The Many Ways He's Wrong: Marc Thiessen and the Reagan Doctrine

The Middle East is a terribly complex and awfully dangerous place. It also hasn't been overly welcoming for the foreign empires that find themselves there. And, as some of you might have noticed, the region has been undergoing transformative change over the last six weeks.

Will that change be good or bad? That's hard to say and the answer depends entirely on the perspective of the person asking the question.

I believe that in the long term, real self-governance is probably the best thing that could happen in the Arab world, in that it creates a mandate for personal and national responsibility for what happens there going forward. In most of the Arab world, this will be the first time that this has happened. Most of the people of the region have never had much of a say in their national destinies, having them decided for them by first the European empires and then the puppet regimes of the Cold War superpowers.

I also believe that real national self-determination will be years, if not decades, in coming. This is going to be messy for awhile. And no, what happens will almost certainly not be in the interest of the United States and Israel. But that's exactly the point: that foreign interests have created the political cesspool that's being drained today. Because the criminal toadies that have been propped up for centuries by outsiders murdered any democratic opposition years ago, the only organized opposition is necessarily the kind that we're not going to like very much. And, like it or not, the last 12 American presidents have supported the people doing the murdering.

More importantly, the more foreign powers resist the changes coming - the more we take sides in their internal affairs - the more it's going to empower the more radical elements of the opposition, and the broader support they'll gain from a justifiably xenophobic Muslim world. You know how most Americans flip out when the Pope speaks out against capital punishment? Well, imagine Vatican City imposing the AFL-CIO as the government of Mississippi because it's in Rome's interest. Whoever the West and Russia backs in these movements are going to be feared and hated by the locals, if only because history teaches them that they should be.

The best thing the United States can do at this point is to stay the fuck out of it. Will doing so negatively impact Israel? Probably, but I believe that the main reason the Israelis didn't reach some sort of a deal with their neighbours decades ago is because Jerusalem knew that the U.S would ultimately back them, regardless of what it did.

Even during the first Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which Ronald Reagan described as a "Holocaust" to Menachem Begin, the Americans still supported the Israeli-backed Druze, which ultimately cost 241 Marines their lives. Was the outcome of the Lebanese civil war ever a vital national interest of the United States? No, it wouldn't have even mattered all that much in the context of the Cold War. But it did directly lead to the hostage taking of American citizens in Beirut which set the stage for the Iran-Contra affair.

Since the Six Day War, no American administration seems to have known where America's interests end and Israel's begin and that has caused intense and justifiable Muslim outrage. That's not an anti-Israeli position. It's a statement of fact. As soon as the United States determines what it's own attainable vital interests in the region are, the better off everyone - especially Israel, because of the growing demographic shift there - will be. Absent a settlement, the Palestinians and Arab Israelis will eventually be of sufficient numbers to say "let's vote", at which point Israel ceases to exist entirely. But there will be no settlement so long as the United States continues to enable Israel in demanding the perfect at the expense of the good. And the longer that continues, the more profound Muslim enmity toward America is going to be.

All things being equal, the Obama administration has handled recent events about as well as I could have expected them to. They seem to recognize that inserting itself now would change the dynamic from a referendum on the tyrannies that oppress them to a referendum on America, which historically has supported, armed, trained and financed those tyrannies.

Of course, the Republican peanut gallery in the media and the blogosphere isn't helping. Of the GOP commentariat, only Pat Buchanan and George Will seem to understand the implications of what's happening. Others, like The Washington Post's weapons-grade moron and former Bush 43 speechwriter, Marc Thiessen, want places like Libya to become America's new covert wars. Sadly, he has no idea what he's talking about, as we'll learn in his Tuesday article "Apply the Regan Doctrine in Libya."

The administration is positioning military assets in the Mediterranean but seems unwilling to use them. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has expressed deep reluctance about establishing a no-fly zone over Libya, and he recently gave an address at West Point in which he warned that "any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined."

From his days as deputy CIA director during the Reagan administration, Gates knows there are options for removing a dictator short of sending in "a big American land army." In the 1980s, U.S. policymakers figured out a way to roll back Soviet expansionism without committing American ground forces to every flashpoint around the world. There were motivated people willing to fight their own wars of liberation. They did not want American soldiers to fight for them. They wanted America to provide weapons, training, intelligence and other support so they could fight and win those wars themselves. By providing such assistance, America helped resistance fighters in places such as Nicaragua and Afghanistan liberate their countries. It was called the "Reagan Doctrine," and the time has come to apply it in Libya.

Holy Christ, that's dumb.

First, that part of the "Reagan Doctrine" actually grew from the Nixon Doctrine during the abyss of the Vietnam War. And mindsets like Thiessen's are exactly what put the United States in Vietnam in the first fucking place. If you've studied your history, you'll know that the Eisenhower administration was applying "The Reagan Doctrine" with the South Vietnamese government. The only problem was that it wasn't working, so the Kennedy administration put in 13,000 military "advisers." Ultimately, Lyndon Johnson had 550, 000 combat troops there. It didn't end well, as you may have heard.

The Reagan Doctrine differed from Nixon's in that Nixon was supporting internationally recognized government whereas Reagan propagating wars of national liberation, just like the Soviets were. And like the Soviets, Reagan's clients were unsavoury characters to a man. The Contras and the Afghan mujaheddin were, at best, war criminals and at worst, terrorists and drug dealers. None of them were, as President Reagan described them, "the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers."

Second, the "successes" Thiessen cites is a stronger case for his own brain damage than proof of his argument. Let's for a moment look at what happened "in places such as Nicaragua and Afghanistan" in the wake of the "Reagan Doctrine".

The current government of Nicaragua is the Sandinista Party, which the Contra rebels Reagan supported were supposed to crush forever. Worse still, the Sandinistas are still headed by President Daniel Ortega, who was also famously in charge in the 1980s. Ortega is closely allied with America's current regional bogeyman, Hugo Chavez.

Then there's Afghanistan. Yes, the Reagan administration continued Jimmy Carter's policy of supporting the mujaheddin fighters there, but it never controlled that support - Pakistan did, and Islamabad had very different strategic interests than did the United States. First, the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence funded, trained and armed only those groups loyal to it and who would be willing to also support the jihad in Indian-occupied Kashmir, which exploded as soon as the Soviet war in Afghanistan began winding down.

Second, of the hundreds of millions of dollars in American, Saudi and Chinese aid sent through Islamabad, as much as half of it was diverted to the Pakistani nuclear program. Not only bring South Asia to the edge of nuclear war three times in the last fifteen years, Pakistan also proliferated that technology to North Korea, Iran and Libya.

As the Russians bugged out of Kabul, American aid ended and a power vacuum was created, which was filled by the religious fanatics and terrorists that ultimately attacked New York City and Washington on September 11, 2001. The Soviet jihad dissolved into an unpredictable civil war, and the Reagan Doctrine never considered that.

Thiessen is advocating following the same policies in Libya without considering their rather well-known consequences, making him either desperately dishonest or dangerously dumb.

Anti-Gaddafi forces in Libya need the same things the resistance forces in Nicaragua and Afghanistan needed:

l Intelligence. America can provide Libyan rebels with satellite imagery of government troop movements and intelligence on the government's military strength, capabilities and intent - as well as tactical advice on how to capitalize on this intelligence.

l Weapons. America can provide the Libyan resistance with everything from guns and ammunition to more sophisticated weaponry, such as advanced artillery, night-vision equipment, and communications gear.

l Training. The United States can put its experience building up the Afghan and Iraqi military forces to use in Libya, providing advisers to train anti-Gaddafi forces in weapons, tactics and military strategy.

l Diplomatic support. The United States can play the role of diplomatic surrogate for the Libyan resistance, further tightening sanctions on Gaddafi, while rallying NATO and allies in the Middle East to assist in his overthrow.

Never mind that, as was true in Afghanistan, that no one really knows anything about the "anti-Gaddafi forces" except that they're anti-Gaddafi, and we don't even know that as a certainty. In fact, their leader, Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, was in Gaddafi's cabinet a mere three weeks ago.

We have no idea what the national aspirations of the rebel movement are, yet Thiessen and others are more than willing that the United States send them heavy arms capable of fighting a national military. That's precisely what happened in Afghanistan, and we're paying for that in our blood thirty years later.

To his credit, Thiessen acknowledges that the anti-Gaddafi forces could be jihadis dressed as Jeffersonian democrats. He just doesn't care very much.

But let's assume for a moment that the rebels are what they say they are, which is a dubious proposition at best. Would overt American support alienate them from the Libyan people. We know that the population generally hates Gaddafi, but how it would respond to American sponsorship of the insurgents is unknown. Would they see the United States as interfering in the borders, as the Italians did so brutally? We don't know if the average Libyan's hatred for Gaddafi is greater than it is for foreign intervention, and given the broad support for the Iraqi insurgency in 2004-06, that's something people like Thiessen should think about.

The fact is that there is no American vital national interest in Libya. But once the United States takes sides in a civil war, it assumes the moral responsibility for what happens in it and what their side ultimately becomes. With that comes unintended consequences, such as those we've seen in Latin America, Lebanon and Afghanistan.

More immediately, the American people should be made aware of the risks involved. If Gaddafi's forces capture Americans delivering arms to the rebels, the United States is going to have to go in and rescue them, putting themselves right in the middle of another civil war. While getting into a civil war is one of the easiest military operations imaginable, getting out of one is something else entirely.

Thiessen closes with the typically Republican tactic of unrealistic fear-mongering.

The risks of helping the resistance in Libya are real, but inaction carries risks as well. President Obama has declared that Gaddafi must go. Dictators from Iran to North Korea are watching and assessing the resolve of this president. It would do damage to America's credibility if Gaddafi survived while Obama stood helplessly on the sidelines.

You would think at some point people would start recognizing that line of logic for the horseshit that it is. There are few things that the Iranians and North Koreans have enjoyed as much as watching the United States trapping itself in sinkholes like Afghanistan and Iraq because of terrorists who aren't there and weapons of mass destruction that don't exist.

The more places that America is bogged down, the less likely it is to take action against Tehran and Pyongyang. Iran and North Korea have acted with impunity since 9/11 precisely because the United States has been stretched too thin to do anything about it. Russia was able to attack and occupy a potential NATO member for the same reason.

That anyone could have lived through the last decade and not recognized that never ceases to amaze me. By being everywhere, the United States is increasingly nowhere, and people like Marc Thiessen want to perpetuate that until American diplomatic, military and economic capability finally reaches the breaking point.

What Marc Thiessen and others like him are advocating is essentially a foreign policy of wishful thinking, which is something that the United States has suffered no shortage of since the end of the Second World War. You can't possibly defend your vital national interests when literally everything is your vital national interest.

Well, I guess that you can for a time, but you ultimately wind up bankrupt and impotent.