Ryan Streeter
Peter Feaver wrote last week that if “we do opt for military inaction, it had better be the result of a tough-minded assessment of the costs and benefits of all of the alternatives and not simply the sloppy embrace of inertia.”
Sadly, President Obama has embraced inertia, and now we’re trying to figure out what it means to be the United States getting pulled along by the United Nations into armed conflict.
Our President has voted “present” this week, in Kimberly Strassel’s words today, echoing Michael Barone’s observations of Obama’s behavior last weekend.
The Fox poll yesterday showing most Americans reluctant to send troops to Libya helps make Strassel’s point: this is what Americans think, and Obama seems more prone to follow their lead than to lead. He has already shown he prefers to follow our allies, the UN, even the Arab League. One wonders what American opinion would be like if he had pronounced early that we were going to put some heavy-handed pressure on Gadhafi. More importantly, one wonders whether Gadhafi would already be out of power. We’ll never know.
Obama should have known he would make enemies here at home no matter what he chose to do. Conservatives have flipped all over the place (for example, here) on whether an early no-fly zone was justifiable, and his left flank will be upset with just about any kind of action in the matter. What's worse than his apparent opinion-chasing is that we still have no idea what principles, if any, have guided the administration's decision-making on Libya. That, to me, is the gravest outcome of this whole mess. He should have acted earlier, but if at least he could articulate clearly why we didn't, the world would know where America stands.
Let’s hope the deployments we’re reading about taking place within “hours” make quick work of the situation.
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