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This is what he should have said in the first place

If president Obama had given the speech he gave last night 10 days ago when he committed our military forces to enforce the no-fly zone over Libya, he would have had the best week of his presidency since the fall of 2009 — instead of one of the worst.

It was a speech that spoke to the American people as presidents ought to speak to the American people — with respect, with seriousness and with an understanding that he is not our boss but our employee, whose job it is to tell us what he is doing and why.

“In this particular country, Libya, at this particular moment, we were faced with the prospect of violence on a horrific scale,” he said.

“To brush aside America’s responsibility as a leader and — more profoundly — our responsibilities to our fellow human beings under such circumstances would have been a betrayal of who we are.”

Had he put it this way a week ago Friday, he would have spared himself a lot of trouble. Instead, he hid and dithered and pretended the United States was not leading the mission.

The fact that he behaved so strangely is yet another example of how his political instincts as president are, in fact, pretty lousy.

Garnering American support for the Libyan effort should have been relatively easy at the get-go, given both its humanitarian aspect and the fact that as military actions go, it is relatively low cost.

Because Obama did not wish the American people to think the United States was in charge, he did not want to act as though he was in charge.

That was a foolish choice. A leader leads or doesn’t. It makes no sense to make a decision and then scamper away from that decision as though it were a boiling pot that might scald you.

No one will respect a leader’s pusillanimity under those circumstances, not even those who agree with you — and not those who disagree but are inclined to like you anyway.

So last night he wisely owned up to his choice and embraced the policy he’d put into place.

It was not a flawless speech, to put it mildly. For Obama to say that he only supported the use of force to “protect” Libyan civilians but not “regime change” to oust Moammar Khadafy was to speak nonsense. How can you have one without the other?

And for him to argue that supporting regime change in Libya would have led us down the same road we traveled in Iraq — a nation we invaded with 150,000 ground troops — was a pretty stunning bit of sophistry.

Meanwhile, he all but said, “Mission accomplished,” by claiming that, in short order, NATO would be running things — as though NATO were anything more than a fig leaf covering the continuing projection of American power.

Still, he did his job. He addressed the American people like adults. Better late than never.