...with the acuity of an eagle's eye turned in on itself...

Robert Farley loves you.

He loves you with such great passion, and depth of feeling, that he wants you to sleep well tonight. You - you sweet, gentle souls - you matter to him. And he wants to salve your troubled spirit.

Unlike the naive and misguided complainants against the institutional order of things, Farley wants you to rest assured. Especially if you are a good liberal. He doesn't ask you to risk your mortal soul in challenge against the rightness of our betters. He's a good man, this Robert Farley.  When bombs are falling on foreign soil, Farley reminds you, you must remember that they are international.

A consensus sends them.

Can you really oppose a consensus of loving governments? I mean, c'mon now...

Sure, sure, it's okay to wonder if our benevolent leaders have sufficient foresight. Farley worries. He wants the best. It's a reasonable concern. Our leaders are only human after all. Though, one mustn't reach from their mortality, towards a dangerous assumption that betters might not be betters. They are, we must remind ourselves, leaders because they lead us. Some might fail, but that is no reason to doubt leadership.

So, when discussing the invasion of one of the most abused, destitute, war ridden countries on the face of the only planet we know with certainty sports any life, Farley also has concerns. But, they are the right questions. Nary a Marxist or silly anarchist in sight would ever voice them. They are, we've heard, unreasonable folk. Where an anti-statist might wonder at minutia, like corpsified children and the tendency for freedom bombs to fall astray of their righteous targets, Farley hones in on the really important stuff:

"...To recap, the "Afghan Model" involves the combination of special forces, indigenous proxy fighting forces and heavy precision airpower. Proxies screen the special operators from attack, fix enemy positions and exploit tactical victories by seizing ground. Special forces operators identify targets and coordinate proxy ground assaults with precision strikes. Precision air attacks either destroy enemy formations or suppress them enough to allow proxy forces to overrun their positions. This model worked very well in the first several months of the Afghanistan War, but it worked rather less well at the start of the Libyan Civil War. Although airstrikes were able to freeze loyalist forces, rebel offensives in the east initially failed, and for a time it looked as if the besieged city of Misrata would fall.

With what looks like a rebel victory in the offing, the specifically military aspect of the Afghan Model seems to have been vindicated, albeit in slow motion. Compared to the war in Afghanistan, the pace of the rebel advance in Libya was glacial. To date, the NATO intervention in Libya has lasted five months and four days. In Afghanistan, the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar fell on December 9, 2001, just two months and two days after the beginning of U.S. airstrikes. Of course, there are also important differences. The pace of airstrikes over Afghanistan was more intense than those over Libya -- by roughly a factor of three -- and the strikes themselves were heavier. While we may never know the precise composition of special forces in either the Afghan or the Libyan campaigns, the contingents were likely larger and more active in the former conflict. The organized military forces on both sides of the Afghanistan War were more experienced than their counterparts in Libya, a fact that may have made it easier to undertake the offensive that eventually seized Kandahar, as offensive infantry tactics generally take longer to master than defensive tactics. The geography of Libya, which forced most military operations into a relatively narrow corridor along the coast, also favored the use of airpower.

However, the Afghan Model is as much a political as a military concept. Politically, the model is supposed to minimize domestic opposition in the intervening country, minimize nationalist reactions in the target country and minimize international upheaval. In Libya, the grade is mixed on all three. The leaders of the primary NATO countries -- Obama, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron -- clearly did not expect the war to last this long. Obama was forced to manufacture a questionable legal justification for the war after it exceeded the limits of the War Powers Resolution. Cameron and Sarkozy also came under domestic pressure, and other NATO countries grew steadily more critical over the course of the campaign. However, the relatively low cost of the campaign in both Western lives and Western money undoubtedly blunted domestic criticism. In Libya, the overall political impact of the air offensive remains unclear. The broader international community remained relatively quiet, although the violence in Syria and the ongoing collapse of the global economy may have drawn their attention away from Libya.

The other political aspect of the Afghan Model involves post-conflict stability. Because that model eschews use of large-scale ground forces, it assigns de facto responsibility for post-conflict management to the rebel forces. This has the upside of being cheaper for the intervening power and ideally avoids the nationalist backlash typically associated with a large-scale occupation. However, it also puts tremendous stress on the rebel coalition. The rebels, who may not have previously worked extensively with each other for any purpose other than winning the war, suddenly need to assemble a working government coalition. The rebels also have to decide what to do with the surviving elements of the defeated government. All of these obstacles represent potentially disastrous pitfalls inherent to the Afghan Model. If Libya crumbles back into civil war in the wake of Gadhafi's fall, it will not reflect well on a strategic concept that promises large returns at minimal risk. On the other hand, if the experience of working together against Gadhafi's forces helped build relationships between the rebels that can serve as the foundation for a representative government, the slow course of the war in Libya may have had hidden benefits..."

See from how deep springs Robert Farley's human love? Witness what exercises his loving and compassionate soul. The model, kind readers. The model, itself! The model might be in doubt if our benevolent leaders apply it improperly. Oh, how we must shudder.

I mean, can you believe the horror should that occur?

Our leaders, our institutions, their very structural selves, might lose a method, might stumble upon an instant of doubt, and in doubting, discover a traitorous self-reproach.

This must not happen.

This must not happen, most especially, in Libya. Afghanistan is Bush's Folly. Good Obama, that transformational and transitional man - he's got a peace prize. We ought not lose sight of that.

Farley's meaning is clear, and it almost takes the form of a confession: the state must step rightly, and publicly, in order to preserve its ability to step in and into the future.

A "stable, democratic regime" must follow upon the path blasted into the earth, a path forward made ready by freedom bombs and superior force projection, a road towards stability begat by just and democratic war. We must not waver. We must work and labor for this hopeful tomorrow, extending it into the bright future of a world where air power cannot be in doubt, and where good doctrine prevents the resurgence of those who would not be so casually upended by death from the sky, or even - gasp! - ruled at all.

*

If Farley's point reminds a honest reader of a Rumsfeldian argument, circa Autumn 2003 through Spring 2004, the reader should not doubt her impressions. Farley is exactly arguing, with the acuity of an eagle's eye turned in on itself, that the Western powers foray into Libya was and is "a genuinely multinational effort."

He is, no doubt, joined by august company. I imagine they'll also take great pains to remind goat faced doubters that out of a thousand French armed and British coordinated smugglers, drug runners, former Qadaffi staffers and royalists, aided by American, Norwegian and French air strikes, a revolution makes itself.

But, you know, when discussing the six thousand seven hundred forty five separate air sorties against a country of six and a half million people, what matters most is that the French bombed more people and land than the pilots of the half billion dollar flying American death machines.

All things being temporarily equal, I wonder what the six and half million or so citizens of the State of Washington would think if China, India and Russia, in an attempt to liberate them from the pernicious regimes of Gregoire and Obama, dropped thousands of tons of ordnance over a period of five months, during six thousand seven hundred forty five separate bombing runs...

It should also be noted, that Farley had his doubts about intervention back in March. Not condemnation of American interventionism. Doubts. And not even about intervention, or freedom and democracy bombing. Farley's laser of concern was focused on what sort of regime the US could get something out of the venture.  Farley is a good liberal:

 "We can’t throw open the gates of Libya, then “let the Libyans decide for themselves;” the very act of throwing open the gates requires intervention that will work to the benefit of certain actors, thus necessitating the question 'Who shall we install in Tripoli?' ”

* - with roughly the area of the Pacific Northwest including British Columbia


[I originally wrote a crowvian snark attack upon this Lawyers, Guns and Money piece by LGM founder Robert Farley, mocking and ridiculing the institutional liberal perspective which allows an ostensibly intelligent man to treat with air war with the posed objectivity of an announcer at a mid-week summer Little League game.

It didn't work, mostly because announcers at mid-week summer Little League games are almost always thirteen or fourteen year old boys and girls, and their delivery runs from excited self-involvement to comedic boredom. Even the poses they take are endearing, what with their youth making up for their failure to yet become serious.

So, it didn't work, and then Farley made it easy by doubling down.]