Inside the Obama's administration intervention in Libya
Gates offered a last-ditch case against intervention, arguing that Libya had little strategic value. He warned that the U.S. often ended up "owning" what happened, pointing to Kosovo and the no-fly zone over Kurdistan in Iraq. He said he was wary of getting involved in a third Muslim country, and feared "a stalemate."The president answered these arguments himself. According to one participant's summary, Obama said: Look, the question of who rules Libya is probably not a vital interest to the United States. The atrocities threatened don't compare to atrocities in other parts of the world, I hear that. But there's a big "but" here. First of all, acting would be the right thing to do, because we have an opportunity to prevent a massacre, and we've been asked to do it by the people of Libya, their Arab neighbors and the United Nations. And second, the president said, failing to intervene would be a "psychological pendulum, in terms of the Arab Spring, in favor of repression." He concluded: "Just signing on to a no-fly zone so that we have political cover isn't going to cut it. That's not how America leads." Nor, he added, is it the "image of America I believe in." - Michael Hastings
President Bush took his lumps for many a facile assertion about the regional impact of removing Saddam Hussein from power, but the rationale offered by President Obama here is just as tenuous. It is also demonstrably false. NATO's intervention in Libya has not rolled back counter-revolutionary forces in Syria or Bahrain (or Saudi Arabia, or Egypt). Gaddafi's death, welcome though it is, won't change that either - whatever momentary fillip it gives protesters in the Arab world is not going to change the balance of forces in the region. In fact, watching Gaddafi's bloody carcass being hauled around may convince the region's autocrats to crack down harder lest they find themselves similarly discomfited.
It's also worth reflecting on the threshold this administration set for risking the lives of American military personnel. It's true that the NATO mission in Libya was fairly low-risk compared to the range of options available, but it still carried serious risks. Imagine if a U.S. plane had been shot down by Gaddafi forces. Would President Obama explain to a mourning family that their son or daughter had to die because the president was concerned about the "psychological pendulum" of the Middle East?
