Head of the rebel forces Abdel Fattah Younes attends a news conference in Benghazi April 5, 2011. Libyan rebels fighting Muammar Gaddafi’s forces on Tuesday criticized NATO as too slow to act and said they would ask the U.N. Security Council to suspend its mission unless it “did its job properly”. Younes said NATO’s inaction was allowing Gaddafi’s forces to advance and letting them kill the people of the rebel-held city of Misrata “every day”. REUTERS/Esam al-Fetori

WASHINGTON (IPS) – In something of a replay of the
infighting among Republicans over Washington’s military interventions in the
Balkans in the 1990s, U.S. involvement in the civil war in Libya is exposing
serious splits among self-described conservatives.

On the one hand, Republican “realists” in the
tradition of President George H.W. Bush – of whom Pentagon chief Robert Gates
was a protégé – are clearly worried that Washington is
“overextending” itself by intervening in a country that is not
“vital” to U.S. national-security or economic interests.

They are backed by many members of the increasingly
influential Tea Party, which is determined to slash the mushrooming federal
deficit. They worry that another open-ended military commitment in Libya,
particularly if it is protracted, could make their mission much harder.

Arrayed against them are the neoconservatives and their
allies in Congress, notably Sen. John McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential
candidate.

The latter have called for President Barack Obama to take
all necessary measures, including arming and training rebels and expanding the
list of targets subject to U.S. and NATO bombing, to oust Libyan leader Moammar
Gaddafi.

As with the Balkan wars of the 1990s, they are forging
alliances with liberal interventionists in the Democratic Party and, to the
extent they can, inside the administration to get their way.

Whether they will succeed as they did with another
Democratic president, Bill Clinton, in Bosnia from 1993 to 1995 and then again
in Kosovo in 1999, remains to be seen.

Obama himself has made clear that, while he shares their
goal of regime change in Libya, he is very reluctant to involve the U.S.
military more deeply in the unfolding conflict.

In this, Obama enjoys strong backing from the Pentagon, and
particularly from Gates, who, in Congressional testimony that drew harsh
complaints from neoconservatives last week, rejected a U.S. role in arming and
training the rebels, insisting that other countries could undertake such an
effort, if they so desired.

Gates’ clear lack of enthusiasm for deepening Washington’s
military commitment in yet another uncertain conflict with no clear “exit
strategy” recalls the exasperation felt by then-chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Colin Powell, in 1993, when he was asked by then-UN Amb.
(and consummate liberal hawk) Madeleine Albright, “What’s the point of
having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use
it?”

“I thought I would have an aneurysm,” Powell —
who, like Gates, was a Bush I protégé — later wrote about his reaction to
Albright’s question, which he thought betrayed an all too cavalier attitude
toward using U.S. military force.

At the time, Albright, strongly supported by most
neoconservatives, was lobbying Clinton to intervene in Bosnia, something Bush
had refused to do, just as he had rejected their appeals to send U.S. troops to
Baghdad at the end of the 1991 Gulf War.

By the time the Dayton Accords that ended the war in Bosnia
were signed in November 1995, neoconservatives had become increasingly dismayed
with what they saw as growing “isolationism” among Republican
lawmakers who won a majority in Congress the previous year.

In 1996, two prominent neoconservatives, William Kristol and
Robert Kagan, published an article titled “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign
Policy,” in ‘Foreign Affairs’ in which they criticized a “confused
American conservatism” and called for fellow Republicans to embrace a
policy of “military supremacy and moral confidence,” whose main aim
would be to preserve Washington’s “benevolent global hegemony …as far into
the future as possible.”

In 1997, Kristol and Kagan co-founded the Project for the
New American Century (PNAC) whose charter – a distillation of the ideas
contained in their ‘Foreign Affairs’ article — was signed by other prominent
neoconservatives, such as Paul Wolfowitz and Elliott Abrams, as well as
aggressive nationalists, including Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who would
claim top positions in the George W. Bush administration six years later.

But it wasn’t until the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent
invasion of Iraq that PNAC’s views came to dominate the Republican foreign
policy thinking.

Many leading Republicans were skeptical of – or outright
opposed to – the 1999 Kosovo war, which once more found neoconservatives allied
with liberal interventionists in urging its prosecution.

“Before we go bombing sovereign nations, we ought to
have a plan,” warned Texas Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison at the
time in an eerie echo of the current debate over Libya. Republican leaders in
the House of Representatives, meanwhile, insisted on calling the Kosovo air
campaign “the Democratic war” or “Clinton’s war” to
underline their disapproval.

And when McCain proposed a resolution authorizing the use of
“all necessary force” in Kosovo, including the introduction of U.S.
ground troops, most Republicans lined up against him.

Indeed, in the 2002 presidential campaign, candidate George
W. Bush, who defeated McCain in the Republican primaries that year, suggested
that his foreign policy views were considerably more “humble” than
those of either the neoconservatives or the liberal interventionists. His
subsequent appointment of Powell as secretary of state encouraged many
observers – and voters – in the belief that he would follow in his father’s
footsteps.

But the 9/11 attacks tilted the balance of power – both
within the Bush administration and the Republican majority in Congress –
decisively in PNAC’s direction, as Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz, among other
hawks, seized control of the policy and led the country to invade Iraq in 2003.

Even as Bush himself began to moderate his policies in his
second term, and particularly after the Democrats swept the 2006 mid-term
Congressional elections and the president replaced Rumsfeld with Gates,
Republicans in Congress remained firmly wedded to the PNAC vision.

Two years later, McCain, most of whose closest foreign
policy advisers were neoconservatives, emerged with the party’s presidential
nomination from a Republican field in which all but one of the major candidates
were at least as – if not more hawkish – than he.

But even before Libya, a combination of the September 2008
financial crisis and growing war fatigue on the part of the public – not to
mention McCain’s electoral defeat by Obama – appeared to be slowly turning the
clock backwards by rekindling the intra-party foreign-policy conflicts of the
1990’s.

The Tea Party’s emergence as a major force has already
resulted in the Republican leadership’s willingness to consider cutting the
defense budget — a notion that has long been anathema to neoconservatives,
whose PNAC has since morphed into a new organization, the Foreign Policy
Initiative, that has sought common cause with liberal interventionists.

The debate over U.S. military intervention in Libya
threatens to accelerate the time-travelling process, as McCain’s appeals for
Washington to take “all necessary measures” to oust Gaddafi –
reminiscent of his efforts around the Kosovo war – aren’t resonating with his
fellow Republicans in the way they would have two or three years ago.

The fact that Gates, in particular, has made his opposition
to a stronger commitment as clear as he has – and that the military brass
appears to be backing him up – appears also to have made some in the party’s
leadership think twice about the political wisdom of indulging the hawks.