Spencer Ackerman reports:
During a Senate hearing on Tuesday, Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island asked Adm. James Stavridis about NATO putting forces into “post-Gadhafi” Libya to make sure the country doesn’t fall apart. Stavridis said he “wouldn’t say NATO’s considering it yet.” But because of NATO’s history of putting peacekeepers in the Balkans — as pictured above — “the possibility of a stabilization regime exists.”
Ken Pollack discussed this yesterday at AEI, wondering if there might be a need for a two-year occupation of Libya to stabilize the broken country after Gaddafi falls. We’ve had U.N. and NATO commitments like this before, and they’ve been fairly uncontroversial – certainly, in 2000, few Republicans were calling for all U.S. troops out of the Balkans.
