Letter From Washington
Libya Action Creates Risks for Obama
By ALBERT R. HUNT | BLOOMBERG NEWS
Published: March 27, 2011
Representative
Dennis J. Kucinich, Democrat of Ohio, has raised the possibility of impeaching President
Barack Obama for ordering aggressive airstrikes against Libya, while
Mitt Romney, a potential Republican presidential candidate, has said the policy shows the commander in chief to be “tentative, indecisive, timid and nuanced.”
Mr. Obama can brush aside these criticisms. Every modern American president would have been impeached under Mr. Kucinich’s standards. And, to borrow a timeworn phrase, if Mr. Obama walked across the Potomac River, rivals like Mr. Romney would say that only proves he cannot swim.
What the president cannot brush aside is Col.
Muammar el-Qaddafi, who Mr. Obama has declared must leave power. If a year from now the dictator still rules Libya, thumbing his nose at the West and plotting revenge, Mr. Obama’s political prospects will suffer and Mr. Romney’s critique will resonate.
Libya is of marginal strategic interest to the United States, especially compared with Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran. Yet in the short run, symbolically and politically, Mr. Obama may have more at stake.
The analogy that might give the president comfort would be President
George W. Bush’s boast, after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that the United States would get
Osama bin Laden “dead or alive.” Not only did Mr. Bush fail, but a couple months later, when Mr. bin Laden reportedly was cornered in Tora Bora, Afghanistan, the United States failed to act. In his memoirs, Mr. Bush’s domineering defense secretary,
Donald H. Rumsfeld, insisted that no one told him the Qaeda leader was within striking distance.
Yet that analogy has flaws. In the 2004 elections, three years after Sept. 11, the United States still was in a rally-round-the-flag mood, and Democrats did not capitalize on the administration’s failures.
Foreign policy, except in times of unpopular and higher-casualty wars, rarely drives U.S. elections. In 2004, the Iraq war was not a determining factor in Mr. Bush’s re-election. Twelve years earlier, his father lost his bid for a second term, despite a more successful effort in throwing Iraq out of Kuwait. In 1956,
Dwight D. Eisenhower’s failure to come to the aid of the unsuccessful uprising in Hungary cost him hardly any votes.
Contemporaneously, Mr. Obama’s handling of Egypt may be much more important for the region. Yet in calling on President
Hosni Mubarak of Egypt to step down in an orderly way, the United States knew it had some institutional support within Egypt; there is no such support in Libya.
The policy appears ad hoc and schizoid. One day the stakes are huge, the next it is no big deal; Colonel Qaddafi has to go, unless he does not; the United States is providing leadership, except when it is not.
The contention that the president exceeded his authority in the airstrikes on Libya seems specious to most war power experts.
More problematic has been the failure of the White House to explain to Congress or the country why it has taken a more aggressive posture. Even a number of Democrats nodded when the speaker of the House,
John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, complained that U.S. military resources had been committed without defining the mission. When lawmakers like Senator
Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana and a foreign-policy mentor to Mr. Obama when he was in the Senate, and Senator Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia, complain about a lack of consultation or clarity of policy, that is far more credible than the gripes of Mr. Kucinich or Mr. Romney.
After more than a week, with the distraction of a trip to South America, Mr. Obama still has not laid out a coherent strategy or plausible endgame to the public. He will have an opportunity to do so in a speech Monday evening.
There was a very legitimate debate on Libya within the administration, with both sides making a compelling case. Skeptics argue, sure, Colonel Qaddafi is a monster, but the world is full of such despots:
Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe,
Kim Jong-il in North Korea and
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran.
The United States lacks the military, economic and political wherewithal to take all of them out. With two wars, the military is already stretched too thin, a state of affairs reflected in Defense Secretary
Robert M. Gates’s reservations about the Libya action.
All true, acknowledge the interventionists, including most of the top women in this administration. However, if Colonel Qaddafi were permitted to brutally repress a genuine uprising, he would encourage dictators throughout the region and signal that the United States only pays lip service to promoting human rights and democratic values. The factors are geopolitical as well as humanitarian.
A parallel they cite is the former Serbian president,
Slobodan Milosevic, who committed atrocities in Bosnia for years, until
Richard C. Holbrooke, a senior diplomat, and Secretary of State
Madeleine K. Albright finally persuaded President
Bill Clinton to intervene. The genocide stopped, and Mr. Milosevic eventually fell. That is the aim in Libya.
The criticism from neoconservatives that Mr. Obama is a multilateralist, hesitant to exercise U.S. power, in the mold of Presidents
Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, does not stand up to scrutiny. Mr. Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan — committing more troops and more air assaults than the Bush administration even considered — stayed the course in Iraq, and when Somali pirates took an American freighter captain hostage, the president ordered
U.S. Navy snipers to shoot the captors; three pirates were killed and the American was freed.
Further, the Reagan and Bush examples, so cherished by conservatives, are especially ironic when discussing Libya. It was Mr. Bush five years ago who normalized relations with Colonel Qaddafi after the dictator renounced weapons of mass destruction. That easing of tensions has enriched his coffers to pay for the current repression.
Mr. Reagan did bomb Libya in 1986 in retaliation for terrorist acts. Two years later, the erratic Libyan dictator masterminded the downing of
Pan Am Flight 103, which was blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 189 Americans. There was no retaliation of any consequence.
If the current move does not topple the aging colonel, he will assuredly taunt Mr. Obama and plot similar acts of terrorism.
The White House usually does not look to the conservative commentator
Sarah Palin for political wisdom. When she declared the other day that the objective in Libya has to be to “win it,” and “win it means Qaddafi goes,” she could have been channeling Mr. Obama.
Obama Faces Political Storm Over Libya When Congress Returns
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Originally Posted by Kosciuszko
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