Posted on 04/19/2016 6:25:56 AM PDT by MarvinStinson
Five years ago, President Obama hailed the military campaign in Libya that toppled Moammar Khadafy as one of the foreign policy triumphs of his presidency. Today he calls Libya his worst mistake. But though he may have changed his grade from an A to an F, his commitment to “leading from behind” — a euphemism for American passivity and abdication — hasn’t budged.
On the day Khadafy was killed, in October 2011, Obama took a victory lap. “Our brave pilots have flown in Libya’s skies, our sailors have provided support off Libya’s shores, and our leadership at NATO has helped guide our coalition,” he declared. “Without putting a single US service member on the ground, we achieved our objectives.”
He was wrong. Libya soon imploded into chaos and violence. It became a terrorist badlands, where more than 10,000 people have been murdered — including US Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three of his colleagues, killed by Islamists in Benghazi just 11 months after Obama’s “mission accomplished” moment in the Rose Garden.
The president acknowledges now that his policy in Libya ended in disaster. In a Fox News interview last week, he confessed his negligence in “failing to plan for the day after” the dictator was overthrown.
In other interviews, Obama has pinned the blame for the Libya debacle less on his own lack of preparation for a post-Khadafy transition than on Europe’s failure to stay engaged. “When I go back, and I ask myself what went wrong, there’s room for criticism,” he recently told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, “because I had more faith in the Europeans, given Libya’s proximity, being invested in the follow-up.” But when the United States heads for the exits, its allies are apt to follow suit. And Obama, who had agreed only reluctantly to intervene in Libya in the first place, had no interest in sticking around.
It didn’t take long for Libya to drop off the White House radar screen. “The inattention was not just neglect. It was policy,”concluded The New York Times in a lengthy review of the Libyan fiasco earlier this year. The administration imposed “fierce limits” on any US role in Libya’s metamorphosis — conditions so strict that America in effect washed its hands of responsibility for the country’s fate. Not surprisingly, that fate has been ghastly.
It may seem astonishing that Obama, who so harshly condemned his predecessor’s blunders in Iraq, would wind up repeating the gravest of those blunders in Libya — namely, not being ready for the instability and insurgency that would follow Western intervention. As military historian Max Boot remarks, by 2011 “it was not exactly a secret that bad things happen if the United States and its allies overthrow a strongman without having a plan for what comes next.”
But Obama is better at deploring other people’s foreign policy messes than at learning from them. The lesson he takes away from the Iraq war was that the United States has no business intervening militarily in the Middle East — and that the greater the intervention, the greater the resulting fiasco. The facts haven’t borne out that conclusion. But Obama won’t be budged.
That's the idea...
Libya...isn’t that where obama/clinton came, saw, killed?
Hillary should be asked about this now, but she won’t. It wouldn’t qualify as a softball question...
It must be very challenging for Jacoby to work at the pro-socialist, anti-Judeo-Christian Boston Globe as the token conservative.
There is nothing he can’t screw up a democrat in action.
Yes.....
“To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect. To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society’s ills on the West - know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” -Barack Obama
Hey Obama, Iran “unclenched their fist” just long enough to grab the $150 billion you gave them. How’d that work out for ya?
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