Failure is an option?
There’s been no shortage of criticism of Obama’s decision to set up a no fly zone/air strike on Libya and I think much of it is deserved. I mean, if he wanted to stop civilian killings, why not make this move weeks ago when not only you would have saved lives … but likely would have dethroned Gadhafi? But that’s all water over the dam. This criticism from Britt Hume last night is not an exercise in punditry and I think has real meaning for service people everywhere.
Hume, I think tackles the real issue here, and that is the mission itself. Even the President yesterday seemed to struggle reconciling his stated goal of regime change with a mandate in Libya that stops far short of that. Listening to him you wonder if he seems to be hoping to “scare” Gadhafi into leaving.
Because the young President found it necessary to let the UN define the mission, and not his military advisors. Because he decided it was more important to consult with the Arab League than Congress, the mission in Libya is fuzzy at best, and foolhardy at worst. The UN mandate means we are there to protect civilians only, not regime change. But how long does that last? And what if Gadhafi retains power, even if it only means ruling half of Libya. What then?
Hume calls this one correctly. Failure is an option.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0kN2VqSpy4
7 Comments
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Perhaps Obama would like to be the president of Libya- since China already has a president and they're kind'a xenophobic anyhow… His health-care schemes could be funded by oil, like in Saudi Arabia, rather than a printing press. And being Kenyan, he's a citizen of the African Union and is therefore qualified to practice despotism throughout the entire continent. Oh, and within Kenya alone there are more than 50 tribes and racism is a blood-sport, so his community organizing skills could only be more valuable!
point!….JollyRoger.
My biggest fear with humanitarian military missions is that they have a real potential to turn out the way Clinton's Mogadishu mission ended…with U.S. soldiers not knowing what their mission is, a lack of communication from the top and, ultimately, their bodies being dragged through the streets of the country they were sent there to "save". I do not believe this is going to end well.
Who invented the strategy of letting our enemies know what we are going to do a month before we take action? INSANITY!!!
With this bunch of clowns, failure is SOP, the country is FUBAR, and the war is a big SNAFU.
I'm curious…we don't have a federal budget and Obama went Nato with this instead of going through congress (not calling it a war…all comes down to semantics, ya know)…where is the funding for U.S. participation in this "humanitarian" mission coming from?
From your "contributions" (read it: taxes). 😉