My
first reaction to the President Obama's speech is that he should have given it
ten days ago. He didn't say anything tonight that he couldn't have said when he
ordered combat operations to commence. Waiting for NATO to agree to take on the
mission became a good reason for the White House to delay the Commander in
Chief explaining his volte face to the nation. But it didn't actually
mask the president not wanting to detract from his prior obligations in Latin
America or give the appearance that Americans were running the show (even when
Americans were running the show).
That
slight of hand feeling pervaded the president's speech; I still don't know
whether he thinks we have a national interest in Libya. In the past 36 hours,
the Secretary of Defense has said we do not have a national interest in the war
in Libya, the Secretary of State has said our national interest is our
humanitarian interest and helping our allies who really do have national
interests. In an effort to break the tie, the president described our national
interests in the Libyan war as: preventing a stain on our conscience (from
doing nothing), stopping Qaddafi's advance on Benghazi, preventing refugees
destabilizing fragile governments in Egypt and Tunisia, showing other
repressive regimes we not allow them to use force, and upholding the United
Nations. Which sounds like he's siding with Secretary Gates' description but
Secretary Clinton's prescription.
President
Obama's checklist of why we acted consisted of: the scale of potential harm,
America's unique ability to stop it, having an international mandate, and it
was achievable without ground troops. The Obama Doctrine, as exposited in this
speech appears to be "we care enough to prevent you from losing, but we don't
care enough to help you win." That's fair enough as a risk-minimizing framework
for United States foreign policy, but it is wildly at variance with the soaring
language the president offered up about our commitment to freedom. And it
doesn't provide very satisfying answers to what next in Libya or whether we
will do this again.
I
thought the comparisons to the Balkans and Iraq were both unfair. The
complicated dissolution of Yugoslavia, the timing of its occurrence, and the
lack of precedent made the degree of difficulty higher intervening in the
Balkans (and, incidentally, the Clinton Administration delivered Germany). Iraq
raises much weightier national interest arguments than the president
acknowledged.
The president
has taken an awful lot of credit for a pretty stingy commitment to advancing
freedom -- which is not to say he should make every war of liberation an
American war, just that I couldn't help wondering how it sounded to Iranian
dissidents in prison since July of 2009 or voters in Ivory Coast where stolen
elections are unresolved or in Darfur, wishing now for years that we cared
enough to prevent militia raping and killing, to hear the President of the
United States say so proudly "some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to
atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different."
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