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My main reaction to last night’s speech was a kind of bleak relief, a sort of grim gratitude, that we have a President who is capable of practical analysis and moral reasoning—under fire, as it were—and who, for good or for ill, treats his fellow citizens as adults, as thinking people to be informed and persuaded, not a fearful mob to be manipulated and condescended to.
The President had the task of addressing not only the American public but also the publics of Europe and the Arab world (which suddenly has a public that will not be silenced) as well as the policy and media élites of all of the above. He walked his audience(s) step by step through the choices he has faced, the values that have guided him, and the limitations on his freedom of action. With admirable concision and a minimum of bluster, he conveyed a strong sense of the complexity of the Libyan situation, a situation in which many of the moral and practical imperatives have been in conflict with one another—for example, the imperative of speed (too much delay and the massacre could no longer have been prevented, with dire consequences for American influence and nascent Arab democracy) versus the imperative of international and Arab sanction (without which intervention could backfire politically, with dire consequences for American influence and nascent Arab democracy).
I confess I simply don’t know if Obama has forged the “right” policy—i.e., the policy that will yield the desired results, which include the end of the Qaddafi regime (without a long and bloody stalemate) and the further encouragement of constitutional democratic change throughout the region. I don’t know if there even is a “right” policy, in the sense of achieving everything one would wish to achieve. And no matter what we do or refrain from doing, there is certainly no course of action or inaction that will leave us with perfectly clean hands.
But, as I say, I am somewhat reassured by the narrative of Obama’s decision-making that he presented last night. I have not yet seen a truly convincing critique of Obama’s overall approach to this crisis—convincing in the sense of teasing out how a different approach would have left us in a better place, morally and strategically, than the (admittedly far from satisfactory) place where we are now.
I would strongly urge readers to look at these two posts by Juan Cole, whose Informed Comment blog has been among the more valuable sources of Middle East analysis for nearly a decade.
Photograph: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza.
