War It Is

And so it begins.

Somehow, inexplicably, a Democrat President has embroiled us in a neo-conservative wet dream. Yet again, we've managed to find ourselves in a benighted hell-hole, committed to bombing people until they stop being nasty to each other and embrace democracy:

The U.S. military attacked Moammar Gadhafi's air defenses Saturday with strikes along the Libyan coast that were launched by Navy vessels in the Mediterranean. 

A senior military official said the assault would unfold in stages and target air defense installations around Tripoli, the capital, and a coastal area south of Benghazi. That's the rebel stronghold under attack by Moammar Gadhafi's forces.

Complete details were not immediately available.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss sensitive military operations.

Hours after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton attended an international conference in Paris that endorsed military action against Gadhafi, the U.S. kicked off its attacks on Libyan air defense missile and radar sites along the Mediterranean coast to protect no-fly zone pilots from the threat of getting shot down.

Michael Lind looks to the historical results of this sort of fundamentally neo-conservative style of foreign policy:

Undeterred by the failure of lift-and-strike in the Balkans, neoconservatives proposed the same discredited strategy as a way to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Paul Wolfowitz and others proposed the creation of enclaves in Iraq, from which anti-Saddam forces under the protection of U.S. airpower could topple the tyrant. Critics who knew something about the military dismissed this as the "Bay of Goats" strategy, comparing it to the Kennedy administration's failed "Bay of Pigs" operation that was intended to overthrow Fidel Castro without direct U.S. military involvement by landing American-armed Cuban exiles in Cuba. In Iraq, as in the Balkans, the ultimate result was an all-out U.S. invasion followed by an occupation.

And (via Andrew Sullivan ) Talleyrand closes in for the kill on the argument for military intervention:

Talleyrand, like many other people, is very perplexed by this most recent action. Several European nations, the United States and a few token others have decided to intervene militarily in a civil war on the losing side, and just at the moment when these forces were on the verge of defeat.

The assumption appears to be that Col. Gaddafi and those with him will be so intimidated, demoralized or simply disrupted as to surrender in short order and cede control of the country and its resources to a capable and effective national government led presumably by those now active in Benghazi. If that assumption proves incorrect, the next assumption appears to be that he will be defeated, also in short order, by superior air power. If that assumption proves incorrect, the next assumption appears to be that his Libyan enemies will be so emboldened by outside intervention that they will finish the job themselves. If that assumption proves incorrect, the final assumption appears to be that the “coalition of the willing” will just keep bombing until something else happens. That something else is vague, but the assumption appears to be that it will be better than the state of affairs in Libya during the past four decades.