Barack Obama’s risk-averse handling of the war in Libya holds political risks of its own
“WE APOLOGISE for the unplanned hiatus in bombing of the Middle East. Normal service has now been resumed.” Thus one wry Facebook posting after Barack Obama launched Operation Odyssey Dawn and America unleashed its cruise missiles. To people all over the world, it has come as a shock that this of all presidents, the man who always opposed George W. Bush’s “dumb” invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003, should have plunged the United States into a war of his own against Colonel Muammar Qaddafi of Libya.
In America too the decision came out of the blue. Distracted by the tsunami and nuclear catastrophe in Japan, the media had lost sight for a while of the negotiations taking place behind closed doors in the UN Security Council. By the time Resolution 1973 authorised “all necessary measures” to protect civilians, and military operations swiftly followed, there had been none of the public weighing of pros and cons that preceded the Iraq war. Nor did Congress get a chance to have its say. The lack of debate was inevitable, given that the operation was, as Robert Gates, the defence secretary, later admitted, put together “on the fly” to block Colonel Qaddafi’s imminent conquest of Benghazi. But now, rather like the squabbling international coalition itself, Mr Obama’s many critics are scrambling to make up for lost time.
Some of the most scathing criticism has come not from Republicans but from anguished liberals. Like the neoconservatives who were so bullish about Iraq, and have now got their voices back, a few on the left are still haunted by the world’s failure to prevent atrocities in benighted places such as Rwanda and Bosnia and are still willing to entertain military intervention on humanitarian grounds in some circumstances. But a good many have come to see the Iraq war as an unmitigated calamity and concluded that no good can ever come from American intervention in a Muslim country. One influential blogger, Andrew Sullivan, seems scarcely able to believe that what he calls a “neocon-bleeding heart alliance” has forgotten the Iraqi lesson so soon.
The response of mainstream Republican politicians has been more cautious. This may be due less to the fraying convention that it is unseemly to criticise the commander-in-chief and more to the fact that even a war-weary America tends to rally behind wars in their early stages. An Economist/YouGov poll taken after Resolution 1973 was passed and as bombing began found 67% of Americans in favour of imposing a no-fly zone, up 21 points from the previous week. Support for direct military intervention had more than doubled, to 32%. So the dominant Republican line is not that the war is misconceived—it is hard for Republicans to object to the general idea of walloping the loathsome Colonel Qaddafi—but that Mr Obama’s handling of it has been incompetent.
Exhibit A in this indictment is that Mr Obama dithered. Rick Santorum, one of the Republicans’ presidential wannabes, said that by taking so long the president may have “missed our window of opportunity”. Senator John McCain, the Republicans’ 2008 candidate, and Sarah Palin, his running-mate, voiced similar misgivings: better to have helped the rebels clinch their victory when they appeared to be on a roll than come to their defence when they were at their last gasp on the edge of defeat. For exhibit B the Republicans turn to what they see as Mr Obama’s muddled definition of the war’s aim and his abdication of America’s vocation to lead. “I don’t know what finally got the president to act, but I’m very worried that we’re taking the back seat rather than a leadership role,” Senator Lindsey Graham told Fox News.
As to whether these points have merit, the answer, like Mr Obama himself, is complicated. This president has never been the peacenik America’s doves craved; his scorn for the “dumb” war in Iraq was always balanced by support for the “necessary” one in Afghanistan. When he collected his Nobel peace prize from Oslo in December 2009 he made a point of saying that he accepted the case for using force on humanitarian grounds, as Bill Clinton did in the Balkans in the 1990s. But justifying a war on such grounds depends on some large atrocity looking imminent—as it did by the time Colonel Qaddafi reached the gates of Benghazi and not, arguably, very much earlier.
For much the same reason Mr Obama says that although his ultimate aim is to topple Colonel Qaddafi, this must be done by non-violent means, such as diplomacy and sanctions, while the military force the United Nations authorised is used only to protect Libya’s civilians. Such distinctions do matter, especially to the Cartesian Mr Obama. But this conclusion, even if reached by way of an impeccable philosophy, is in danger of leaving the average Joe, not to mention the average General Carter Ham, Odyssey Dawn’s American commander, scratching his head in puzzlement. Are the coalition’s jets supposed to clobber Libya’s forces wherever they are or only when they are advancing? If they are attacking rebels, rather than civilians, can they be hit? Is an armed rebel also a threat to civilians, or are loyalists the only target?
Many Americans are no less queasy about Mr Obama’s desire for someone else—France’s president, Britain’s prime minister, NATO, the league of Arab dictators, whoever—to take charge, even though everyone knows the whole enterprise leans in the end on American power. His instinct is admirable: to dilute what in Oslo he called the world’s “reflexive suspicion” of the superpower. He also, presumably, would prefer to face re-election in 2012 without bearing sole responsibility for another war in the Arab world. But letting a committee run a war is a risk too. A safer, if less principled, path to re-election would be for him to topple the colonel quickly, with less scruple for the sensitivity of allies and the letter of the law. Assuming that is possible, of course.
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