The complexities of war policy

Libya is a mess -- in and of itself with it's crazy dictator. It's also a mess in that its rebels are not like those in Tunisia and Egypt. They are not well organized or even united. Two top generals are arguing about which one is in charge of the other.

Our intervention plan is something of a mess too -- and maybe inherently so, given the conflicting goals that we're trying to pursue. Here's how HuffPost's David Wood describes it:

The White House wanted the Pentagon to come up with a low-cost regime-change plan for Libya. Ideally, this strategy would have toppled Col. Muammar Gaddafi without bogging the U.S. down in another inconclusive foreign adventure. And by no means could the plan have included young American infantrymen advancing under fire across the sand.

The military kept insisting that no such option existed. A real regime-change operation, some officers argued, requires "boots on the ground." That was a cost the White House, given rising domestic pressure to bring the troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq, was unwilling to consider.

In long meetings and email exchanges, arguments over strategic details often led to more serious disagreements, the official told The Huffington Post. The White House thought the Pentagon was disrespecting the president by refusing to propose a politically acceptable action plan, while the Pentagon became furious that White House officials didn’t "seem to understand what military force can and cannot do,’’ the official said.

And this is in spite of having Robert Gates as the center of these disparate groups of civilians and military trying to work together. He has the respect of both. Unfortunately, he has announced long ago that he will be leaving the post this fall. And, at the same time, Adm. Mullen will be retiring from Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The alternatives to what we're doing just don't seem to offer any better solution. Either doing nothing to help the Libyan populist movement or sending in our troops would have been political suicide for Obama, as well as a financial and moral disaster for our country.

It's a tough job. Having an opposition party doing everything possible to see that you fail makes it almost impossible. To those who are critical of Obama, I ask: whom would you choose to have in there in his place? John McCain? Newt Gingrich? Or, god forbid, Donald Trump?

Ralph