Ten days after the United Nations Security Council authorized the United States and our allies to fly into action as the air wing of the otherwise defenseless brigades of an eastern Libyan uprising (yes, the wording and the expressed motive were different, but that’s what it meant and that’s where we are now) President Obama took to the lectern Monday night to tell us why he has made this our war. There had been much talk, in the long runup to the speech, about how Obama could seize the occasion to clearly articulate or delineate his vision of the conditions and compulsions for U.S. military intervention—something that could stand as an Obama Doctrine. That seemed unlikely and probably unwise; Obama has always declined to be strident when he could be cool and conciliatory; he tends to hold dogma at arm’s length, favoring pragmatism. Frustrating as his silence was, as he entered our country into a war whose scope few in his divided cabinet, much less in the public, even pretended to understand, it still appeared prudent for him to say as little as possible, and to understate the goals and ideals driving his actions.
On Monday night that sober, temperamentally conservative, stealthily cogent Obama was still operative, even as the President made a fierce defense of taking the offense against Qaddafi. The result was a constant evocation of high principle balanced by a hedging refusal to commit fully to any single principle—not the the Obama Doctrine, but the Obama Posture.
The speech contained some stirring rhetoric. (“Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different,” the President said, turning a blind eye to our long record of turning just such a blind eye.) And the speech was full of exciting-sounding historical analogies, too. (The President effectively likened the irregulars of Benghazi, whose principles remain inscrutable, to the Minutemen of Concord and Lexington, and our support of them to the abolitionist movement, as Tom Ricks keenly noted.) There was also some swagger: “It was not in our national interest to let that happen,” the President said. “I refused to let that happen.”
The “that” which did not happen as a result of our air war was the massacre of a lot of people in Benghazi, the capital of the eastern rebels—a massacre that was probable, or likely, or anyway fully anticipated if Qaddafi’s forces overran the city. We have no idea, of course, what would have happened in Benghazi: the claims of mass murder preëmpted are as unprovable as they are undisprovable. If averting that particular calamity was the mission, it has been accomplished. “The United States of America has done what we said we would do,” Obama said. But it was never plausible, even at the outset, that defending Benghazi would be the whole shooting match in Libya. These are very early days still in the Libyan war, and we have got in deeper almost by the hour.
In his speech, the President tied himself in knots trying to say two irreconcilable things at once: that we’re still in it to win it against Qaddafi, and that we have already fulfilled our purpose and will not be responsible for what happens next. Of course we will. The logic of our entry into the civil war dictated that we would have to see it through—we could not leave without getting rid of Qaddafi, and then, of course, dealing with what comes after him. The minute we flew against him, we signed on with the rebel cause.
On Monday, Obama said that in addition to saving Libyans from their leaders, American and allied planes had knocked out enough of Qaddafi’s forces on the ground to let the rebels—whom we still know next to nothing about—retake some oil towns, Ras Lanuf and Bin Jawad. That had been the story over the weekend. Only it wasn’t quite like that. As the Times reported, there are only about a thousand real fighters among the rebel forces, and, as we’ve seen over and over by now, that’s not enough to achieve anything militarily. They didn’t retake any cities; we retook them, and the rebels drove into them and fired their guns in the air in celebration.
But maybe the rebels believed what Obama said about them, because after his speech they pressed on from Bin Jawad to try to take Qaddafi’s hometown of Sirt. The problem was that Qaddafi’s people shot back, and that was all it took for the rebels to be pushed back, and lose what we had gained for them. Newspapers were running photos of rebels in retreat alongside their coverage of the President’s speech.
As the rebels fled, Hillary Clinton was in London, speaking of their aims as “the legitimate aspirations of the Libyan people,” and engineering a shift in international policy to allow us to arm them. The spin is that, yes, the Security Council resolution that green-lighted the war imposed a nationwide arms embargo, but that its authorization of protection of civilians “by any means necessary” is the overriding principle, and so arms for self-protection are O.K.
Meanwhile, in plain English, let’s be clear: what the rebels do with our guns will be our doing. We decided that they should be the ones killing, not the ones killed, and we cannot control that story from the air. Why are these guys our guys? (Qaddafi’s former Interior Minister is one of their leaders.) What if, with our guns, they kill a lot of civilians? Do we then subtract those casualties from the putative numbers of lives saved? Obama didn’t touch any of these obvious and urgent questions. (And what if there is a rebellion against the rebels we are empowering? Obama said he supports more rebellion in the Arab world—whose side will we be on then?)
There is no more debatable question in international or military affairs than the merits of “humanitarian intervention,” and yet even as Obama insisted, on Monday night, that that’s what this war is, he was more intolerant of other points of view than he has ever been in public. He depicted his critics as head-in-the-sand isolationists. As Amy Davidson indicates in her fine parsing of the dodges, distortions, and deceptions in the speech, Obama was outright contemptuous of those of us who believe that there is ground for serious debate about his current action. And the President made a point of telling us that what he said does not just pertain to Libya, but more broadly to “the use of America’s military power, and America’s broader leadership in the world, under my Presidency.”
But, if a Security Council resolution is a precondition for action, Libya may be the first and last time you see the Obama Posture in action. Qaddafi is despised: nobody cares if you want to go rain hellfire on him, so fine—here’s your resolution. But what, exactly, is the message the President was sending to the Syrian people who have been marching against their dictator and being shot down in the streets of late? Or the Bahrainis, who did the same, or the Yemenis? (To say nothing of Ivory Coast, a terrifyingly escalating civil war that should be taken seriously as much more than a talking point.) What Obama told Arab revolutionaries was, Go for it, we’ve got your back—unless, for all-too-understandable reasons, we don’t. One assumes the dictators were listening, too.
