In his speech on Libya Monday evening, President Barack Obama demonstrated why self-congratulation is an awful basis for foreign policy. The stated aim of the address was to tell the American people "what we've done [in Libya], what we plan to do, and why this matters to us." That might have been a genuinely interesting bit of oratory. It is not what we actually heard. Perhaps the wrong speech got loaded onto his teleprompter, because the preachment Obama delivered fudged the past, gave us weasel words in place of real goals, and substituted a vigorous Nobel Peace Prize-winning pat on...