"Hey, What Do You Say We Bomb Libya?"

I've always found it difficult to take Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi seriously. How much fear can you reasonably expect someone who regaled himself in Michael Jackson-style military outfits to inspire? And it only got more laughable in the last decade, when he started dressing like Prince.

Having come to power in a coup d'etat in September of 1969 - six months almost to the day before I was even born - Gaddafi is the fourth longest serving non-royal national leader in human history. In classic Gaddafi fashion, after assuming control, he only had himself promoted from captain to colonel, thereby remaining outranked by the general officers he commands. Oh, and he's surrounded by chick bodyguards.

The guy is a joke and he always has been. The only way he gained any credibility at all was by becoming Ronald Reagan's designated bad guy for a time a quarter of a century ago. The surest way to attain leadership in the Arab world is to provoke the United States, and Gaddafi failed even at that. Even after the April 1986 American bombing of Libya, the Colonel remained the subject of ridicule in the Middle East.

Yes, he engaged in terrorism, but mostly of the nickle and dime variety. His only truly impressive attack, the downing of Pan Am 103 over Scotland, seems to have succeeded almost by accident, and four U.S administrations refused to retaliate against him for it.

Now the "Arab spring" has moved to Libya and there's an uprising against Gaddafi's rule. Rebel forces at one point took the eastern half of the country, but the army has gradually started taking that territory back. Of course, this has all caused a great deal panic-inspiring stupidity among the American commentariat and the blogosphere.

Whenever a foreign policy issue looks as though it might become awkward, the preferred course of action among contemporary Republican commentators generally, and veterans of the second Bush administration in particular, is to stop thinking entirely. This is best exemplified by former Bush speechwriter and current Washington Post resident know-nothing, Marc Thiessen.

Thiessen published a column this past Tuesday that is stunning in how spectacularly wrong and hysterically misinformed it is.

With government forces on the offensive, the question now facing U.S. policymakers is: Does it matter if Gaddafi wins?

Those cautioning against U.S. support for the Libyan resistance say "no" - an over-stretched America should not be drawn in to another woolly-headed humanitarian intervention. But putting aside the moral imperative, from a hard-nosed strategic perspective the stakes for the United States in Libya are high - and consequences of allowing Gaddafi to prevail could be disastrous for American national security.

Oh, this should be good ...

If the Libyan dictator survives, he is not likely to resume being the benign Gaddafi of recent years, who handed over his weapons of mass destruction, renounced terrorism and made nice with the West. More likely, he will be the brutal Gaddafi of old - the state sponsor of terror who blew up Pan Am 103 over Scotland, killing 270 people; destroyed a French passenger jet over Niger, killing 171 people; bombed the La Belle discotheque in West Berlin, killing two U.S. soldiers and injuring more than 50 American servicemen; established terrorist training camps on Libyan soil; provided terrorists with arms and safe haven; and plotted to kill leaders in Saudi Arabia, Chad, Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia and Zaire. If he succeeds in putting down the rebellion, Gaddafi would probably emerge angry and emboldened - a dangerous combination.

Based on what evidence? Gaddafi's crushing of the rebel movement is isolating enough. Any return to terrorism would bring about total isolation and very probably a multilateral invasion that would destroy his regime once and for all. And why would he be suicidally "angry and
emboldened" by a West that refused to back the rebels in any militarily significant way?

If Gaddafi survives, he would almost certainly put a halt to the destruction of his programs to develop weapons of mass destruction, begun during the Bush administration. Since 2003, Libya has handed over the key components of its nuclear and ballistic missile programs and allowed the destruction of more than 3,300 aerial bombs designed to disperse chemical weapons. But Gaddafi still has stockpiles of chemical weapons - including mustard gas and chemicals for the manufacture of sarin and other nerve agents - that were slated for internationally supervised destruction. These are deadly toxins that terrorists are desperate to acquire.

Ahh, the old "he'll give WMD to the terrorists" canard that fell out of favor about three months into the Iraq War. I've been waiting for that oldie, but goodie.

Gaddafi indeed had a WMD program, but it may have been the most comical one in the history of nuclear proliferation. Of the nuclear material that Gaddafi received from Pakistan's A.Q Khan, a good percentage of it hadn't even been taken out of its shipping crates. This is because Libya lacked a scientific community that knew what to do with it. That tends to be the result of killing all the smart people in a given country.

Another of the great GOP foreign policy lies is that Gaddafi only gave up his program in the wake of Saddam Hussein's fall in Iraq. As a matter of fact, the Libyans were negotiating the program away with the British and Americans during the latter days of the Clinton administration, several years before the Iraq debacle.

But let's review the logic behind this deeply flawed theory once again. Seeing as how "he'll give WMD to terrorists" was the main predicate for the Iraq invasion, it's probably pretty important that we at least understand it. And there is no logic behind it. It actually defies logic.

For a state to give nuclear, biological or chemical (NBC) weapons to non-state actors for use in a terrorist attack is something that everyone agrees would be an act of national suicide. Doing something like that would almost certainly invite a nuclear response from the United States, Britain, France, Israel or India. Paranoid Republican dogma aside, there actually is a reason that no one has done it yet.

Now, if you've been in power for as long as Saddam was, or Gaddafi has been, chances are that you have a pretty good idea of how to ensure your political survival. State sponsors of terrorism have been careful to facilitate attacks that would draw no more than what is commonly known as a "proportional response", and Lockerbie didn't even invite that. Despite having had the ability to pass NBC (and chemical weapons specifically) to terrorists for use against Israel at least since the 1960s, no Muslim state has ever done so or even seriously explored the possibility. This is because they know that Israel would immediately retaliate with its full nuclear capability.

If, however, you know that you are going to be invaded and deposed from power, there is no longer any reason to be so cautious. If nothing else, you can retaliate against the invader's homeland from beyond the grave. It's important to realize that it takes several months to deploy and mobilize an invasion force large enough to take out even the weakest of Arab leaders. If he actually had WMD, Saddam - or for that matter, Gaddafi - could have used that opportunity to transfer weapons for use in a terrorist retaliatory strike. And I'm not aware of how you would strike back against a regime that no longer exists.

The 2003 Iraq invasion therefore could have caused the terrorist use of NBC that it was supposed to prevent, if only because Saddam had nothing left to lose. He knew that if he was deposed he would be killed, since that the only way that transfers of power occur in the Arab world. It's one of history's happy accidents that Saddam's capability had dissolved years earlier.

It is brutally stupid to suggest, as Mr. Thiessen does, that Colonel Gaddafi would survive the current uprising, only to engage in behaviour that would guarantee the total destruction of his regime and probably his country. While it might be a great way to scare the yokels, it also frequently lands you in endless military quagmires, as any veteran of the junior Bush years should already know.

If Gaddafi survives, his regime will probably not achieve a decisive victory. That means a stalemate in which eastern Libya could become a lawless, ungoverned area. Moderate rebel leaders - who pleaded to the West for help but failed to secure it - could be pushed aside by radical elements. Al-Qaeda could step in to furnish the weapons and training that America refused to provide - and be rewarded with sanctuary in exchange. As the United States continues to put pressure on al-Qaeda in the tribal regions of Pakistan, terrorists could migrate to eastern Libya, where several al-Qaeda leaders have roots, turning the region into a new terrorist haven.

First, how do we know that the rebel leaders are "moderate"? Some of them were in Gaddafi's cabinet as recently as last month. So far as I'm aware, there's no intelligence on any of these people or their intentions. Second, eastern Libya is already a lawless region. A good percentage of the foreign fighters in Iraq came from there. However, the Bush administration still restored full diplomatic relations with Libya at the time and removed it from the list of state sponsors of terror. Third, there's no reason to believe that al-Qaeda wouldn't infiltrate a fully liberated Libya, just as they did the liberated Iraq. The only difference would be the lack of 150, 000 American troops to contain them.

Thiessen then engages in an almost weaponized form of nonsense when he weighs the cost of Gaddafi's survival on U.S foreign policy.

If Gaddafi survives, despite President Obama's demands that he leave Libya, it would send a message of American weakness across the Muslim world - and cement the perception in Arab minds of a United States beaten down by its engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan and afraid to act. It was just such a perception of American weakness that emboldened al-Qaeda before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Allowing Gaddafi to prevail would embolden the extremists and invite further acts of terror. It would also embolden dictators from Iran to North Korea, who would see America's lack of resolve against Gaddafi and assume they are free to wreak havoc without fear of a decisive American response.

One does not have to believe in the "freedom agenda" to see that the geopolitical consequences of allowing Gaddafi to survive are serious - and that the United States has a strategic interest in helping the Libyan rebels succeed in removing him from power. James Clapper has said the reason he believes Gaddafi will prevail is that his regime possesses superior firepower. That is a problem that can be fixed without sending American ground forces - by arming and training the Libyan rebels. The United States helped the contras remove the Sandinista regime from Nicaragua and helped Afghans drive out the mighty Soviet Red Army, without sending ground forces. We can help the Libyan rebels drive Gaddafi out without sending the Marines to the shores of Tripoli.

I've already pointed out Thiessen's historical fallacies regarding Nicaragua and Afghanistan here and here, so I won't do so again.

But the Libyan rebellion has to be looked at as a part of the larger Arab uprising and not as an isolated event. American foreign policy has to be at least somewhat consistent if and when this spreads. What happens, for example, if these revolutionary movements gain serious traction in Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia? Does anybody seriously believe that those countries won't respond exactly the same way that Gaddafi has? And does anyone think that the U.S would support no-fly zones in any of those places? As it is, the Obama administration is tacitly supporting the thuggish monarchy in Bahrain's imposition of martial law and the insertion of the Saudi military to quell the popular unrest.

By supporting the rebels in Libya while propping up friendly Arab authoritarians you send the message to the Muslim world that the United States and the world community is overly selective in promoting and upholding democracy, which is largely why American foreign policy already faces the challenges it does in the Middle East.

If the West inserts itself in knocking down the Libyan domino, we can't say with any certainty which one follows it. If the next domino happens to be friendly to us, we'll wind up approving of the further repression of people who neither understand nor particularly care about American vital interests. And even those friendly governments will eventually be overthrown. Having the people despise you when they are probably isn't wise.

Not that any of my points are still relevant. On Thursday, the U.N Security Council established a no-fly zone in Libya in a resolution so vaguely worded that it can't help but be interpreted as taking sides in a civil war. And that's something that rarely ends well.

Since the opposition insurgents are without an air force, the international community has essentially declared war on Muammar al-Gaddafi and his government. If he survives, or even if he doesn't, then it is possible that he will resume sponsorship of anti-western terrorism, if for no other reason than he has no longer has any motive not to. For that reason, we cannot allow him to survive in power. And we have to take him out immediately, since we've basically incentivized his return to terrorism.

Doing that is going to require a lot more than enforcing a no-fly zone, which Saddam Hussein lived with quite comfortably for twelve years. Indeed, Saddam massacred his people within two no-fly zones. NATO, which will almost certainly be tasked with controlling the air, is going to have to actively destroy the Libyan air force and its defences. Then we're going to have to provide air support to the rebels as well as arm them as they march to Tripoli. If the opposition still can't decisively defeat Gaddafi's military, we'll probably have to insert ground forces and do it ourselves. These people, after all, aren't like Afghanistan's Northern Alliance, which had decades of prior combat experience.

I wouldn't expect a whole lot of support in that from any Arab League countries, since they know that a liberation operation is something that they may soon have to defend themselves against. We've sent the message to Arabs everywhere that if they want to topple their governments, we will support them. But we won't. At least, not always, or even most of the time. We will support the established regimes in Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia regardless of how savagely they crush any uprising. And we still don't know what we're supporting in Libya.

We opened Pandora's Box on Thursday night. Instead of stepping away from the Middle East and letting events run their course, we've taken sides in a way that we can't and won't apply consistently, and militarily committed ourselves to an outcome that we don't even fully understand the implications of.

There is little in the way of historical precedent that suggests that this is going to end the way we think it will.