Max Boot is one of those neocons...

...who has never met an Islamic country he didn't want to invade. (He's also one of those neocons who's never served in the military -- that's for other people.) And, like others who have counseled war in the past (Tom Friedman comes immediately to mind), he now wants to point out all of the risks in doing so -- after the fact. (This is always convenient. If the war goes well, he can take a bow. If it doesn't -- like Friedman and Iraq -- he can just say that it was poorly executed. Why didn't they listen to me? It's a win-win.)

In today's Times, Boot has an opinion piece in which he says:

I can’t stop worrying about everything that could go wrong.

Now you tell us!

Will the rebels be able to root out Qaddafi loyalists? If not, are we prepared to use Western ground forces? So far President Obama has ruled out that option, which runs the danger of a protracted stalemate. Colonel Qaddafi could simply cling to power, while international support for the whole operation frays.

Even if Colonel Qaddafi steps down — an outcome that I believe we must now seek but that hasn’t been declared as a formal aim — the problems hardly end.

See Boot's strategy? He's already laying the groundwork for his "I told you sos."

The next sentence is about as chilling a red flag as you can get:

In some ways Libya presents fewer risks than Afghanistan or Iraq.

And then there's:

But there is still much that could go wrong in a post-Qaddafi Libya.

And, finally:

None of this is meant to imply that I have suddenly changed my mind and decided that we should have stayed out of Libya. This is a worthwhile intervention for both strategic and humanitarian reasons. But the Obama administration must be alive to the numerous dangers that lurk down this path, and must make plans to deal with them.

I'm a big fan of President Obama's. (Regular readers of this blog are probably thinking, "Duh!" right about now.) Some of his decisions, like choosing Hillary as his running mate, seemed questionable to me at the time but turned out to be shrewd. Others, like the push for health care reform, or the compromise on the Bush tax cuts, made sense to me at the time and still do.

But this one -- bombing a third Islamic country when we're already over-committed in the region -- has me scratching my head. (And no bald jokes, please.) But seriously, what on earth is the president thinking? The only hope I can cling to is that, because this intervention has been met with such universal skepticism, it might -- might -- exceed expectations.

But it's hard for me to be optimistic.