Is Libya All About Iran?

[Purveyor]

Posted by Joe Klein Sunday, April 3, 2011 at 11:40 am

Cairo

Jeez, I certainly hope not. But David Sanger's reporting today tells us that at least some in the White House saw it that way:

The mullahs in Tehran, noted Thomas E. Donilon, the national security adviser, were watching Mr. Obama's every move in the Arab world. They would interpret a failure to back up his declaration that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi had “lost the legitimacy to lead” as a sign of weakness — and perhaps as a signal that Mr. Obama was equally unwilling to back up his vow never to allow Iran to gain the ability to build a nuclear weapon.

“It shouldn't be overstated that this was the deciding factor, or even a principal factor” in the decision to intervene in Libya, Benjamin J. Rhodes, a senior aide who joined in the meeting, said last week. But, he added, the effect on Iran was always included in the discussion.

That is truly embarrassing. We got ourselves mixed up in Libya because the President foolishly said that Gaddafi had to go and if Gaddafi didn't go, we'd look weak to the Iranians? OK, as Ben Rhodes, insists, it probably wasn't the "deciding factor," but if it was any sort of factor, it's...pathetic. If, in fact, Iran is any sort of factor in our Middle East thinking (as it should be), we should be paying a hell of a lot more attention to Syria, where Iran's ally Bashar Assad is shooting people in the street, than we have been. Certainly, we should be paying more attention to Syria than to Libya. (Additionally, I'd add that if we have embarked on this Libya mission because the President said Gaddafi had to go, it was an even worse mistake for Obama to say it than I'd been thinking.)

All of this smacks of that old American "credibility" argument that is disproved again and again. As in: if we leave Vietnam, we'll lose credibility in our struggle against the Soviet Union (actually, we lost credibility in our struggle against the Soviets by launching the foolish Vietnam war; we regained some strength by getting out). We've heard this argument over and over--in Iraq and Afghanistan, most recently. Of all the reasons to stay in both those benighted places, "credibility" is the least credible. Stability, in Mesopotamia and South Asia, is a far more plausible reason for staying, if you want to stay.

MORE...

http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2011/04/03/is-libya-all-about-iran/

[dkf]

1. Which is why we shouldn't have gone in the first place.

Preventing genocide is all nice and good, but did the strongest advocates of this, ie Samantha Powers and Susan Rice, understand what they are doing here? Are they experts on the Middle East?