Libya panic attack

I see Tom Ricks has noticed, too. "Everybody's going all wobbly over Libya," he writes. Agreed. This would be a good time to stop pretending that there are simple answers to complex questions. But I digress.

On American military misgivings, Ricks writes:

"Let's knock off the muttering in the ranks about clear goals and exit strategies. Fellas, you need to understand this is not a football game but a soccer match. For the last 10 years, our generals have talked about the need to become adaptable, to live with ambiguity. Well, this is it. The international consensus changes every day, so our operations need to change with it. Such is the nature of war, as Clausewitz reminds us. Better Obama's cautious ambiguity than Bush's false clarity. Going into Iraq, scooping up the WMD, and getting out by September 2003 -- now that was a nice clear plan. And a dangerously foolish one, too."

"What we need now is good, candid, hard-hitting discussions between our military leaders and their civilian overseers. Because war changes the reality of the situation every day, it is essential for the operational, or campaign, level of war to be connected to the political level. That is the purpose of strategy, and of those free and frank discussions."

Well said. But is anybody listening?