Comeback of stupid shit?

Roman temple tombs at Ghirza, Libya. Photo by Esther Kofod.

So, SuperTuesday, huh. Everybody from Corey Robin to Ross Douthat is out with a venture into some of that contrarian horserace panditry as if that's something cool, or adult (gee, Dad, I sure wish I could be like Mark Halperin when I grow up!), the professor working out Bernie's demographic path to unexpected victory (he got 41% of the non-white Democratic vote in Massachusetts!) while the Monsignor games out the chances of a contested convention (credit where credit is due, he uses the correct expression instead of the idiotic "brokered convention", and while his scenario is equally idiotic, or worse, this is a year where that is no bar to becoming reality).

Imma say Hillary over the Donald in November with a record low turnout, and the usual awful performances by the Democratic senatorial and congressional committees leaving Congress more or less as it is. No I'm not. I will leave that to others.

I am feeling kind of distressed, amid the SuperTuesday celebrations and laments, by something else that happened virtually in the middle of it, the huge report by Scott Shane and Jo Becker in the Times that came out Sunday and Monday on the US role in Libyan military operations of 2011-12 and the part played by Secretary of State Clinton; not so much in the intervention itself as in her apparent failure to learn anything from it:

Libya, aides say, has strongly reinforced the president’s reluctance to move more decisively in Syria. “Literally, this has given him pause about what would be required if you eliminated the Syrian state,” a top adviser said.

Mrs. Clinton, by contrast, pushed for greater American involvement early in the Syrian civil war and has repeatedly called for a no-fly zone, a move Mr. Obama has so far rejected. The lessons of the Libya experience have not tempered her more aggressive approach to international crises.

While remaining political allies, the president and his former top diplomat have taken revealing shots at each other. In a rare flash of emotion after leaving office, Mrs. Clinton derided the president’s guiding principle in foreign relations: “Don’t do stupid stuff.”

“Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” she said in a 2014 interview with The Atlantic.

It turns out I haven't really written anything about Libya here before myself beyond the BENGHAZI! incident, which is startling. It's not that I haven't thought about it. I think about the general North Africa and Middle East region all the time, you know, and try not to write about it, because the research is awful and the answers worse, until it starts weighing so much I can't help myself, which usually means Syria nowadays, or more recently Yemen.

I had a lot of trouble seeing what a bad thing in the long run a NATO campaign  in Libya was going to be, and I still think there are reasons for feeling that though it certainly was an error it was an understandable one, reinforced by the new Times coverage. In the first place the purpose of it was pretty plainly exactly what they said it was, haunted by the Clinton memories of Rwanda and Bosnia in particular, when the US had done nothing to stop the unspeakable slaughter of unarmed thousands, to save lives, as Colonel Qadhafi's forces moved against the popular uprising in the east.

Because I really don't see how you could be sitting on top of all that US power contemplating such suffering without wanting to believe you could relieve it. Maybe you usually have to end up saying no, maybe almost always, but I don't see how you can not want to.

It wasn't even a US program, but an idea from (conservative governments in) France and Britain; all they wanted from the Americans was a little help.

As I wrote in comments over at No More Mister Nice Blog the other day, it was basically planned in France and UK from 21 February to 14 March, less than a week before the action began, when Sarkozy and Juppé formally asked Clinton to ask Obama for US assistance. Consonant with Obama's continually exerted effort to get the other developed countries to step up and stop expecting the US to be the world's policeman, and it was managed by French and UK officials throughout. Backed by the unanimous Security Council resolution 1970 (26 February) and the US Senate resolution 85 (for which Sanders voted, 1 March), huge march of women in the streets of Benghazi begging NATO to set up a no-fly zone and formal request from the Arab League (12 March), etc.

The US actually played a fairly minor role, as was understood at the time: in September 2011,

While Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron were given heroes’ welcomes during victory laps through Libya last month, Clinton was confronted during her recent Tripoli visit with questions about why the United States had not done more.

“Many people feel that the United States has taken a back seat,” one student told her.

Unfortunately, while it seemed back in late 2011 and early 2012 that the thing had been a success, as ordinary Libyans rejoiced (they really did welcome Sarkozy and Cameron as liberators!), the American administration inflated its role, Clinton in the lead, and they may have convinced themselves that they did it all by themselves; and the Times story does not do a great job of correcting that impression.

Then, a great deal of what went wrong was intelligence failure (this part the Times does really really well), particularly on the part of Britain and France and Italy, and their complete failure to understand just how many weapons there were in Libya, available in the desert for Qadhafi supporters and freelancers and eventually the Da'esh to pick up at will and prolong the fighting for years. And they were really convinced by the Libyan freedom movement that the civilians had a plan and a more or less coherent and stable government could be formed more or less immediately, as it had been in Tunisia—Clinton was very much bamboozled by this too (though I just heard a story on BBC—from David Kilcullen, who was a counterterrorism strategist in the State Department at the time, suggesting that the breakup of the Libyan government wasn't inevitable until the US raids of October 2013 messed up the balance, long after Clinton was gone). But the intelligence failures weren't an after-the-fact fiction to cover up the various governments' manipulation of the intelligence, as in the Iraq case; they were sincerely wrong.

Be that as it may, the real question is, will she get caught up in the same kind of stupidity again? Is her attraction to stupid shit, well-meaning or otherwise, so powerful that she just can't quit it? I keep telling everybody she has refudiated, as they say, the 2003 AUMF vote and isn't a warmonger of any kind. I really, really want to be an enthusiastic Clinton supporter this fall, I'm willing to do an embarrassingly large amount of rationalization. But this may just be too much.