings with its leaders and direct contact by a U.S. diplomatic mission sent to Benghazi.

Still, you’ve gotta keep an eye on the bastards. Though God or whoever knows what we’d do if we saw something happening that made us uncomfortable again:

“Whether there are people in Libya who may have more extremist or nefarious agendas, that is something we watch very carefully,” the senior administration official said in reference to suggestions of possible al-Qaeda involvement. “We don’t believe that the organized opposition, represented by the TNC, reflects that agenda.”

So who has a bad agenda? Who are the “rebels”? Who are the needy “civilians”?

From PajamasMedia:

While the International Criminal Court has announced that it is investigating charges of war crimes against Muammar al-Gaddafi and other members of the Libyan regime, harrowing video evidence has emerged that appears to show atrocities committed by anti-Gaddafi rebels. Among other things, the footage depicts summary executions, a prisoner being lynched, the desecration of corpses, and even a beheading. The targets of the most serious abuse are frequently black African prisoners. The ultimate source of the footage appears to be rebel forces or sympathizers themselves.

(Warning: Due to the graphic nature of the videos linked below, viewer discretion is advised.)

What is probably the most harrowing of the clips depicts a public beheading. A man with a long knife can be seen alternately sawing and hacking at the neck of a man who has been suspended upside-down. The victim’s inert body is soaked in blood. The beheading takes place in front of a burnt-out building in … the main square of the rebel capital of Benghazi.

A crowd numbering at least in the hundreds cheers on the assailants. At one point, a man begins chanting “Libya Hurra!”: “Free Libya!” According to the NOS translation, someone can be heard saying, “He looks like an African.” As the principal assailant begins to saw at the victim’s neck, members of the crowd yell “Allahu Akbar!” Dozens of members of the crowd can be seen filming the proceedings with digital cameras or cell phones.

SEE THE VIDEO CLIP here. A raging mob yells for the utmost agony to be inflicted on the victim. (We loathe this savagery, but we do not for a moment imagine that the victim would not do the same to any member of the raging mob if he had the opportunity.)

A second clip depicts a black African prisoner being aggressively questioned and beaten. The man is alleged to be a pro-Gaddafi mercenary. Extracts from the footage have been broadcast on both the Libyan state television Al-Libya and on Al-Jazeera. More complete “raw footage,” which is available on YouTube, shows the beating continuing even after the man is lying face down on the ground, the surrounding concrete splattered with his blood. By way of photographs and identity papers, a video from an unknown source on YouTube identifies the victim as a Libyan citizen and a regular member of the Libyan army. [Link provided – go to the article to see it, and descriptions, with links to more video clips, of more horrors.]

Similar footage of rebels demanding a confession from an alleged black African mercenary has also been shown on Western television. It should be noted that even just the mere exposure of a prisoner to “public curiosity” constitutes a violation of the Geneva Conventions – to say nothing of acts of intimidation and abuse or the outright lynching that appears to be documented in the above clip. …

At first glance, it might seem odd that the rebels would document their own atrocities. But given all the indications that the eastern Libyan heartland of the rebellion is a bastion of jihadist militancy, it is in fact not so odd. It is standard jihadist procedure to film beheadings and other sorts of atrocities committed against captured enemy soldiers and hostages.

Meanwhile, Gaddafi’s capability is swelling with mercenaries and materiel not only from Africa but also from China, Russia, and Europe.

From DebkaFile:

Both of Libya’s fighting camps are taking delivery of a surging influx of weapons shipments and military personnel – each hoping to use the extra aid for breaking the military standoff in its own favor …  The British, French and Italian military officers bound for rebel headquarters in Benghazi are part of a package that includes arms and military equipment from the US, Britain, France, Italy and Qatar.

On the other side of the Libyan divide, China, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Serbia are keeping the pro-Qaddafi camp’s arsenals stocked with new hardware along with combat personnel from Eastern Europe and the former Yugoslavia. …

From mid-March, hundreds of “volunteers” – professional soldiers ranking from colonel down to corporal – have joined the army loyal to Qaddafi. …

One group says it is in Libya for unfinished business with the West, especially the United States, for their role in the Bosnia and Kosovo conflicts.

China is helping him with arms, mostly through African neighbors, and intelligence on NATO strikes  …

The NATO bombardment of a large ammunition dump near Tripoli on April 14 aimed at destroying the latest Chinese arms shipments. …

[There are]  four major difficulties still confronting the next, intensified, round of Western coalition operations in Libya:

1. Pushing Qaddafi too hard could split NATO between West and East European members [not to mention Turkey’s angry refusal to participate – JB].

2. The alliance is short of fighter-bombers for blasting the arms convoys destined for government forces in western Libya, and lacks the precision bombs and missiles for these attacks. These shortages have forced NATO to limit its air strikes for now.

3. It is not clear that UN Security Council resolutions provide a mandate for this kind of attack. The Russians criticize the Western alliance almost daily for exceeding its mandate.

4. In view of this criticism, Washington, London, Paris and Rome are careful to label their war aid to Libyan rebels as “non-lethal military aid” and the military personnel helping them “military advisers” – raising memories of the euphemisms used in previous wars.

The trouble is that all the additional military assistance the West is laying on is barely enough … to maintain the current stalemate against the Qaddafi regime’s boosted capabilities – certainly not sufficient to tip the scales of the war.

Qaddafi holds one major advantage: His army can absorb [trained, experienced] foreign assistance [mercenaries] without delay …  whereas Western aid drops into a pit of uncertainty with regard to the rebel groups and their chiefs. The military advisers arriving in Benghazi first need to guide the opposition’s steps in fighting Qaddafi’s forces, then form the rebels into military units and teach them how to use the weapons they are receiving.

It could take months for regular rebel units to take shape under the direction of British, French and Italian military personnel who, too, are not necessarily working in harness.

And we’ve just heard (from Fox news) that Obama will send armed predator drones for use in Libya. So the US is rejoining the armed intervention after all, Joe? What will your pacifist base say to that, Obama and Hillary?

The cauldron bubbles.

We said it was a mess, the intervention in Libya. It is. And the mess is getting messier, as this RedState article makes plain:

NATO’s operations to date in Libya have been a joke … Libyan Rebel Leader Abdel Fattah Younes has asked NATO to please quit the field. He wants them out of the way…

He said: “Nato is moving very slowly, allowing Gaddafi forces to advance. Nato has become our problem. … One official calls another and then from the official to the head of Nato and from the head of Nato to the field commander. This takes eight hours.”

A part of NATO’s reticence comes from the fact that Libyan Strongman Muammar Khadafy [same guy spelt Gaddafi above] has started taking prisoners and using them as human shields.

Of course he has. That is what Arabs do. It should have been expected. Expect the rebels to do it too.

So much for Obama’s stated aim of the war: to protect civilians.

He let this girl, Samantha –  a political sentimentalist who’s been going about for years weeping for people she knows nothing about, and earning honors for doing so in the vicious circles of the left – persuade him, quite easily, that he suddenly had to “protect” Libyans from their own Ruthless Dictator (normal sort, this one established for forty years), and the result is more Libyans are being victimized than ever before.

What will the squabbling coalition diplomats and generals do now? Do they have a plan at all? A strategy? An objective?

Hmmm?

Now we can see what happens when sentimental leftist ideology dictates American action in world politics.

Three women – no, let’s call them girls – in the Obama administration: Samantha Power, Director of Multilateral Affairs; Susan Rice, Ambassador to the UN; and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, have wangled the use of America’s military power to support an insurrectionist Arab mob in Libya, on the grounds that “civilians” needed to be protected.

Never mind that they have not the least idea of how such a thing can be done. They want to make a beautiful moral gesture.

And, as they are ideologically pacifist and don’t really want to be sullied by the nasty business of war, they persuaded 27 of the 28 nations in NATO – all except Turkey* – to take as much of the blame for the martial intervention as possible.

And again, as they fear to offend Arab potentates, they cajoled a couple of small Arab states – Qatar and the United Arab Emirates – to send a few aircraft to fly about in the theatre of conflict to make it seem that they too approve of the beautiful gesture.

From RedState:

Apparently mobs of US supported rebels are happily slaughtering Africans living in cities under their control.

About the time the Obama administration was making nervous noises about military intervention, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees was reporting:

“Yesterday a UNHCR team at the Egypt border interviewed a group of Sudanese who arrived from eastern Libya who said that armed Libyans were going door to door, forcing sub-Saharan Africans to leave. In one instance a 12-year-old Sudanese girl was said to have been raped … many people had their documents confiscated or destroyed.

“We heard similar accounts from a group of Chadians who fled Benghazi, Al Bayda and Brega in the past few days” …

These atrocities were not being carried out by an evil dictator, rather they were the work product of the people with whom the world’s greatest democracy has aligned itself. …

Rebel forces are detaining anyone suspected of serving or assisting the Kadafi regime, locking them up in the same prisons once used to detain and torture Kadafi’s opponents.

For a month, gangs of young gunmen have [been] rousting Libyan blacks and immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa from their homes and holding them for interrogation as suspected mercenaries or government spies.

These pogroms directed against Africans living in Libya have started a deluge of refugees [fleeing]  into Niger, a country uniquely unready to accept them. …

Now we do know something about the people we are helping. They are brutal. They practice systematic rape and oppression as a means of expelling blacks from Libya – one of the many charming things about the Arab world.

They are supported by al Qaeda.

In fact, they are demonstrably worse than the man we’re struggling to depose.

Don’t put your daughter on the stage of world politics, Mrs America!

* An error here. Germany refused to participate in the war.

The armed intervention by the US (with NATO) in the erstwhile communist and disintegrating state of Yugoslavia at the end of the last century, was probably the most unjustifiable war America ever waged.

Why did the US  expend blood and treasure where absolutely no interest of its own was involved? Why did it go to the aid of the Muslims of Bosnia, and protect – as it still does – assorted Muslim terrorist gangs in Kosovo?  True the Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic was a nasty man, but he wasn’t harming America or Americans. And as brutes in power go, he fell well short of the standard set by Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Funny that the left was so against Saddam being overthrown by US arms, yet so ardently for the overthrow of Milosevic.

Now at last comes an answer to “why?”. A revelation. And it should be enough to make the most hawkish of us blush.

According to Samuel Mikolaski, whose article appears today at American Thinker, the answer is: because President Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright hated the Serbs.

At least “in part”  it was her “vitriolic, personal hatred of Serbs” that “facilitated” Clinton’s decision to “import Al Qaeda from Afghanistan into Bosnia”, and “skewed our foreign policy”.

Not since Helen of Troy had a woman’s emotion made nation go to war against nation. (Same part of the world, but a different sort of woman, and an opposite emotion.)

Samuel Mikolaski was born in the Balkans and grew up in Canada. He is a retired professor of theology, so understandably distressed by the “destruction and desecration of literally hundreds of churches, monasteries, cemeteries and other Christian landmarks, some of which are medieval treasures” by the Muslims to whom Kosovo has now been handed over (by the self-described Christian West!). “There are,” he writes, “more churches, monasteries and other Christian landmarks per square kilometer in Kosovo than anywhere else on earth”, because “Kosovo is to Serbian Orthodox Christians what Canterbury is to Anglicans and the Vatican to Roman Catholics.”

Although we don’t share the professor’s religious sensibilities, we do deplore the vandalism and philistinism. But the far greater outrage is the handing over of European territory to Muslim control.

There [was not] even a hint of anxiety or regret [on Clinton’s part] at what his importing of Al Qaeda into Bosnia was causing as they settled down, married Bosnian women, and began the process of imposing Islamic radicalism on Bosnia, which had become significantly secular since the expulsion of the Ottomans from Europe after World War I.

From Bosnia and Kosovo we now have one of the largest and most virulent drug cartels in the world, the worst of white slavery and prostitution trafficking into Europe, and terrorist training compounds. (Several of the 9/11 hijackers spent time in Bosnia among their Al Qaeda compatriots.) …

It is scarcely credible, but nevertheless true, that the Clinton Administration ignored the Islamic Declaration by Alija Izetbegović, former president of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in which he clearly urged Islamists in Bosnia and worldwide to take up jihad against the West. Instead they regarded him as “their boy,” ignoring the proliferating terrorist cells in Bosnia. …

The latest bombshell is the Council of Europe’s recently adopted report… that Kosovo leaders, including Prime Minister Hashim Thaci, are complicit in crime, including organ trafficking. There is now a strenuous effort to sweep the body parts issue under the rug lest it torpedo efforts to legitimize the illegally mandated separation of Kosovo from Serbia. The data are horrific: Serbian captive youths were selected on the basis of genetic compatibility for killing in order to harvest saleable body parts. … But there is an insuperable obstacle to effective judicial proceedings: Kosovo is tiny, and it is almost impossible to shelter witnesses, should they come forward. Testifying would mean signing a death warrant against oneself and one’s entire family. …

Apart from which, a self-imposed code of “omerta” has been adopted throughout Europe (and in America by the Obama administration), with regard to Islam: a state of affairs commented on by one of the world’s foremost authorities on Islam, Bernard Lewis, in a passage quoted at the end of the article:

[There is now] a degree of thought control and limitations of freedom of expression without parallel in the Western world since the 18th century … Islam and Islamic values now have a level of immunity from comment and criticism in the Western world that Christianity has lost and Judaism has never had.

Which provokes another “why?”.

The New York Times exposes a farce enacted on the real stage of international politics: a perfectly performed con-trick by which an imposter extracted a mountain of moola from craven double-dealing presidents, diplomats, and generals involved in The Endless War of Waste and Futility.

The conman claimed to be Mullah Akhta Muhammad Mansour, “the second highest official in the Taliban movement” after the founder, Mullah Mohammed Omar.

He and “two other Taliban leaders” were flown to Kabul from Pakistan in a NATO plane, wearing serious beards, and were ceremoniously ushered into the presidential palace, where they proceeded to beard President Karzai in his den, so to speak. Then they were conducted to the city of Kandahar where “Mullah Mansour” and his two merry men hoodwinked government officials, NATO commanders, American diplomats and top-brass.

For months, the secret talks unfolding between Taliban and Afghan leaders to end the war appeared to be showing promise, if only because of the appearance of a certain insurgent leader at one end of the table: Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, one of the most senior commanders in the Taliban movement.

But now, it turns out, Mr. Mansour was apparently not Mr. Mansour at all. In an episode that could have been lifted from a spy novel, United States and Afghan officials now say the Afghan man was an impostor, and high-level discussions conducted with the assistance of NATO appear to have achieved little.

“It’s not him,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul intimately involved in the discussions. “And we gave him a lot of money.”

American officials confirmed Monday that they had given up hope that the Afghan was Mr. Mansour, or even a member of the Taliban leadership.

Doubts about the man’s identity arose after the third session of negotiations. Only then –

A man who had known [the real] Mr. Mansour years ago told Afghan officials that the man at the table did not resemble him.

Even so, they wistfully hoped that whoever he was would come again. They’d paid him to keep the fake peace talks going, and any old talks, with anyone at all, are better than none.

While the Afghan official said he still harbored hopes that the man would return for another round of talks, American and other Western officials said they had concluded that the man in question was not Mr. Mansour. Just how the Americans reached such a definitive conclusion — whether, for instance, they were able to positively establish his identity through fingerprints or some other means — is unknown.

As recently as last month, American and Afghan officials held high hopes for the talks. Senior American officials, including Gen. David H. Petraeus, said the talks indicated that Taliban leaders, whose rank-and-file fighters are under extraordinary pressure from the American-led offensive, were at least willing to discuss an end to the war. …

President Karzai himself – who wears, literally, the mantle of power – denied that any talks with any Taliban, real or pretend, were going on at all:

“Do not accept foreign media reports about meetings with Taliban leaders. Most of these reports are propaganda and lies,” he said.

The Taliban also deny that any talks took place, or were planned.

In a recent message to his followers, Mullah Omar denied that there were any talks unfolding at any level.

Now, since “Mullah Mansour” turns out to have been a scam artist, it seems they might be telling the truth.

Since the last round of discussions, which took place within the past few weeks, Afghan and American officials have been puzzling over who the man was.

So who was he?

[Some] say the man may have been a [real] Taliban agent. “The Taliban are cleverer than the Americans and our own intelligence service,” said a senior Afghan official who is familiar with the case.  “They are playing games.”

Others suspect that the fake Taliban leader, whose identity is not known, may have been dispatched by the Pakistani intelligence service, known by its initials, the ISI. Elements within the ISI have long played a “double-game” in Afghanistan, reassuring United States officials that they are pursuing the Taliban while at the same time providing support for the insurgents.

The theory we like best is that he was “a humble shopkeeper from the Pakistani city of Quetta”, who simply enlisted the help of two cronies and carried out the sting operation for the most understandable of motives – to get a lot of money. Which they did.

We are not adverse critics of President Bush’s decision to topple Saddam Hussein. But we think the intervention should have ended when the tyrant was gone. We don’t believe that Iraq (any more than Afghanistan) can be transformed into a liberal democracy.

Americans will not change Iraqis, will never break their habits and reform their customs. In Arab and Islamic countries, torture of captives is routine. It’s a normalcy of the culture, and the US showed recognition of this by not even trying to interfere with the practice in Iraq.

When First World nations fought wars of conquest in the Third World to subdue native populations and establish rule over them, they hoped to civilize them – or at least the British did. It would take time and colonization, they thought. And here and there they succeeded to some extent. The United States never wanted even to try such empire-building. Americans want to go in, force a regime change, get the natives voting, and get out.

If they don’t get out in good time, they themselves will be damaged and vitiated.

Here’s part of the Telegraph’s take on the Iraq war documents released last week by Wikileaks:

The 391,831 reports, drawn up in many cases by US soldiers of relatively junior rank … provide a terrifying insight into the anarchy which enveloped Iraq after Saddam Hussein’s regime collapsed.

The reports reveal in terrifying detail how any hope of replacing the former dictatorship with a functioning democracy quickly became a faded dream as Iraq descended into an orgy of killing which reached every corner of the country.

In often nauseating detail, the files disclose the coalition commanders turned a blind eye to acts of torture and murder conducted on an industrial scale.

In one log it is reported that an Iraqi man was arrested by the police and shot in the leg by an officer. The report continues: “this detainee suffered abuse which amounted to cracked ribs, multiple lacerations and welts and bruises from being whipped with a large rod and hose across his back”. The report, with stunning understatement, adds that these acts amount to “reasonable suspicion of abuse” but the outcome was: “No further Investigation Required”.

The decision not to investigate was a direct order from the Pentagon as US officials sought to pass the management of security from the coalition to the Iraqis.

It was a cataclysmic error which probably lengthened the insurgency as the victims of abuse sought vengeance and directed their anger at US and British troops. How many dead coalition troops would be alive today had the Iraqi death squads been stopped?

Stopped how, when the tactic was to make friends with as many Iraqis as possible with a view to “winning hearts and minds”? Even if it were possible to stop the death squads and torture, would interfering with their traditional pleasures do anything but annoy them?

And now Americans, who – like the great British imperialists in the past – see it as their moral duty to improve the lives of backward peoples, are finding themselves blamed, and not unjustly, for the anguish and calamity that has attended their intervention.

Rudyard Kipling gave warning of the hazards of such foreign adventures. He wrote what is now an extremely politically incorrect poem about them. The first line alone would earn it a fatwa and a banning by National Public Radio.

Here are some lines from it:

Take up the White Man’s burden–

Send forth the best ye breed–

Go, bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives’ need…

Take up the White Man’s burden–

In patience to abide,

To veil the threat of terror

And check the show of pride…

Take up the White Man’s burden–

The savage wars of peace–

Fill full the mouth of Famine,

And bid the sickness cease;

And when your goal is nearest

(The end for others sought)

Watch sloth and heathen folly

Bring all your hope to nought…

The ports ye shall not enter,

The roads ye shall not tread,

Go, make them with your living

And mark them with your dead…

Take up the White Man’s burden,

And reap his old reward–

The blame of those ye better

The hate of those ye guard…

Take up the White Man’s burden–

Ye dare not stoop to less–

Nor call too loud on Freedom

To cloak your weariness…