SHAKE, BATTLE & ROLL
: President Obama tries extending the hand of diplomacy to Libya’s Moammar Khadafy in 2009. (REUTERS)
Barack Obama didn’t want to become a war president, but — as his triumphalist talk yesterday following the death of Moammar Khadafy made clear — a war president is what he has become.
The man who began his presidency with an inaugural address saying, “Our security emanates from … the tempering qualities of humility and restraint,” prematurely declared the Libyan revolution “won,” and gave the United States and NATO credit for having made that victory possible.
With these remarks, and the ones he made after the assassination of Osama bin Laden, Obama has continued to follow the same path charted by George W. Bush — one of whose key messages during his 2000 campaign was that he would pursue a foreign policy of “humility” and forgo “nation building.”
KHADAFY KILLED BY 20-YEAR-OLD YANKEES FAN
OBAMA CELEBRATES END OF KHADAFY’S REIGN
Like Obama, Bush was promising to do things differently from his predecessor.
Talk of humility, said Time magazine in 2001, “was Bush’s way of criticizing Bill Clinton’s interventionist foreign policy.”
But Clinton had come to office with absolutely no intention of being an interventionist.
Indeed, he pulled US forces ignominiously from Somalia during his first year in office after 18 Rangers were massacred in Mogadishu.
And yet, by 1999, Clinton was unilaterally ordering a relentless 48-day aerial campaign to force Serbia to release Kosovo from its tyranny in 1999.
LIBYA’S SINISTER SCIONS FIGHT TILL THE LAST BULLET
TOUGH TRANSITION AHEAD FOR WELL-ARMED FACTIONS IN LIBYA
In retrospect, Bush’s embrace of military intervention was to be expected; the country was attacked on his watch and he was the son of another president who had used American military force on two occasions.
But what of Clinton, who wrote a notorious letter in 1969 commending himself and many other “fine people [who] have come to find themselves still loving their country but loathing the military”?
And what of Obama, whose candidacy for the presidency first took off because he was a firm opponent of the Iraq war and vowed to pull all troops out in 2009 — a vow he retracted soon after taking office before adding an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan?
What explains their embrace of the projection of American power through the use of military force?
It turns out that when we call the president of the United States “the leader of the free world,” we’re not just resorting to cliché.
The inhabitant of the White House instantly shoulders responsibilities unknown to anyone save those who preceded him and unknowable to him before he takes up residence there.
Before his presidency, Barack Obama surely would never have contemplated involving US forces in a civil war in Libya. He’d surely have scoffed at the very idea — indeed, might have scoffed only a year earlier.
But as president, there was no one else to make the choice: Act or do not act. Do what you can to change the reality on the ground or do not. Yes or no.
The same was true for Clinton in Kosovo.
All options had been exhausted. The Serbians wouldn’t leave; the Kosovars would be slaughtered.
Either the US would act or it would not.
Not acting would mean, in some sense, assenting to the horrible result.
Similarly, Obama came into office determined to end the US presence in Iraq and to draw down troops in Afghanistan — until it became inescapably clear that to do either or both would be to lose both wars.
It is an interesting parlor game for pundits and law professors to debate the legality and moral legitimacy of pilotless drone strikes and SEAL Team Six insertions in sovereign nations.
But when it comes down to it, the president of the United States is given real-world choices: You can use this drone and kill Awlaki, or not. You can use SEAL Team Six and kill bin Laden, or not.
Whatever one can say about presidents, love or loathe them, they are men of action, and they lead a country that gives them the tools to act — even when they never thought they would.