“SMART DIPLOMACY,” CONT’D: “To all appearances, U.S. foreign policy in the Obama Administration has now definitively gone down the rabbit hole. It is intoxicated with an advanced form of Wilsonian madness, one shorn of all sensitivity to the consequences of the U.S. government’s behavior.”
This unexpected image of a cowboy president from Illinois is gaining traction in the public mind and late-night comedians’ monologues (“Three wars now,” Jay Leno said Wednesday night. “Can you imagine how many wars we’d be in if Pres. Obama hadn’t gotten the Nobel Peace Prize?”)
Heh.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Jerry Pournelle:
As I said at the beginning of this affair, Libya’s fate won’t be decided in Libya. The West can’t seem to make up its mind about Gaddafi, which seems odd. If it’s legal and in the national interest to take him out, surely it would be better to send in a force to do it rather than merely smiting his minions for day, or weeks, or months, or… Gaddafi can’t fly. What next?
We may have a similar decision to make about Syria, where the regime is no more savory than in Libya. . . . The US needs a policy. That policy ought to be based on US abilities, not mere principle, but there ought to be principles and a clear policy. One principle might be “We are the friends of liberty everywhere, but the guardians only of our own.” A quite different one might spell out the conditions under which we will protect civilians from their own governments. Or perhaps we should not have a public policy. Doc Bussard used to say that the last thing America needed was a consistent foreign policy. Let everyone else wonder what the hell we are going to do. But that was at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, when there was this strong pressure for the US to recognize that we were at the end of history and we ought to get on board.
Gaddafi is doomed if the West wants his doom; if left alone he will survive and rule.
Indeed.