“THIS IS A FINE MESS YOU’VE GOTTEN US INTO…”

10/8/11

This weekend’s (i.e., Saturday/Sunday, 10/8, 10/9’s, page A8) Wall Street Journal reports that former CIA chief and current Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, speaking at a Naval Air Station in southern Italy, chided early critics of NATO and U.S. (As if the two were distinguishable; see my 3/28/11 post IT’S NOT A CHICK FLICK; IT’S A ROMANTIC COMEDY.) conduct during the Libyan conflict, saying, inter alia

“There were an awful lot of questions about the mission overall and I think the critics have really been proven wrong.”

and that the 4,000 sorties western planes flew have given the Libyan people “some degree of hope,” elaborating

“They (the Libyan people) are going to have a chance, as a result of what (western militaries) did, to hopefully establish a democracy for the future.”

On the very same page, in the continuation of a page A1 story, we learn that, as the headline says, “Discord Increasingly Riddles Factions in Chaotic Tripoli.” It seems that the freedom fighters so beloved by the likes of Mr. Panetta, John McCain, and Barack Obama, are breaking into factions to see who will become the 21st century version of the Colonel they overthrew. The factions are split between regions (e.g., eastern Libya and Tripoli) and within neighborhoods in Tripoli. The factions are composed of former Gadhafi loyalist, idealistic democrats, regional xenophobes, Islamists, and dictators in the wings. Fighting is breaking out between these factions and, while others will tell you otherwise, it is probably just a matter of time between something like civil war, though the media won’t use that term, will break out in Libya. None of this is surprising, certainly not to readers of the Pontificator; see, among others, the aforementioned 3/28/11 post, my 4/23/11 post DOG BITES MAN, my 8/22/11 post I HOPE MICHELE BACHMANN WASN’T COUNTING ON LIBYA TO GET OIL TO $2, and my 10/8/11 post THICK AS A BRIC?

Yet Mr. Panetta and his colleagues in both parties whose first loyalty seems to be to the American imperial impulse and the defense contractors that impulse keeps wealthy insist that the NATO campaign that fostered the utter chaos that Libya is on the verge of becoming was a rousing success and that those of us who questioned it have been “proven wrong.” Simply amazing.

Optimism, always overrated, is sometimes okay in very measured doses unless it is blind optimism, based on nothing but good feelings and/or gormless, baseless admonitions to “be optimistic,” that leads one to do silly things. Among those silly things is destablilizing entire regions of the globe in response to such ephemeral impulses as “giving people some degree of hope,” because one likes the sounds of such increasingly meaningless words as “democracy,” or because one is enamored of the innocence of youth and so somehow believes that naiveté can somehow, this time, trump the wisdom of the ages.