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Obama wobbly on Libya

By John Bolton
Thursday, April 21, 2011

Opponents of the Vietnam War — that seemingly endless, inconclusive, increasingly unpopular and ever-more-deadly and costly conflict — called it a “quagmire.” They said it was unwinnable and should never have been fought, and that America must avoid similar future wars. Today, our real risk of “quagmire” is Libya.

Our Nobel Peace Prize-winning president has gotten things badly wrong. By demanding Moammar Gadhafi’s ouster while restricting U.S. military force to the more limited objective of protecting civilians, Barack Obama has set himself up for massive strategic failure.

Yet America is now committed. Gadhafi won’t care that he’s being bombed for “humanitarian” rather than “regime change” reasons; once able, he’ll likely return to international terrorism, as he has already threatened. He may also resume his quest for nuclear weapons, and this time we’ll have no hope of negotiating him out of it as we did in 2003-04.

Obama is hypersensitive to the Vietnam analogy — arguing, for example, as he authorized a U.S. “surge” in Afghanistan in 2009 that it is not another Vietnam.

Of course, Vietnam became a “quagmire” because of U.S. unwillingness to persevere to reach our objectives. Obama ignored the critical point that Gen. Creighton Abrams’s strategy had placed us on the path to victory in Vietnam, and that it was a failure of American will, not battlefield defeat, that humbled us there.

And just so is Libya now increasingly a “quagmire” — because Obama’s decision to intervene was perilously late and limited, and compounded by his mistake in drastically curtailing U.S. strike missions. Two immediate steps are required to prevent the stalemate from becoming permanent.

First, we must reverse course now and declare regime change to be our objective, followed by substantial airstrikes against Gadhafi’s forces, whether or not they are imminently threatening civilians. Even now, U.S. airpower should be intimidating enough to permit an opposition victory.

Our NATO allies will welcome our return to active strike missions. So too will the Arab League, whose leaders must be appalled that Obama and NATO are risking failure, thus risking an armed and dangerous Gadhafi remaining in power in their back yard.

Second, because Libya’s opposition leadership is still inchoate at best, we must identify anti-Gadhafi figures who are pro-Western and find ways, overt or covert, to strengthen their hands. Failing to identify reliable leaders now may make any post-Gadhafi regime, already problematic, even more dangerous.

Thus far, however, Obama can’t bring himself to act. Instead, he contends that Gadhafi is being “squeezed” in other ways, most notably that his regime is running out of money — an ironic concern for a president who acts as though no such constraints apply to him.

It is similarly troubling that Obama could say, “I think over the long term, Gadhafi will go, and we will be successful.” There is no better road to “quagmire” than to see Gadhafi’s departure as “long term.”

Our president’s most muscular recent action was to co-author an opinion article with Britain’s David Cameron and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy. This reflects Obama’s view that writings and speeches are all that a president is real- ly required to do. Op-eds don’t constitute leadership.

Woodrow Wilson once wrote: “I am a vague, conjectural personality, more made up of opinions and academic prepossessions than of human traits and red corpuscles.” Dreamer that he was, Wilson could have been describing his ideological descendant, Barack Obama. What we need right now is the opposite of Wilson’s presidential persona, or we shall see a true quagmire in Libya.

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