Anne Applebaum may give Krazy Krauty more credit than he's due, but she still demolishes him

Are crackpot American right-wingers like Krazy Krauty and No-Brain Bolton capable of grasping that Libyans, like other Middle Easterners, learned from our fun in Iraq that we are the last people they want "helping" them?

"I'm listening hard, but I just can't hear the 'voices around the world' that my colleague Charles Krauthammer said last week are 'calling for U.S. intervention to help bring down Moammar Gaddafi.' It's true that John Bolton, former U.N. ambassador and present Fox News employee, has declared that 'strong American words (and actions) were amply warranted' in Libya. It's also true that a clutch of American politicians and writers have come out in favor of a similarly muscular response as well.

"But outside America's borders, all is silent. . . ."

-- Anne Applebaum, in her Washington Post column
today, "The Arab world isn't clamoring for our help"

by Ken

Applebaum is British, which is why I can't help thinking that a translation of what she's written above might include something like: "Jeez, that Krauthammer turd is cracked, and don't get me started on No-Brain Bolton." What's surprising is that Krazy Krauty left himself open to this particular pasting by claiming to represent international opinion, when the correct stance of people who get their marching orders from Right-Wing Pyschotic American Delusion Central is that anyone who listens to furriners is a God-hating socialist who was probably born in Kenya.

Let's pick up where we left off, or rather interrupted Anne:

Certainly nobody in the Arab world is clamoring for American military intervention, or indeed any American intervention: Egyptian democrats are even wary of taking our development money. ("Help from America can be misunderstood," one would-be Egyptian politician delicately explained to The Post a few days ago.)

Nobody in Asia and nobody in Europe is calling for the Marines to be sent back to the shores of Tripoli either. The French, feeling guilty for having failed to support (or even foresee) the revolution in Tunisia, have sent humanitarian aid to Benghazi - but have simultaneously argued against military involvement. The British have already bungled their first solo attempt to see what could be done. On Saturday, a British special forces team and an MI6 intelligence officer touched down near Benghazi, intending simply to make contact with the rebels. They were promptly arrested, handcuffed, interrogated and sent out of the country. The last thing the rebels want, apparently, is the stigma of contact with foreigners.

Since at this point the American Right is so wholly detached from reality, or even functioning intelligence of any kind, the chances are slim that anyone over there on the crackpot side has either the capacity or the willingness to grasp that "what we want" doesn't count for much among people who aren't, you know, us.

Why the Arab anxiety about American and Western help? Why the reluctance among our allies? The answer can be summed up in a single word: Iraq. Far from setting "an example for the entire region," as Krauthammer put it, Iraq serves as a dire warning: Beware, for this could be the fate of your country. When the U.S. Army entered Iraq, we knew nothing about the Iraqi opposition, except what we'd heard from a couple of exiles. Our soldiers didn't speak Arabic and hadn't been told what to do once they got to Baghdad. Chaos followed incompetence, which begat violence: Tens of thousands of people died in an eight-year civil war. Although a fragile democracy has emerged, this isn't an example anyone, anywhere, wants to follow.

And so, Anne writes, "It's not hard to understand why Libyans and others might fear a repeat performance."

Then she comes up with a radical notion:

In truth, the time to contact the Libyan opposition was a year ago - or five years ago - back when Tony Blair was shaking hands with Moammar Gaddafi inside desert tents and Western oil companies were going in to do business. But the British didn't. We didn't either. Now we don't even know who they are. Various colonels have emerged as "spokesmen" for the rebels - but for all of the rebels? Or just some of the rebels? News reports cite "secondhand reports through rebel networks" as sources; in other words, somebody told somebody else what's going on. As the failed British escapade shows, the spies don't know any better.

I note from her WaPo bio that Anne -- despite what seem like reasonably solid journalistic credentials covering international politics and finance -- spent a bunch of years writing editorials for the paper, and it may well be that no mind ever really bounces back from all that time spent internalizing the Voice of Village Orthodoxy, which may be why she so often sounds like such a dementedly determined centrist. In this case, you don't have to be all that smart to grasp the limits of American influence in Libya, or most any of the fermenting tyrannies of the Middle East. (You do, however, have to be smarter than Crazy Krauty -- or thug colleague Marc Thiessen, not to mention No-Brain Bolton. But that's not saying much.

Here's how Anne puts it:

We should enforce sanctions in Libya, offer humanitarian aid and put in place a no-fly zone, to be activated if the rebels really begin to lose. But at the moment, even if our military had unlimited funding - which it doesn't - the Pentagon is not equipped to launch democracy in Libya. That is a job for our underfunded international radio networks, especially the ones that broadcast in Arabic; for independent institutions like the National Endowment for Democracy; for groups that train judges and journalists. Unfortunately, we don't have the contacts such groups need. We should start making them now.

As a determined centrist, Anne is even willing to credit the right-wing crackpots with the cover of honorable intentions. (Not me, no way.)

It's nice to be on the right side of history, and I'm not surprised that George W. Bush's remaining supporters now feel good about the "freedom agenda" he sometimes advocated and sometimes forgot while in office.

Well, not even the most committed centrist can give Chimpy a free pass. I"m pretty stunned that she goes as far as this: "But being right, even morally right, isn't everything." Morally right? Among all the sociopathic lying imbecile scumbags of the right I don't think you could piece together a chromosome of actual morality. Still -

It is also important to be competent, to be consistent, and to be knowledgeable. It's important for your soldiers and diplomats to speak the language of the people you want to influence. It's important to understand the ethnic and tribal divisions of the place you hope to assist. Let's not repeat past mistakes: Before sending in the 101st Airborne, we should find out what people on the ground want and need.

Right, like any of that's going to happen if people like Krazy Krauty and No-Brain Bolton have anything to say about it. Their best solution for anyone who has the effrontery not to speak American is to nuke the bejezus out of the scum. And of course they've rendered themselves too brain-deficient to grasp Anne's final point:

[R]ight now, I don't hear them clamoring for us to come. They are afraid of what American "assistance" might do to their country.

I might add that at least some of those furriners, being substantially much better informed about reality than the most "knowledgeable" American right-wingers, know what American right-wingers have done and now are trying to do to their own country.

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