Obama right all along about Libya
Moammar Who? First things first. How can one person be the leader of a country for more than 40 years, but nobody seems to know for sure how to spell his name?
Is it Moammar Kadafi, Kadaffi, Gaddafi, Qaddafi, or even Khaddafy? And is his first name spelled Moammar, or Muammar?
All we do know is, thanks (in part) to a decision by President Obama back in March, that Kadafi, Kadaffi, Gaddafi, Qaddafi, Khadaffy guy is no longer the head of anything.
Oh, back in March, you would’ve thought Obama proposed building a mosque on the Washington Mall, by the responses he got from Republicans for merely announcing his desire to free Libyans from their despot.
That was a full two months before Newt Gingrich announced his now comatose presidential candidacy. And, as he usually does, he stepped all over his own tongue attacking Obama.
First, on March 7, Gingrich told Fox News that he would (if anybody was gullible enough to elect him president) unilaterally help the growing insurgency in Libya. He would “exercise a no-fly zone this evening.” He then added for good measure, “We think that slaughtering your own citizens is unacceptable.” But that was before Obama announced he was joining a coalition that would institute a no-fly zone.
But after Obama’s announcement that the U.S. military would join the coalition, Gingrich appeared on NBC news on March 23. “I would not have intervened. There are a lot of other ways to affect Kadafi. I would not have used American and European forces,” he said matter-of-factly.
The kind of matter-of-factly that sounds like you believe that all video tape vanishes after 16 days. What Gingrich did was tend to confirm the oft-repeated theory that no matter what Obama does, Republicans will come out strongly against it.
The Sarah Palin line back then was that she didn’t exactly know what the president’s intentions were. She told her co-worker at Fox News, Greta Van Sustern, she didn’t know if Obama was planning “an intervention, a war or a “squirmish.” I don’t know anything about military operations, but I’m convinced it wasn’t a “squirmish.” That’s ’cause there is no such thing as a “squirmish.” It’s not a word.
Mitt Romney, who seems now to have been running for president since I was a teenager, was also critical of Obama’s initial stand and statements on intervention in Libya. “It’s also conceivable that it’s ill-conceived, and not fully thought out,” Romney said back in April. (The same things could be said about that “ill-conceived” “not fully thought out” statement, by the way)
He also agreed with ex-U.S. ambassador John Bolton that Obama was setting himself up for a “massive strategic failure.” Well, that failure obviously didn’t take place.
In fact, despite all of the usual Republican falderal about Democrats being unfit to handle foreign policy and military matters, Obama’s emerging trump cards are just those things.
It was the Obama administration’s decision, you will remember unless you’re a Republican, to go after, and throttle those Somali pirates in April of 2009. It was the thoughtful decision by Obama to go all out and kill Osama Bin Laden earlier this year. And now Libya has been liberated, due in no small measure to an Obama decision to take action.
Yet, none of the Republican presidential candidates have acknowledged that fact. Instead, several Republicans have given credit to everybody involved except the president.
Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain issued a joint statement that supports the Libyan efforts to advance toward democracy. But they also threw a dig at President Obama. “We regret that this success was so long in coming due to the failure of the United States to employ the full weight of our airpower,” they said.
Oh, what must it be like to fear the wrath of your rightwing supporters if you’d get caught offering even the tiniest praise for the president?
I’m waiting for one of these Republicans running for president to propose a no-fly zone over the White House. Obama just might take out another dictator if they don’t.
Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20- year veteran of television news. Email him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net.