U.S. President Barack Obama recently announced that the NATO-led operation against Libya had reached a stalemate. At the same time, however, he hopes Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi will soon be forced to step down. Obama’s statement is remarkably similar to U.S. President Lyndon Johnson’s comments at the peak of the Vietnam War.
Beginning with the first Gulf War, we have become accustomed over the past 20 years to Western military interventions in which the enemy’s defenses were devastated in the first few days by overwhelming air attacks But the Libya operation is different because NATO member countries as a whole — and the United States in particular — have shown so little resolve.
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