Alexander Golts: NATO's Half-Hearted War

Alexander Golts is deputy editor of the online newspaper Yezhednevny Zhurnal.

U.S. President Barack Obama recently announced that the NATO-led operation against Libya had reached a stalemate. At the same time, however, he hopes Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi will soon be forced to step down. Obama’s statement is remarkably similar to U.S. President Lyndon Johnson’s comments at the peak of the Vietnam War.

Beginning with the first Gulf War, we have become accustomed over the past 20 years to Western military interventions in which the enemy’s defenses were devastated in the first few days by overwhelming air attacks But the Libya operation is different because NATO member countries as a whole — and the United States in particular — have shown so little resolve.

Almost two centuries ago, German military theorist Carl von Clausewitz coined the oft-quoted phrase, “War is a continuation of political relations.” By extension, no war should be launched before allies have reached agreement on both their political and military strategies.

In the early 1980s, U.S. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger formulated principles for conducting military operations (although it is often attributed to then-U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, who implemented them brilliantly in the 1990s). According to Weinberger’s principle, massive and overwhelming military force should be applied without political constraints to quickly break down the enemy’s will to resist. This is exactly how most U.S. military operations have been carried out in the past 15 years, from Yugoslavia to Iraq...