Sometimes a newspaper editorial gets it exactly right. This is one such time. Read the whole thing, if you can. But pay attention especially to the last paragraph, which states that:

As for Mr. Romney, he would do well to consider the example of Republican former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, who issued a statement Wednesday lamenting "the tragic loss of life at our consulate," praising Mr. Stevens as "a wonderful officer and a terrific diplomat" and offering "thoughts and prayers" to "all the loved ones of the fallen." That was the appropriate response.

Not persuaded? Then read more here from Republican apparatchik Ed Rogers. And more here from James Fallows, who concludes that Romney isn't ready for that 3 am phone call. Here's a roundup. 

(HT to RD) 

While Tom Ricks is away from his blog, he has selected a few of his favorite posts to re-run. We will be posting a few every day until he returns. This originally ran on June 16, 2011.

Remember in early April I highlighted a David Ignatius column saying that Qaddafi was weaker than people thought and predicting that the old coot would run out of money in three months? Well, the bills may be coming due. John McCreary, another smart guy, notes that pro-Qaddafi fighters deserted a town in western Libya on the road to Tripoli. He observes, "This development is significant because it is the second instance in a month in which pro-Qadhafi fighters just stopped fighting. That is a strong suggestion that their pay or their contracts ran out."

He says fears about it falling apart or into civil war are overblown:

  ... on visits to Benghazi, Misrata and Tripoli, to find that there were no militiamen to be seen, that most things were functioning normally, that there were police at traffic intersections, that there were children's carnivals open till late, families out, that jewelry shops were open till 8 pm, that Arabs and Africans were working side by side, and that people were proud in Benghazi of having demonstrated against calls for decentralizing the country.

As someone who has lived in conflict situations, I take as a very serious gauge of security whether shops are open and how late they stay open. Jewelry shops in particular are easily looted, and the loot is light and easy to fence. But in Tripoli there was loads of gold in rows of jewelry shops, along with clothing stores newly stocked with Italian fashions."

The new issue of Prism has a fascinating article about American command arrangements for the Libya operation earlier this year.

The authors, three souls who toiled in the lower depths of the Joint Staff's J-7, write that, "the decision was made to retain AFRICOM as the supported command, with USEUCOM, USCENTCOM, USTRANSCOM and U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) in support."

Sounds simple, but wait: AFRICOM doesn't have any forces, so EUCOM became "de facto force provider." It is almost as if EUCOM were acting like a service. (Which would make it our sixth service, after the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, and SOCOM, which already effectively has its own civilian-led secretariat, in the SO/LIC bureaucracy.)  

It gets even more complicated.  Many aircraft were flying from bases in EUCOM's area of responsibility, so EUCOM "retained OPCON of these forces." What's more, EUCOM had other fish to fry, so reported Adm. Locklear, "We were responding to OPCON pleas of the provider to make his life easier rather than the OPCON needs of the commander." It's like a waterfall running in reverse.   

Also, it turned out that AFRICOM lacked the ability to actually run an operation. (Interesting side fact: Half its staff is civilian, and it had never rehearsed to run anything.)

Final bonus fact: The U.S. military has apparently come up with the worst acronym I have heard in a long time: "VOCO." The article's authors quote an Army brigadier as stating that in the Libyan operation, there was "Lots of VOCO between all levels of command." It stands for "verbal orders of the commander." But hold on: Aren't all  orders are verbal, unless the guy is pointing or something? What the poor general meant was "oral orders of the commander." That would be "OOCO." I'd prefer "Unwritten orders of the commander," which would be "UOCO," but that is too hard to pronounce. It could make you poco loco in the coco.   

And remember at this point we haven't even gotten into the command arrangements with the other 14 nations in the anti-Qaddafi coalition (AQC).

Qood.

(In the foto, that's him on the left, before he went all Bob Dylan.)

That's the article I'd like to read by everyone who predicted a stalemate or quagmire in which the United States eventually would have to insert ground troops. (For those of you too hurried to click through to all them links, I am calling out the following members of the diverse quagmire/stalemate coalition: Dov Zakheim, Andrew Sullivan, Alexander Cockburn, Anne Applebaum, Richard Norton-Taylor, Melanie Clarke, the German government, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, the Xinhua news service, and the Beirut Daily Star.)

Who wants to go first?

Meanwhile, from Fareed Zakaria, here is one of the best summaries I have seen of the meaning of the Libyan war:

The Libyan intervention offers a new model for the West. It was a humanitarian mission with strategic interests as well -- support for the Arab Spring and the new aspirations of the people of the Middle East. It was also a new model in that it involved an America that insisted on legitimacy and burden sharing, that allowed the locals to own their revolution. That means, however, that it is in the hands of the Libyans. They can avoid the mistakes of Iraq, which makes the challenge before them even more daunting. But it is a challenge they have eagerly sought and one for which they will find help from friends around the world.

And that is a headline I thought I'd never write about Professor Chomsky. The old-school hard-core MIT leftist has issued a letter denouncing his old friend Hugo Chavez for undermining Venezuelan democracy.

Better late than never.

Meanwhile, David Frost, who may be sleazier than I thought, seems to have been pocketed lots of money to help Col. Qaddafi with his image.

(HTs to BH and Dr. AM)

I continue to think that intervening in Libya was the right thing to do, but I still don't think this Obama administration statement to Congress passes the laugh test. Firing cruise missiles at someone isn't an act of war? And I wonder if the Air Force and Navy know that it ain't a war if it doesn't involve ground troops.

The twisted logic here reminds me of the Bush administration's legal rationale for embracing torture. 

The President is of the view that the current U.S. military operations in Libya are consistent with the War Powers Resolution and do not under that law require further congressional authorization, because U.S. military operations are distinct from the kind of 'hostilities' contemplated by the Resolution's 60 day termination provision. U.S. forces are playing a constrained and supporting role in a multinational coalition, whose operations are both legitimated by and limited to the terms of a United Nations Security Council Resolution that authorizes the use of force solely to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under attack or threat of attack and to enforce a no-fly zone and an arms embargo. U.S. operations do not involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they involve the presence of U.S. ground troops, U.S. casualties or a serious threat thereof, or any significant chance of escalation into a conflict characterized by those factors.

(HT to BB)

I certainly don't endorse all the comments posted on this blog, nor even all the guest columns. Case in point: I disagree with the argument below, because I don't think we want our corporals and lieutenants to try to be constitutional lawyers weighing each order they receive. (Or even our generals, like Douglas MacArthur, who got fired in part for following by his own reading of the Constitution.) I think people need to be taught that the issue of "legal orders" applies to war crimes and the like, not to whether one believes the executive branch has abided by the War Powers Act.

Yet I believe the column below is worth reading. If we try to crush such discussions, they will take place only furtively, and so become ill-informed.

By "A Midshipman"
Best Defense guest correspondent

I'm a Midshipman at the Naval Academy and have been talking with officers from the submarine that launched most of the American cruise missiles into Libya. We've had some interesting discussions about the legality of the operations at this point and whether the personnel still engaging the enemy there are breaking their oath to obey only legal orders. 

President Obama's decision to avoid seeking Congress's permission to continue America's role in the Libyan conflict marks one more step in the long march toward a balance of power within the federal government that is more Napoleonic than democratic. Since the Vietnam War, President's have not felt obliged to seek a Congressional declaration of war before committing American lives to conflicts abroad. Every sitting President since Nixon has ordered the military to battle without going through the channels prescribed in the Constitution.

In their decision to place the power to declare war with Congress, the writers of the constitution sought to limit the ability of the president to use military force as an autocrat. Unfortunately, the founding fathers had never seen an undeclared war and didn't foresee the emergence of such a beast. We are left to deal with this oversight.

The conflict in Libya has now continued for more than 60 days without congressional approval. Not only is this unconstitutional, but it is in direct opposition to the War Powers Act, passed in the wake of the Vietnam War.

Officers of the United States Military take an oath to obey only lawful and constitutional orders and refuse all others. The servicemen and servicewomen who are currently fighting over Libya took that oath. It is their professional obligation and ethical duty to disobey their orders until constitutional and legal requirements are either changed or met.

The pressure that a refusal of orders would place on the President would be impossible to ignore. Even if the ensuing legal debate were inconclusive, no President would likely venture to take action which could result in a similar response. The constitutional balance of power would be restored because a professional precedent would have been established within the military, if not a broader legal one.

Congressman Abraham Lincoln once remarked, "Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us." By giving only Congress the power to declare war, the constitution takes out the personal element that was so often a cause of war in the era of Kings. While President Obama is certainly no oppressor, the trend that he is reinforcing opens up the possibility that the time will come where we will have to contend with a leader who is. 

The author is a third year student at the U.S. Naval Academy who has decided not to be identified more precisely.

Regular readers of this blog know that I have a lot of admiration for the work of David Ignatius -- both his columns and his novels.

So I was surprised to see his denunciation on the deployment of armed drones to Libya. He thinks that in the Arab world they have become a symbol of targeted assassination.

Perhaps so. But deploying them in Libya is a sign that the U.S. is not bugging out on its NATO allies nor on the Libyan rebels, who are Arabs.

Frankly, I am surprised it has taken the U.S. government so long to get the Predators over Libya. They should have been there on Day One. This is exactly the type of move that makes sense here: Putting U.S. assets into the operation in support of an intervention led by other members of NATO, but supported by the United States, especially in areas where the U.S. can offer unique capabilities, especially when U.S. aircrews are not endangered by the deployment.

In this case, I can see many more uses for drones than the assassination of Col. Qaddafi, which Ignatius figures is their likely use. We have seen Qaddafi's forces adapting to the presence of NATO aircraft overhead-for example, moving from tanks to pickup trucks. So closer observation is needed before striking. That requires getting down low, but that can sucker a NATO aircraft into getting hit. Drones are a good answer to this tactical problem. Likewise, they can get down under clouds in bad weather, taking away from Qaddafi's goods the advantage of attacking under overcasts. Plus, drones can "loiter" over a target, which helps both with observation and deterrence. They even can harass the foe-on exercises at the Army's National Training Center, I once was with an "opposition force" ambush team that crouched down warily when they head that lawnmower-like buzzing of a drone somewhere overhead. They hated that noise.

My question is, What took so long to make this move? I worry that the national security establishment -- the Pentagon, the CIA and even State Department-are slow-rolling this mission a bit, foot-dragging by "defining terms" and "seeking legal clarification." I know the military doesn't much like the Libyan intervention, and worries about mission creep. But they are supposed to follow legal orders. Part of this slow response probably has been President Obama's fault, because he was very cautious to act and then when he did, he emphasized U.S. minimalism. That sort of nuance runs contrary to U.S. national security culture, and so may have thrown some sand in the gears. Still, fellas, he is the president, so let's be careful about shirking. If your conscience can't take it, you know where the door is. 

Meanwhile, here's an interesting take on Libya from retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson, who I think has appeared in all three of my non-fiction books.  

And here is Sebastian Junger's meditation on the loss of his friend and Restrepo collaborator Tim Hetherington in Libya. Worth reading

Ever notice how a passage from an old book can suddenly take on new meaning? On our rainy Saturday afternoon over the weekend I was checking something in Maj. Gen. (ret.) Robert Scales' Firepower in Limited War (rev. ed), and this paragraph on p. 98 jumped out at me:

A phenomenon of recent history has been the disturbing habit among Western nations, the United States in particular, to expect too much from aerial firepower. Perhaps this expectation has been the product of our search for a technical means to win wars without expending lives. Whatever the cause, the use of airpower in Vietnam certainly followed the historical precedent. Policymakers with an imperfect understanding of the true limitations of modern airpower concluded all too readily that those wondrously destructive weapons of aerial warfare would be able to persuade the enemy to come to terms with a minimum of human investment.

Tom again: So, while I still think that President Obama had to intervene in Libya, yeah, I understand why this air campaign is making many of my friends very nervous.  

Meanwhile, I see where veteran intelligence analyst John McCreary is growing more pessimistic: "The survival of the Benghazi regime will be nothing short of miraculous, if events continue as they have this weekend." Suddenly a stalemate doesn't look so bad.

As John McCreary's NightWatch concludes that, "The rebellion is approaching collapse," here is an exchange from yesterday's (Thursday) hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee. I was surprised to see Gen. Carter Ham, who as head of the Africa Command oversaw the first part of the intervention in Libya, say what he did here. He's probably lucky the White House is distracted by the budget negotiations.

The exchange is a bit murky because Sen. James Webb (D, Fields of Fire) couched his question in terms of a post-Qaddafi force, but Ham did not seem to answer it in those terms, but rather as a force to be interposed between the regime and the rebels.

SEN. WEBB: I would assume that planners are considering the prospect that there might be an international force on the ground in Libya in the future. Let's say not boots on the ground in combat, but if Qaddafi leaves, is that in the cards?

GEN. HAM: Sir, I think that is certainly one potential outcome of this, an international force of some composition intervening between the regime and the opposition forces.

SEN. WEBB: Would it be a consideration for the United States military to be on the ground in that situation for you?

GEN. HAM: Sir, I suspect there might be some consideration of that. My personal view at this point would be that that's probably not the ideal circumstance, again, for the regional reactions that that would -- that having American boots on the ground would entail.

Boy am I getting sick of the word "ragtag." Anybody got another convenient one word way to describe a disorganized, untrained, ill-disciplined force? Bonus points for alliteration.

By Elizabeth Flora
Best Defense bureau of eastern Libyan affairs

"Who is the Libyan opposition?" Questions regarding the nature of the uprising have confounded journalists and U.S. officials alike over the past few weeks, so when Ambassador Ali Aujali of the Libyan Transitional Council gave a talk at the Center for American Progress yesterday afternoon, it was particularly apropos that this question was the title selected. The wide variation in media rhetoric over the last week, ranging from fearful questions about al Qaeda among the rebels to proposals that the selfsame rebels be called "freedom fighters," has no doubt stemmed from a massive dearth of information that compelled journalists to flock to this event seeking enlightenment.

Aujali maintained that we "cannot believe that al Qaeda or extremists" have any role in the opposition. He was insistent on reassuring Americans of this point in order to make the case that the United States and the rest of NATO should help the rebels in their goal of ousting Qaddafi, stating, "If we want the opposition to achieve victory on the ground, they need help." In addition to continued air strikes, he is also requesting military training, weaponry, U.S. recognition of the Transitional Council as the legitimate ruling body of Libya, as well as access to Gaddafi's frozen assets.

Throughout the discussion, Aujali was far more eager to discuss the occupation's need for aid than to delve into details about the power structure of the Transitional Council. Upon being questioned about whether or not he saw a lack of cohesion in the Council's political or military leadership, he argued that this was "not a big concern" because the opposition is united in the common goal that "Qaddafi must go." In response to concerns about the disorganized, untrained nature of the rebels, he contended that there is now far "more training" and "more discipline," referring to the troops as "well-organized."

Aujali posited that specifics such as the size of the rebel forces or the exact weaponry needed were not as important as the fact that the Libyan people are fighting "for their future" while Qaddafi is fighting for "nothing but for one family to control Libya." He ruled out any potential outcome save total opposition victory (i.e. a stalemate in which Libya would be divided in two) stating, "No Libyan will accept that." According to him, the Libyans "will fight until they get rid of Qaddafi."

Despite his adamancy about the opposition's strong resolve, he did imply that its goal of ousting Qaddafi is unlikely to be realized if more support is not immediately forthcoming. He argued that air strikes must take out Qaddafi's forces before they reach and occupy major cities and ominously stated that "time is not on our side."