Eliot Cohen has a very direct piece out in the Wall Street Journal on how we have bungled Libya and what the consequences will be.
Not only have we erred badly by not finishing off Qaddafi when we had him, but we have made matters worse by demanding he leave, making threats that we might intervene, and then doing nothing and failing to dislodge him – a clear sign to our enemies of our weakness and vacillation.
From the article:
The administration is teaching dictators, and the populations they oppress, that you can get away with large-scale mayhem if you avoid YouTube. Instead, let the hard men do their work with assault rifles in alleys and soldering irons in lonely cellars. The thuggish leaders will be emboldened, the populations either despairing or desperate. If one hopes to aid the Arab awakening in the direction of more open and just societies, rather than to empower Islamist terror, this policy is perverse. And, finally, the U. S. has provided cover and reassurance for other unsavory actors—a deafening silence, for example, as Iran arrests leaders of the opposition.
This is a disaster for the people of Libya. It is a moral and political calamity for a generation of Western leaders whose reactions to Rwanda and Srebrenica consisted of ineffectual squeaks of dismay. It may deflect the Arab awakening into directions that will horrify us. And it says dangerous things about American foreign policy. Unless it is reversed, the administration’s Libya policy will convince the world that the U.S. is a feeble friend and an ineffectual foe, paralyzed by its own ambivalence.
4 thoughts on “The Consequences of Inaction in Libya”
This is delicious. All these people all of a sudden want 0bama to go to war to remove this guy and make the place ‘safe for democracy’. How long before we hear that ‘We’ll be hailed as liberators, We’ll stroll in on roads paved with flowers and kisses from the population. Please. Let this Country fight it out amongst themselves. There are no ‘good guys’ there.
BTW, waiting to hear the cries of “no blood for oil”…..crickets. You see, the only ‘good wars are those started by leftists. They’re started for the ‘right reasons’.
What about those women fleeing into bushes and being repeatedly raped by men surging in on horseback in Darfur–did anyone help them? In fact, didn’t some UN guys abuse women? We can’t just jump into everything…Look at the lies that Curveball guy fed us that led to Iraq. This is a veil of tears, people, to coin one.
That phrase “finishing off.” It never turns out that way…
It has finally dawned on me. Obama hangs with Trumka. Qaddafi probably doesn’t seem to be that bad to him. So what’s the hurry.
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