I have been reliably critical of Barack Obama’s inability to be awesome when it comes to using force or at least the threat of force against hostile regimes.
And despite America’s involvment in a UN coalition to stop dictator Moammar Gadhafi from killing his own people, Obama is reportedly limiting the U.S. role in precision strikes against military targets. While Gadhafi deserves everything he gets from coalition forces, Obama’s position on America’s role is basically this: We’ll launch a few Tomahawk missiles and maybe contribute a fighter jet or two, but we sure as hell won’t do anything more.
That reminds me of when Bill Clinton authorized the bombing of Iraqi targets in 1998, when Saddam Hussein was still playing games with weapons inspectors. The air raids were justified, but limiting the scope of military action in the country helped lead to the 2003 invasion by American, British, and other forces. Under George W. Bush, America was forced to finish what George H.W. Bush started and what Clinton was unwilling to fully address.
Now, Hussein is dead and Iraq is far better off. The same, of course, can’t be said for Gadhafi and Libya. While these air strikes, primarily by France, will certainly weaken Gadhafi’s ability to wage war on Libyans, they will not address the bigger issue – which is that Gadhafi is a danger to his own people and, perhaps, other countries.
It took too long to deal with Hussein. And we’ve still got problems with Iran and North Korea, the other two members of Bush’s axis of evil.
Diplomacy is futile when dealing with countries like Iran and Libya. Only the threat of force – and the utmost willingness to use it – works against them. Bush proved that, and he was the better president for it.
Obama is a huge fan of drone attacks over terrorist-controlled areas in and around Pakistan. They’re cheaper, less publicly visible, and require almost no manpower. It’s a perfect scenario for Obama, since he’s got big, big problems in using military force against anyone for any reason.
With this Libya action, that must really put the president in an awkward position. It must have really hurt him to have to order missile strikes from the sea. So here we are now, essentially watching French aircraft (that sounds damn silly and ironic) enforce a UN resolution. By the way, UN resolutions are usually worthless, but for some reason, enough members of that piece-of-shit world body saw fit to craft one and enforce it.
Still, Obama has done nothing so far to reach the awesomeness of the previous administration, which had no problem whatsoever punishing people for doing evil things. Fortunately for America, we’ll only have to tolerate Obama’s weaknesses on the world stage for a couple of more years.
