Iran's bellicose rhetoric and Gulf wargames in recent days have given rise to the question of whether Tehran could close the Strait of Hormuz. As many analysts have observed, the answer is no -- not for a meaningful period of time. Less frequently addressed, however, is whether Iran would even try. The answer to that question is also "no" -- even the attempt would have devastating strategic consequences for Iran.

The presumable target of an Iranian effort to close the Strait would be the United States. However, while we would of course be affected by any resulting rise in global oil prices, the U.S. gets little of our petroleum from the Gulf. The U.S. imports only about 49 percent of the petroleum we consume, and over half of those imports come from the Western Hemisphere. Less than 25 percent of U.S. imports came from all the Gulf countries combined in October 2011 -- far less than is available in the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, were Gulf supplies to be interrupted.  

China, on the other hand, would find its oil supplies significantly threatened by an Iranian move against the Strait. China's most significant oil supplier is Saudi Arabia. China also happens, however, to be Iran's primary oil customer and perhaps its most important ally: Beijing provides Iran with its most sophisticated weaponry and with diplomatic cover at the United Nations. Thus a move to close the Strait would backfire strategically by harming the interests of -- and likely alienating -- Iran's most important patron and cutting off Iran's own economic lifeline, while doing little to imperil U.S. supplies of crude.

It is perhaps no coincidence, then, that China quickly dispatched Vice Foreign Minister Zhai Jun to Tehran in the wake of Iran's bellicose statements. In typically opaque fashion, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said only that "China hopes that peace and stability can be maintained in the Strait;" this is essentially diplo-speak for "Cool it."

Even if Iran ignored these considerations and proceeded with an effort to close the Strait, the U.S. and others would move to keep it open, and would be unlikely to stop there. As Iran has crept closer to a nuclear weapons capability, the possibility of military action against Iran has also become more imminent. President Obama has been reluctant to threaten Iran militarily, and any U.S. president would think long and hard before engaging in another armed conflict in the Middle East. 

An effort by Iran to shut down the oil trade in the Gulf, however, would make such a decision straightforward. The U.S. would react with force, and once engaged in hostilities with Iran, would likely take the opportunity to target Iran's nuclear facilities and other military targets. It is difficult to envision any scenario beginning with an Iranian effort to close the Strait of Hormuz that does not end in a serious strategic setback for the Iranian regime.

Recognizing that Iran is neither able nor likely to try to close the Strait, the U.S. could simply sit back, confident in our superior firepower. This would be a mistake. The real danger in the Gulf is lower-level activity by Iran to harass shipping and confront the U.S. Navy. Iranian commanders in the area are increasingly brazen. If not deterred, Iran's sense of impunity -- rather than its nuclear progress -- may be the spark that ignites a conflict in the region. 

Iran's navy -- especially the naval arm of Iran's Revolutionary Guards -- has invested in vessels and armaments that are well-suited to asymmetric warfare, rather than the sort of ship-to-ship conflict which Iran would surely lose. Thus, they have purchased, with Chinese and Russian help, increasingly sophisticated mines, midget submarines, mobile anti-ship cruise missiles, and a fleet of small, fast boats. In addition, they have reportedly sought to develop a naval special warfare, or frogman, capability.

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The staggering Islamist victories in the initial rounds of parliamentary voting and the spasms of violence which regularly grip Cairo have raised grave worries about Egypt's political future. Less visible, however, is a deepening economic crisis that may be just as dangerous. And the prescriptions proposed by the ascendant Islamist parties will only make matters worse. Egypt's liberals can distinguish themselves both from the transitional government and from their Islamist rivals by offering sensible policies to stem Egypts economic bleeding.

The Egyptian economy, which grew at a healthy clip in recent years even if the fruits of that growth were unequally shared, has entered a downward spiral. The tumult of 2011 has resulted in a sharp drop in tourism and business activity, leading to forecasts that Egypt's GDP will grow only one percent this year. This slowdown has exacerbated the country's unemployment woes, which were one of the chief causes of the February revolution.

Despite the slowdown, inflation is soaring -- the dreaded combination known as stagflation. Capital flight and other factors have depressed the Egyptian pound to its lowest level in years and driven up prices, despite desperate efforts by the Egyptian Central Bank to defend the currency's value, which have in turn left the country with alarmingly low foreign currency reserves.

The rise in prices and unemployment, combined with the economic slowdown, will only serve to deepen Egypt's already massive poverty and concomitant socioeconomic discontent, which will fuel further instability at a fragile political moment.

The policies of Egypt's transitional military rulers who themselves are heavily invested in the economy and thus have a strong incentive to restore order have not helped. Wary of exacerbating popular unrest, the interim government has followed a loose fiscal and monetary policy, incurring a budget deficit and leaving interest rates unchanged.

This approach has exacerbated Egypt's economic difficulties by further fueling inflation and crowding out private sector borrowing in the domestic debt market. Given this less-than-impressive performance, it is small wonder that a recent Gallup poll showed that Egyptian citizens' primary concerns going into the election were overwhelmingly economic rather than political or ideological.

The outcome of those elections, however, is unlikely to address voters economic concerns. The two best-performing parties, the Muslim Brotherhood and the more radical Islamist Nour party, advocate policies that would not cure, and in some instances would dramatically worsen the country's economic plight.

The Muslim Brotherhoods' economic approach appears influenced by Turkey's Islamist, pro-business AK party, and stresses the importance of a market economy and even appears to support some measure of privatization. Nour, on the other hand, advances a far more explicitly populist platform. Nevertheless, both favor government redistribution of wealth and share damaging economic ideas, and just as Nour is likely to drag the Brotherhood in a more radical direction on political issues, it can be expected to do the same in the economic arena.

Both parties' platforms criticize foreign imports, and stress the need to explicitly favor domestic goods. Both criticize lending with interest, and promote various forms of Islamic finance. Nour in particular criticizes foreign labor and foreign investment, and proposes what amounts to statism in its advocacy of a heavy-handed government role in industrial planning and economic activity. And critically for Egypt's tourism-dependent economy, both would impose strict moral curbs on visitors, with Nour's platform observing that it is possible to have fun without taboo.

Whatever lip service the Muslim Brotherhood pays to free-market capitalism, the combined effects of these policies would be to further deter foreign investment and tourism and decrease the vitality of Egypts ailing private sector.

Liberal politicians largely failed to present an appealing political alternative to Islamist parties whose ideology and history of opposition resonate with Egypts conservative electorate, and may feel tempted to follow the Islamist's populist economic lead. However, they should instead seize the opportunity to distinguish themselves on economic matters from a transitional government whose approach has foundered and Islamist parties whose policies are misguided.

The right approach for Egypt is to reduce spending and accept external financing proffered by the IMF but rejected by the transitional government -- to ease the crowding-out of domestic capital and provide a boost to private enterprise. Furthermore, foreign trade and foreign investment should be encouraged, and investors should be reassured that their interests will be safeguarded, not expropriated. Tourists and the money they bring should be welcomed rather than deterred.

With the right policy signals, and by stemming the rise in prices and flight of foreign capital, Egypt can restore a measure of stability, encourage foreign and domestic private-sector investment and a return of tourism, and turn its downward spiral into a virtuous circle. Rather than be deflated by their disappointing election performance, Egypt's liberals should be focused on the economic long game, because whichever party delivers prosperity to Egyptians will rule.

Given the alarms that have increasingly been sounded in recent months about Iran's nuclear progress and furor over its alleged plotting to kill the Saudi ambassador in Washington and the storming of the British embassy in Tehran, one might think that Iran's leaders would be worried about the prospect of a Western attack on their country.  However, their remarks suggest just the opposite.  In recent days, Iranian Leader Ali Khamenei has boasted of "shatter(ing) the resolve" of the West, and the commander of Iran's paramilitary Basij forces -- who were responsible for the embassy rampage -- predicted that the U.S. would be too weak even to respond to an Iranian attack.   

Perhaps this is just bluster; however, U.S. officials have done little to dampen the regime's overweening self-confidence and the proclivity for escalation which is fueled by it.  While Obama administration officials continue to assert that the military option remains "on the table" with respect to Iran, they have a counterproductive tendency to simultaneously undermine those assertions and thereby undermine our efforts to deter Iran and muster support for tougher sanctions.  The latest disquisition on the inadvisability of military action came from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who on Friday described five reasons why the U.S. should not strike Iran.  All of them were debatable.

First, Panetta claimed that an attack might only set back the regime "one, possibly two years" because "some of [the nuclear] targets are very difficult to get at."  Putting aside the advisability of broadcasting the limits of our military capabilities to Iran and others, this analysis is questionable.  Presumably Panetta is in a position to know whether it would actually be difficult to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities, though recent unexplained explosions such as the one which nearly obliterated an Iranian missile complex suggest they are vulnerable.  In any case, even partial damage could be difficult for Iran to recover from quickly.  Centrifuge manufacturing, for example, depends critically on specialized, hard-to-acquire components, which would make reconstituting the program difficult with vigorous sanctions enforcement.

Second, Panetta asserted that an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities would result in increased support for the regime in Iran and the region.  However, it is far more likely that our Arab allies -- especially those in the Gulf, who see Iran as the chief threat to their security -- would at least privately cheer a successful attack.  Among Muslim-majority populations, a mid-2010 Pew poll found that only in Pakistan is there majority support for Iran's nuclear program.  In Iran itself, far from bolstering the regime an attack may undermine it.  Khamenei himself recognized this recently, warning in a speech to the Iranian navy that two previous Iranian regimes -- the Qajars and Pahlavis -- had shown vulnerability in the face of foreign powers and had been swept aside as a result.

Panetta's third, fourth, and fifth assertions all concerned Iranian retaliation -- that Iran would target U.S. ships and bases; that an attack would carry economic consequences, presumably because Iran would target oil shipping or seek to close the Strait of Hormuz; and that an attack would lead to Iranian escalation and a conflict that would "consume the Middle East." 

It is a risk of any military activity that one's adversary will retaliate; the question is how capable he is of doing so.  While the threat posed by Iran and the uncertainties inherent to any conflict should not be discounted, neither should they be exaggerated.  Much sober analysis and planning would go into any strike on Iran by the United States and its allies, and it is difficult to imagine that the conclusion of those deliberations would be that we would be incapable of dealing with Iranian retaliation.  Most open-source assessments of the Iranian threat to shipping in the Persian Gulf, for example, conclude that Iran could not close the Straits for more than a brief period in the face of U.S. resistance. 

As for escalation -- it is already happening, as demonstrated by the aforementioned assassination plot and the storming of the British embassy.  Suggesting that we are deterred from responding is to invite further provocation.  Conversely, if we wish to prevent further escalation or, in the aftermath of a strike, make Iranian leaders think twice about how they respond, we must make clear that we are willing and able to counter any Iranian outrage or retaliation.

For U.S. officials to consider privately the concerns raised by Secretary Panetta is both responsible and necessary.  To muse upon them publicly, however, is neither; it is a strategic error.  Undercutting the credibility of the military threat not only reassures Tehran, but it increases the temptation of our allies in the region to hedge their bets and it takes pressure off of states such as Russia and China to support sanctions targeting Iran's central bank and oil revenues.  Panetta to his credit did not rule out force, but said it should be a last resort.  Few would disagree, but the timing may not be up to us -- the Iranian regime is unlikely to extend us the courtesy of waiting until we have exhausted all sanctions and diplomacy before going nuclear.  The surest way to put off that date and buy breathing room for a diplomatic strategy is to convince Iran's leaders that while we are not eager for a conflict, we are prepared to fight and win one if necessary.

Iran's alleged plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington was brazen, sloppy, but, regrettably, entirely plausible. While its tactics vary, the Iranian regime has engaged in direct terrorist attacks in the past, and recent events in the Middle East and changes to Iran's own military command and control structure have raised the likelihood of such attacks. The Obama Administration will be careful to avoid a war of escalation with the regime, but should resist the temptation to confine its response to sanctions.

On its face, the details of the Iranian plot seem amateurish and provoke deep skepticism. An Iranian-American who claims his cousin is a "big general" in Iran makes contact with what he thinks is a Mexican drug gang to blow up a Washington restaurant in a frantic effort to assassinate the Saudi ambassador, heedless of the innocents who will surely perish or the risk of US retaliation. This hardly seems to fit the modus operandi of the Quds Force, the external operations arm of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The Quds Force has recently tended to operate below the radar, through trusted proxies such as Hezbollah, and while its activities are global, it concentrates its most nefarious activities in Iran's immediate environs, most notably Iraq.

Nevertheless, this conventional wisdom glosses over a significant variability in the IRGC's tactics. In Iraq, Quds Force commanders have been caught red-handed aiding militants. This includes Mohsen Chizari, the Quds Force operations chief who was caught and released by US and Iraqi forces in Baghdad in 2006 and was more recently designated by recent US sanctions for aiding the Assad regime's crackdown. Further in the past, the IRGC did the dirty work itself in bombing the Israeli Embassy and a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994. One of the Iranians wanted for that attack is Iran's current defense minister, and another ran unsuccessfully against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for the presidency in 2009.

Recent developments may have spurred the IRGC to return to such tactics. While Iran initially seemed buoyed by the uprisings in the Arab world, which it touted as anti-American, Islamic revolutions, the regime was stung by events in Bahrain. The GCC, led by Saudi Arabia, successfully intervened in Bahrain to shore up the Khalifa monarchy against a largely Shiite uprising, while Iran -- which sees itself as defender of Shiite communities worldwide and occasionally asserts an old Persian territorial claim to Bahrain -- stood by impotently. This humiliation may have convinced the regime of the need to act. And the Saudi ambassador may have been seen in Tehran as a fitting target, as he is a close confidant of King Abdullah and a key conduit between Saudi Arabia and the United States, two powers whose hands the paranoid Iranian regime sees in all of its troubles.

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Is the Obama administration's relationship with Israel close or cold? According to Eli Lake, writing in the most recent issue of Newsweek, it is both. Lake, in reporting the apparent delivery of "bunker-buster" bombs by the US to Israel, provides additional substance to an argument often made by defenders of the administration's approach to Israel: that despite any strains in the political relationship over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, U.S.-Israel military and security ties have never been stronger. 

That the military-to-military relationship is strong is not in dispute -- it has been growing broader and deeper for many years, and the Obama Administration has maintained this trajectory. That the strength of this relationship attests to the good health of the U.S.-Israel alliance, however, is questionable.

The ties between the US and Israel are based on many things, not least a deep historical and cultural affinity. However, those ties are also based on shared strategic interests. The United States provides military assistance to Israel not out of charity, but because it is in our interest to do so (indeed, this is the rationale behind most foreign assistance). Israel is a powerful, competent, and cooperative partner in a region of the world that is vital to American security and prosperity. Our assistance not only protects Israel, but also provides for our common defense against threats such as Iran's nuclear and missile program and transnational terrorist groups. These threats and Israel's cooperation in dealing with them are not merely hypothetical, as demonstrated by the Israeli strike on Syria's clandestine nuclear program in 2007. We seek to safeguard Israel's security in order to advance our own.

Providing for Israel's security, however, involves more than good military-to-military ties. It also requires a good political relationship, for two reasons. First, the threats faced by the United States and Israel (and our other allies) in the Middle East have both political and military dimensions, and often the former are more important than the latter. Frequent, close, and candid political contacts are vital in any alliance for dealing with potential threats (and capitalizing on opportunities) before they metastasize into matters that must be dealt with by generals. Second, many of the steps the United States would like Israel to take (or, in some cases, refrain from taking) would be eased by the assurance of strong U.S. backing for Israel, whether at the United Nations or in regional and global capitals. As is the case throughout the Middle East and elsewhere, our political and security relations with Israel are inextricable.

Many observers have suggested that our military support for Israel should be traded for Israeli concessions in the peace process (indeed, this was the implicit bargain offered by the United States to Israel in November 2010 -- military hardware in exchange for an extension of the settlement freeze). This sort of zero-sum thinking has a simplistic appeal, but does not stand up to the rigors of the real world. A more patient and nuanced approach views our security relationship with Israel -- and indeed our regional security efforts -- and advancing the peace process as mutually reinforcing. The reasons are simple: first, an Israel both consumed with external threats and worried about the reliability of U.S. backing is one which will hunker down, not take risks for peace; second, to the extent Israel and its neighbors are focused on similar threats, such as Iran and terrorism, our efforts to counter those threats can serve as a rare point of cooperation, even if implicit, among them and improve the regional political atmosphere.

The United States should not be uncritical of Israel, nor should we expect that we will not have differences, including publicly, with Israeli leaders. The reality of any alliance is that however extensively overlapping our interests, they are not identical. But we should treat those differences -- as we do with other close allies -- as obstacles to be overcome as we pursue a close and cooperative military and political relationship. We should not allow them to define the relationship, much less highlight them in the vain hope of winning the esteem of Israel's foes.

On Sept. 22, I testified to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs regarding the abuse of human rights in Iran and Syria. The wide-scale human rights abuses we are witnessing in these countries are atrocious, but they are certainly not new. The abuses perpetrated by Bashar al-Assad's Syria and Ali Khamenei's Iran stretch back for years and are a key element in those regimes' system of authoritarian control over their people. The Iranian and Syrian regimes have, in an effort to establish and maintain this control, cultivated illusions of democracy, prosperity, and stability which are belied by the underlying realities of these countries. The great achievement of both the Iranian and Syrian opposition is to have shattered these illusions, which neither regime will easily be able to reconstruct. Looking ahead, the U.S. should do all it can to assist opposition activists in both Iran and Syria to break the control exerted by their regimes. Whether in Iran or in Syria, preventing human rights abuses necessarily means supporting democracy.

You can read my entire written testimony here.

The annual melodrama in New York over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has largely overshadowed the real historic drama that is playing out in the Middle East today. The region seems turned upside-down: rebellions are taking place across the Arab world, Turkish-Israeli relations have dramatically deteriorated, and tumult seems to be the rule.

Nevertheless, trying amid the chaos to determine precisely what has changed in the region is no easy task. In some places, like Libya, the change is total -- Qadhafi is ousted, and leadership has passed to a cobbled-together group comprising both jihadists and bureaucrats. In others, like Egypt, the change is worryingly superficial -- Mubarak is gone, but the military chieftains who have succeeded him have reimposed his draconian "emergency laws" and continue to drag bloggers and activists before military tribunals. In others still, like Syria, little change at all has come -- protests grind on, and so does the regime.

For Western officials looking to protect or advance their countries' interests in the Middle East, sorting the superficial from the fundamental changes is a vital task. While the outcomes of the revolutions in Egypt, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere remain far from certain, it is possible to identify three shifts in the region which are significant and likely to endure.

First, there can no longer be any question that internal politics matter in the Arab world. Before the Arab rebellions, the conventional wisdom in the West was that understanding policy in a country like Egypt meant understanding the views and intentions of essentially one person -- Hosni Mubarak. He in turn was able to impose his will on the country through a mixture of coercion and co-optation. Public opinion and the views of opposition groups were important on their own merits and for understanding the deeper dynamics of the country, but had little actual bearing on Egyptian policy. This point of view was questionable before, and certainly wrong today. There are now a multiplicity of political groupings and power centers, and issues such as the U.S.-Egyptian or Israeli-Egyptian relationships are political footballs important as much for their symbolism as their substance. Influencing, much less predicting policy in Egypt, Libya, or Tunisia will require diplomats and officials to do something which is second nature to them in places like Europe, but to which they have been unaccustomed in the Middle East - cultivating relationships beyond the presidential palace and its immediate environs, and understanding the interests, motivations, and aspirations of a broad swath of society.

Second, the new governments that spring up around the Arab world will likely be more anti-Western, and anti-Israel, than those they succeeded. Fairly or not, the West and the United States in particular is strongly associated with the old regimes in the Middle East, and thus seen as accomplices in oppression. This is in part a problem of our own making -- the United States supported Arab dictators during the Cold War as foils to Soviet expansionism. When the USSR fell, however, we continued to support those dictators rather than pressing for democratic reform. Those moments, such as the mid-2000s, when the US took a different approach, were not sustained, leading raised expectations in the region to be dashed and our public esteem lower than it began. Our image has not been helped by US policy during the Arab Spring, during which we have been perceived as a fair-weather friend, taking sides only when a conflict's outcome was already clear rather than acting on our pro-democracy proclamations.

The cold peace that has long prevailed between Israel and its Arab neighbors is also perceived throughout the region to have been an unsavory arrangement that worked to the benefit of repressive regimes. The blame for Israel's isolation in the region is often laid squarely at the feet of Israeli leaders for their perceived failure to make peace with the Palestinians; the reality is more complicated. Egyptian leaders, for example, studiously maintained peace with Israel and enjoyed the strategic and economic benefits accompanying it. But they never made the case to the Egyptian people for this peace. Instead, they cynically employed both anti-Semitic and anti-Israel rhetoric in the official media as a means (ineffective, it turns out) of deflecting public anger from domestic issues.

Third, and most troubling, the Middle East is likely to be a more dangerous and volatile region in the future. For the past several decades, a relatively stable regional order has prevailed, centered around Arab-Israeli peace treaties and close ties between the United States and the major Arab states and Turkey. The region was not conflict-free by any means, and Iran, Iraq, and various transnational groups sought to challenge the status quo, albeit largely unsuccessfully. Now, however, the United States appears less able or willing to exercise influence in the region, and the leaders and regimes who guarded over the regional order are gone or under pressure. Sensing either the need or opportunity to act autonomously, states like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran are increasingly bold, and all are well-armed and aspire to regional leadership. Egypt, once stabilized, may join this group. While interstate conflict is not inevitable by any means, the risk of it has increased and the potential brakes on it have deteriorated. Looming over all of this is Iran's quest for a nuclear weapon, which would shift any contest for regional primacy into overdrive.

It is likely that there are more fundamental changes in the Middle East which we have yet to detect, or that some changes will be short-circuited as events unfold. As it unfolds, the Arab Spring is unlikely to fulfill the dearest hopes of U.S. policymakers for democracy or bring to pass their darkest worries of radicalization; it is certain, however, to change the Middle East forever in ways we are only beginning to apprehend.

In the wake of Tripoli's fall, the White House has been quick to characterize the U.S. participation in NATO's Libya intervention as a success, and perhaps even a template for future military interventions.  Nevermind that the administration is engaging in a bit of revisionist history (far from rallying a U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing the intervention, the U.S., for a time, was among those blocking a resolution, according to British and French diplomats).  Never mind that however full-throatedly the White House touts Libya as a model intervention, it is unlikely to apply that model anywhere else, including Syria.

These things aside, it is hardly surprising that the White House should tout Libya as a success.  This is a political season, and a fractious one at that. Foreign policy successes come few and far between for any president, and White House communications teams are invariably quick to declare victory with a conspicuous lack of subtlety.  Indeed, tactically speaking, the international intervention was a success:  Tripoli has fallen, and while Qadhafi remains elusive, his regime has crumbled.  While significant questions remain about the next phase of Libya's revolution, and while there is much to criticize regarding the timing and execution of American and NATO operations, the decision to intervene has been vindicated. 

Nevertheless, the way in which the Obama administration handled the Libya conflict is no model; it had positive and negative aspects, the full ramifications of which will not be clear for some time.  With the bulk of NATO's involvement likely concluded, it behooves U.S. policymakers to engage in a clear-eyed stock-taking of the Libya intervention to determine what to do, and what not to do, in future crises.

The advantages of the Obama administration's approach to the Libya intervention seem clear.  Not a single American life was lost, as far as we know.  In addition, the operation enjoyed broad international buy-in, which brings with it multiple benefits: the costs and responsibilities of the fighting were shared among coalition partners (though far from equally so); it had credibility globally, regionally, and in Libya itself insofar as NATO was perceived as supporting an indigenous uprising; the Libyan opposition is not strongly associated with any single international power, but has broad-based support (diplomatically, though notably not financially); and the burden of post-conflict reconstruction assistance does not fall on American shoulders alone. Finally, the intervention gave tangible if belated expression to President Obama's avowed support for the Arab Spring.

The disadvantages, however, are equally stark.  Foremost among these was the "leading from behind" mentality which has seemed to guide the Obama administration not only throughout the Libya conflict but also the Arab Spring broadly.  The administration has portrayed this approach as patiently assembling a coalition and allowing local partners such as the Libyan opposition to take the lead.  In the Middle East, however, the U.S. approach is viewed less charitably -- Washington is perceived as hanging back until an outcome seems clear or a decision is forced by events.  It was not necessary that the United States lead the charge against Qadhafi - that was appropriately the role of the Libyan opposition.  But Washington did not even lead the international coalition to support the opposition; instead, we seemed a reluctant partner.

From the U.S. reluctance to engage fully in the intervention flowed a number of problems which will have lingering effects.  First, the administration failed to make a coherent or compelling case to the American people and U.S. troops for the Libya intervention.  U.S. officials made clear that they wanted to see Qadhafi and his regime toppled and behind the scenes were likely keen to demonstrate support for the Arab Spring and firmness in the face of possible advances in the region by Iran and extremists.  However, they made no effort to secure a mandate or conduct military operations toward that end. Instead, international intervention was rhetorically justified on humanitarian grounds, which was hard to square with US and international inaction elsewhere around the globe.  As with Iraq, Afghanistan, and other conflicts past and future, the president owes Americans a clear and coherent explanation as to why and toward what objectives American soldiers are being put in harm's way and American resources expended. 

The American ambivalence toward the Libya intervention has also had reverberations overseas.  First and foremost, the lack of clear leadership in the coalition-building process led not only to a fractured alliance - Germany and Turkey, for example, initially exempted themselves - but also to ongoing poor coordination between the Libyan opposition and NATO, which was also hamstrung by its incongruous mandate.  For many months, NATO's activities appeared designed to enforce a stalemate, preventing regime forces from advancing but doing little to assist opposition forces in doing so.  In addition, Washington's reluctance to become involved in Libya -- despite the strength of international support, the weakness of Qadhafi's forces, and the compelling justification provided by his regime's activities -- sends a negative signal to the Iranian regime and others regarding Washington's stomach for confrontation.  It conveys instead the impression of an America that is increasingly unwilling or unable to exercise influence in the Middle East, a development with deeply troubling implications.