America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (53 page)

All of this—the emergence of an “Iraq Syndrome” with its reluctance to put U.S. troops in harm’s way, the turmoil resulting from the Arab Awakening, and signs that attitudes toward Israel were in flux—had implications for the ongoing conduct of America’s War for the Greater Middle East.

Moving beyond that war’s invade-and-occupy phase had important implications for the American military apparatus, which experienced a substantial reconfiguration during the Obama era. That reconfiguration came chiefly at the expense of the U.S. Army, which in the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan fell out of fashion. Army generals might still entertain visions of brigades and regiments storming enemy lines pursuant to occupying the enemy capital, but no one else was buying. So from a peak of 566,000 at the height of the Third Persian Gulf War, the regular army found itself on a downward glide path toward a projected overall strength of 450,000 by 2018. Although army leaders still insisted that their service existed to fight and win the nation’s wars, few Americans wished to test the proposition further.
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The principal beneficiaries of the army’s fall from grace were special operations forces and anyone able to carve out a piece of the action associated with unmanned aerial vehicles. For policymakers seeking ways to punish without the complications associated with wholesale invasion and occupation, commandos and drones offered a host of benefits. During the fourth decade of America’s War for the Greater Middle East, they emerged as the clear weapons of choice.

The presidency of Barack Obama coincided with the “golden age” of America’s special operators, according to General Joseph Votel, who in 2014 assumed the reins of U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM).
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In the decades since the embarrassing Iran hostage rescue mission—subsequently enshrined as “our most successful failure” and classified not as a fiasco but as a launch point—the special operations community had grown and prospered.
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With over seventy-two thousand personnel and further expansion projected, SOCOM by 2015 was on track to surpass the entire British Army in overall size.
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Over the course of the previous year, SOCOM had operated in an astonishing 150 countries.
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No military force in history had acquired such a far-flung presence. No institution with a comparably expansive mandate had ever succeeded in maintaining such a low profile, thereby avoiding serious oversight except on its own preferred terms.

Where SOCOM would not or could not go, UAVs offered policymakers an attractive alternative, even if one that U.S. military officers had not immediately recognized. Much as navies initially viewed submarines as a means to conduct reconnaissance rather than as instruments of destruction, the Pentagon initially saw drones as vehicles to gather intelligence or maintain surveillance rather than to kill. Not until February 2001 did the United States successfully weaponize a drone, test-launching a Hellfire missile from a Predator UAV. In November of that year, during the opening stages of the Afghanistan War, a missile from a CIA-operated drone assassinated a senior Al Qaeda operative in Kabul. From this point forward, enthusiasm for exploiting the potential of drones as a means to attack grew progressively. By the time Obama had fully settled into the White House, that enthusiasm knew no bounds, with little apparent interest in the implications of others acquiring drone technology, as they inevitably would.
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Here was a surviving remnant of the now-discredited Revolution in Military Affairs that had so warped U.S. military practice during the 1990s and immediately after 9/11.

Varying according to purpose, the Obama-era campaigns that superseded Iraq and Afghanistan and brought special operators and drones to the forefront of U.S. military policy fell into three distinct categories. In some, the aim was to
depose,
in others to
suppress,
in others still simply to
retard
. All shared a common determination to minimize risks, keep down costs, and above all avoid anything approximating a quagmire—the very qualities that had made Iraq and Afghanistan each such an ordeal.

Included in the first category were direct intervention in Libya and indirect intervention in Syria. The second category included military actions in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The third category expanded America’s War for the Greater Middle East into Africa, the Pentagon calculating that a modest U.S. military presence in nations with majority or notably large Muslim populations could nip violent jihad in the bud. Regardless of the intended purpose, little of this activity produced the desired effect. Yet overall, the number of active fronts in America’s War for the Greater Middle East multiplied—this was President Obama’s principal contribution to that war.

The Libyan intervention, launched in March 2011, proved a particular disappointment. The aim of Operation Odyssey Dawn, as the Pentagon called it, was to complete the job left unfinished by Operation El Dorado Canyon a quarter-century before—to rid the planet of Moamar Gaddafi. It did that, but with catastrophic aftereffects.

Ironically, George W. Bush, given to wrapping himself in the mantle of Ronald Reagan, had thrown a lifeline to the Libyan dictator that Reagan had so roundly despised. After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Gaddafi had volunteered to give up further efforts to develop nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons. The Bush administration accepted the offer—“a significant success,” according to Donald Rumsfeld, stemming directly from the fact that Gaddafi “did not want to become the next Saddam Hussein.”
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In return, the State Department removed Libya from its roster of terror-sponsoring nations and restored full diplomatic relations. According to
Time,
parroting the Bush administration’s own line, “the onetime international pariah’s decision to dismantle his weapons of mass destruction program was primarily the result of the U.S. war on terror and its toppling of Saddam Hussein.”
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Offering Libya a fresh start, while letting bygones be bygones, served as the first (and last) fruits of Bush’s Freedom Agenda. The resulting deal released the Gaddafi regime from various international sanctions and provided Western energy conglomerates access to Libyan oil fields. To cement this renewal of U.S.-Libyan relations, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Tripoli in September 2008, calling on Gaddafi at the very residence struck by American bombs two decades prior.
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As for Gaddafi’s subjects, few tangible freedoms came their way. So during the Arab Awakening, they took matters into their own hands. In February 2011, a popular uprising triggered a full-fledged civil war. Rebel forces seized Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest metropolis. With Gaddafi vowing to march on that city and eliminate the “cockroaches” daring to challenge his rule, President Obama reversed his predecessor’s policy of conciliation. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denounced Gaddafi’s threat as “completely unacceptable.”
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On March 2, she declared that Gaddafi “must go, now, without further violence and bloodshed.”
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When he refused to comply, the United States set about organizing a coalition to intervene. The advertised aim was to protect civilians and end the turmoil that threatened to destabilize the “entire region.”
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The actual aim was to help Gaddafi’s adversaries prevail while validating a new rationale for allowing big countries to interfere in the affairs of small ones, justified by a putative “responsibility to protect.” RTP, as it came to be known, was the Bush Doctrine of preventive war in humanitarian drag. Rather than providing protection, its application in Libya sowed the seeds of prolonged disorder.

Odyssey Dawn commenced on March 19. With President Obama having categorically ruled out the commitment of U.S. combat troops, this was to be an air campaign, albeit one facilitated by small numbers of special operations troops on the ground. Odyssey Dawn fell under the purview of United States Africa Command (AFRICOM), newest of the Pentagon’s regional commands, ostensibly created not to wage but to prevent wars on that continent. The operation began with the standard volley of Tomahawk missiles launched from ships afloat in the Mediterranean and targeting Libya’s weak air defenses and even weaker air force. Attacks by manned aircraft followed, with first France, Great Britain, and several other nations participating on a token basis. Over the next two weeks, according to AFRICOM’s air component commander, this summarily assembled coalition “flew well over 2000 sorties, launched more than 200 [cruise missiles], released thousands of pounds of munitions, saved thousands of Libyan civilians from massacre, and eliminated the Libyan Air Force as a threat.”
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At this point, responsibility for directing the campaign passed from AFRICOM to NATO, headed as always by an American officer, the move intended to endow the operation (which NATO dubbed “Unified Protector”) with a multilateral coloration. Under this arrangement, bombing continued through October. By the time operations ended, NATO claimed to have destroyed 5,900 targets to include four hundred artillery pieces and six hundred armored vehicles, all under the guise of protecting civilians. In reality, the United States and its allies were providing a de facto air force for the Libyan resistance while denying air support to Gaddafi’s troops. U.S. aircraft, which included Predator drones, completed roughly one-third of the 26,500 NATO sorties flown.
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For Gaddafi himself, who fled Tripoli in August, the end came when an armed Predator engaged a convoy in which he was traveling near Sirte, the city of his birth. The deposed dictator was injured in the attack and then captured, beaten, and summarily executed.
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Secretary Clinton pronounced herself pleased with the outcome. “We came, we saw, he died,” she gloated.
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Her boss the president promptly declared that “the dark shadow of tyranny has been lifted” from Libya and summoned residents of that nation to “build an inclusive and tolerant and democratic Libya that stands as the ultimate rebuke” to the man once known as that country’s “Brotherly Leader.”
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Obama’s hopes came to naught, however. It was Iraq all over again: Getting rid of the evil dictator turned out to be the easy part. An intervention justified by the imperative of protecting innocents and averting instability produced the precise opposite of the results intended. Once Gaddafi was gone, the factions that had joined together to overthrow him turned on one another. A country once defined by its leader’s zany antics now became synonymous with outright anarchy. The state ceased to function. The plight of desperate Libyans seeking to escape became an international scandal, with thousands losing their lives trying to cross the Mediterranean into Europe. The principal beneficiaries of Gaddafi’s removal were human traffickers and radical Islamists as Libya became the site of Al Qaeda’s newest franchise. By 2015, the country was a basket case and seemed likely to remain one for the indefinite future.
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In Iraq, the presence of U.S. troops on the ground had made the consequences of invasion impossible to ignore. In Libya, the absence of U.S. troops enabled Americans to avert their gaze from what intervention had wrought. While the assassination of the U.S. envoy to Libya in September 2012 stirred a flurry of interest, critics used the death of Ambassador Christopher Stevens not to draw attention to America’s role in the crisis enveloping Libya but to score political points at the expense of President Obama and Secretary Clinton. The ill-conceived U.S. intervention in Libya demanded serious reflection, perhaps even contrition. Instead, Washington opted for crude partisanship.

Even so, Libya represented a model of thoughtful planning and competent execution in comparison with Obama’s one other foray into regime change. In Syria, the United States responded to a nominally similar situation with impressive rhetoric and desultory action, yielding an outcome at least as calamitous as Libya’s.

Among Syrians, the Arab Awakening generated popular demands for the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad and his Ba’athist regime. Assad responded first with minor concessions followed by a crackdown. By April 2011, protest gave way to civil war and escalating violence. Echoing his secretary of state on Gaddafi, Obama declared that Assad “must go.”
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Yet apart from inveighing against any Syrian government use of chemical weapons—violating that “red line” would “change my calculus,” the president warned—his administration limited itself to various diplomatic and economic sanctions.
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Obama’s reluctance to go further became evident in the summer of 2013 when Assad’s forces employed chemical weapons against his own people, thereby violating the U.S. red line. To lesser provocations by Gaddafi in the 1980s and Saddam Hussein in the 1990s, Obama’s predecessors had responded with punitive action. Obama himself considered that possibility but, sensing an absence of enthusiasm, both at home and among key allies, backed away.
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Instead, he signed on to a Russian-brokered deal providing for the supervised destruction of Syria’s chemical arsenal.