Not a great endorsement of the Libyan Kinetic-Military-Overseas-Contingency-Operation-Action-But-Not-A-War. He outlines the idiocy of putting the operation under the rubric of a NATO committee that America won’t be in charge of. It’s insanity.

A failure, Krauthammer says. Perhaps harsh; this isn’t over and we might get lucky and blow Qaddafi sky-high on a goof. Qaddafi goes and this Kinetic-Military-Overseas-Contingency-Operation-Action-But-Not-A-War gets salvaged as some sort of success. We can then sit back and watch the Muslim Brotherhood set up an Islamist regime that’s even worse than Qaddafi, but in the short run that’s an improvement over what happens when this Kinetic-Military-Overseas-Contingency-Operation-Action-But-Not-A-War collapses under the weight of 26 Euro-weenie NATO countries and Canada squabbling over a mission many of them aren’t interested in.

Because if this thing goes down the tubes and Qaddafi survives, he’s going to unleash a horde of cutthroats, hit men and bombers that will make Saddam Hussein look like Herman van Rompuy – and from then until we actually decide to go in with boots on the ground and engage in a full-scale war (an action for which there is quite correctly zero American support now), no plane, train or automobile in America or Europe will be safe. And oh, by the way – should Qaddafi survive, all the Arab countries will rush to make peace with him and in so doing condemn America for having killed civilians with those bombs. Which means we’ll be the bad guy, we’ll have lost a war, we’ll have squandered our prestige on the world stage and we’ll have actually increased the threat of terrorism we face. Or we can bend a knee and apologize to Uncle Muammar for attacking his country, and pay him reparations for the privilege of his calling off the dogs – a program which will have the exact effect as if we didn’t do any of those things.

Libya is a tar baby, and we’ve got both hands in it. We’ve invested resources stupidly there with no plan, no defined mission and no strategy. And in doing so we’ve ignored Yemen, Bahrain and Syria – all of which are more important to us than Libya  is. And none of this was given a hearing in Congress as the law requires.

If there is a larger geopolitical Charlie Foxtrot than this, we can’t find one in the history books. Perhaps it’s not so harsh to call it a failure after all.