In his salad days, Muammar Qaddafi was a professorial friend and vigilant protector of his colleagues in tyranny. At the World Revolutionary Center, in Benghazi, a desert Deerfield for dictators, Qaddafi trained Blaise Compaoré, of Burkina Faso; Idriss Déby, of Chad; and Charles Taylor, of Liberia. He bankrolled the genocidal leader of Ethiopia, Mengistu Haile Mariam. And when, in the spring of 1979, Idi Amin found that he could no longer resist a tide of homegrown rebels and the Tanzanian military, it was Qaddafi who sent a plane to rescue Uganda’s self-proclaimed Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea, and shuttled him to a villa on the sands of Tripoli. Amin, who eventually moved to Jidda, was responsible for the torture and murder of hundreds of thousands, but he got to live out the rest of his life in air-conditioned, unapologetic splendor.
In the end, after forty-two years of gaudy oppression, Qaddafi neither sought nor received such fraternal succor. The leaders of the Arab League came to despise him, and encouraged NATO to send planes in support of the Libyan revolution. After eight months of bizarre threats, wanton slaughter, and humiliating retreats, Qaddafi was discovered hiding in a water pipe, reportedly begging his captors, “Don’t shoot!” They shot.
In the minutes between the initial reports of Qaddafi’s capture and the confirmation of his frenzied execution, the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza posted a hasty but convincing analysis of the way that the welcome news from Libya will affect Barack Obama’s bid for reëlection. It won’t, Cillizza said, recalling the ephemeral rise in Obama’s popularity after the successful operation to kill Osama bin Laden. If, in 1992, George H. W. Bush could not rely on a successful hundred-hour war in Iraq––an operation carried out with military and diplomatic precision––to trump a relatively slight recession, Obama will have an infinitely more difficult time touting his résumé as Commander-in-Chief when millions are out of work and the signs of economic decline, gross disparity, and daily suffering are everywhere.
The Republican professionals know it. The numbers show that more than half the country identifies the economy as the most pressing issue of the campaign; one per cent name foreign policy. Before Qaddafi was pronounced dead, Glen Bolger, a partner in a polling firm working for Mitt Romney, was ready with a pithy Beltway quote to help insure that the President reaped no benefit from the news. “If Obama only got a brief, small bump from bin Laden’s death, Qaddafi’s death isn’t going to matter at all by the time we hand out the candy this October, much less next October,” he told the Post. “The election is much more about Americans losing their jobs than about Qaddafi losing his head.”
Yet there’s something strange about the backseat status often given to foreign policy in Presidential campaigns. Presidents have a great deal more sway over the matters of war, peace, and diplomacy than they have over the economic weather. (Globalism and the House of Representatives make sure of that.) Even stranger is the lack of attention given to foreign affairs by the candidates themselves.
The leading Republican candidate (for the moment) is Herman Cain, and so far he has displayed what can only be called an uncertain grasp of worldly matters. He recently declared that knowing the name of the leader of “Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan” was of no interest to him and he saw no reason why it should be. (As it happens, Islam Karimov, the bloody-minded leader of Uzbekistan, is an especially important dictator in a region, Central Asia, that is of vital interest to the United States.) Rick Perry is similarly, and smugly, detached. When it comes to world affairs, his most notable proposal is to defund the United Nations.
Romney, the candidate most likely to survive the primary process, recently accused the President of an “eloquently justified surrender of world leadership.” The choice facing Americans was “very simple,” Romney said. “If you do not want America to be the strongest nation on Earth, I am not your President. You have that President today.” He would, he says, expand the size of the Navy, review the Administration’s “massive defense cuts,” reconsider the reduction of troops in Afghanistan, and much else. The picture he tries to paint of Obama is that of the cartoon version of Jimmy Carter––recessive, defeatist, and timid. In this scenario, of course, Romney is the Gipper Redux, ready to reassert American power and singularity.
Romney’s rhetoric is more informed than Michele Bachmann’s, less nutty than Ron Paul’s, and less self-admiring than Newt Gingrich’s, but his line on Obama’s record on national security and foreign policy is a sham. Obama is responsible for an aggressive assault on Al Qaeda, including the killing of bin Laden, in Pakistan, and of Anwar al-Awlaki, in Yemen. Beginning with his 2009 speech in Cairo, the President has walked a deliberate, effective path on the question of Arab uprisings, encouraging forces of liberation in the region without ignoring the complexities of each country or threatening Iraq-style interventions. He has drawn down forces in Iraq and Afghanistan; awakened to the miserable realities of Pakistan and Iran; and, most recently, played a crucial role, without loss of American lives, in the overthrow of the world’s longest-reigning dictator. If a Republican had been responsible for the foreign-policy markers of the past three years, the Party would be commissioning statues. In Tripoli, Benghazi, and Surt, last week, Obama won words of praise; on Republican debate platforms, there was only mindless posturing. In an election year, the world is too little with us. ♦
