Natalie Gonnella
With yesterday's news that one of Gadhafi's sons and three of his grandchildren were killed during recent airstrikes, NATO efforts in Libya were a popular topic among the Sunday morning political shows.
With regime loyalists ransacking the embassies of coalition allies in retaliation and government forces stepping up their attack on rebels, here's a look at what a number of conservatives had to say this morning in response to yesterday's airstrikes:
Senator Lindsey Graham said during an interview on Fox News Sunday:
I think this is a good move by NATO to go after the source of the problem...If you want to protect the Libyan people, go after his inner circle. ... In my opinion, wherever Gaddafi goes is a legitimate military target. He’s the command and control source. He’s not the legitimate leader of Libya, and the way to get this to end is to go after the people around him and his support network. So I support what NATO’s doing.
Former National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley said on CNN's State of the Union:
In a military operation the command and control elements are a legitimate target. And in Libya the command and control goes up to Gadhafi. But I think we have to focus on the narrative we want to come out of this. The narrative that we want to come out of this is that the Libyan people overthrew a dictator, not that we came in and toppled a despot. That’s the problem with going after command and control. If it results in the death of Gadhafi because what we really want him to do is for him to leave or to die at a Libyan hand, not an American hand.
Unsatisfied by the US role in Libya, Senator John McCain, who has been very vocal throughout the uprisings of the "Arab Spring," commented on CBS's Face the Nation that:
I think that if you view the-- the Qaddafi himself as part of the command and control, I think you could argue that if he was in one of those places, then it would be part of it. But Bob, we tried many times to kill leaders. Remember when we-- we’re going to kill Saddam Hussein at the beginning of the last war in Iraq. We tried to kill Osama bin Laden on several occasions. So it’s not as easy as you think. And so, we should be taking out his command and control. And if he is killed or injured because of that, that’s fine. But we ought to have a strategy to help the rebels succeed and overthrow Qaddafi and everybody associated with him.
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