The war in Libya is not going well. Muammar Gaddafi shows no sign of giving up power. His forces’ siege of the rebel-held city of Misratah has killed upwards of 1,000 people, including two Western journalists. One month in, NATO’s air campaign is plagued by halfhearted commitment and intracoalition blame-passing. The rebels on whose behalf the U.S. and its allies intervened have failed to advance much beyond their strongholds in eastern Libya. Only a few inveterate optimists seem to believe the anti-Gaddafi forces still have a chance to win.
John McCain is one of them. “Gaddafi is a third-rate military power,” he told me on Sunday. “This isn’t the Wehrmacht we’re taking on. These are a bunch of goddamn mercenaries that are highly paid — but one thing we know about mercenaries is that if they think things are going in the wrong direction, they’ll get out of Dodge.” I had run into McCain the previous night in Cairo, as he was finishing a quiet dinner with two of his aides, at a Chinese restaurant overlooking the Nile. He was just back from a day trip to rebel-held Benghazi, Libya’s second largest city. In McCain’s view, the West still has tools at its disposal that can bring about Gaddafi’s downfall, even without a major commitment of U.S. military force. In two conversations with me before he departed Egypt for Oman, McCain described what he saw in Benghazi and laid out what it will take for the Obama Administration to avoid a foreign-policy disaster.
