Obama’s Libyan Abdication

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following editorial first appeared in the 3/6/2011 edition of the Wall Street Journal.  I thought it extraordinary and wish to share it here with you.

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The battle for Libya has reached a bloody impasse. Moammar Gadhafi continues to hold Tripoli, but his sons and mercenaries have been unable to break the uprising or retake the country’s east. Having loudly declared that Gadhafi “needs to step down from power and leave,” President Obama now seems to have retreated into a bizarre but all too typical passivity.

We say bizarre because the U.S. has already announced its preferred outcome, yet it is doing little to achieve this end. The greatest danger now to U.S. interests—and to Mr. Obama’s political standing—would be for Gadhafi to regain control. A Libya in part or whole under the Gadhafi clan would be a failed, isolated and dangerous place ruled by a vengeful tyrant and a likely abettor of terrorists. We presume that’s what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton meant the other day when she said that “one of our biggest concerns is Libya . . . becoming a giant Somalia.”

Ghadafi can also only prevail at this stage through a murderous campaign that will make U.S. passivity complicit in a bloodbath. Media reports relate stories of his secret police terrorizing Tripoli’s population and killing indiscriminately. Al Jazeera is already comparing the West’s failure to act in Libya to the slaughter of Iraq’s marsh Arabs in 1991 and of the Bosnian Muslims by Serbs later that decade.

The Administration is explaining its reluctance to act by exaggerating the costs and the risks. It rolled out Pentagon chief Robert Gates last week to mock “loose talk” of military options. “It’s a big operation in a big country,” he said. “We also have to think about, frankly, the use of the U.S. military in another country in the Middle East.” Centcom Commander James Mattis offered a similar warning.

We can understand if our war-fighters are trying to make sure that civilians understand the costs and are totally committed before they order U.S. forces to action. But no one is talking about introducing U.S. ground forces a la Afghanistan or Iraq. The Libyans want to liberate Libya. The issue is how the U.S. can help them do it, which includes humanitarian, diplomatic and perhaps military assistance.

Three weeks into the uprising, Mr. Obama has finally approved a humanitarian airlift. The U.S. should also recognize the provisional government known as the National Transitional Temporary Council, which has issued a declaration of principles that is at least as enlightened as the average Arab constitution. U.S. officials may not know these men well, but we will have more influence with them if they see us helping their cause when it matters.

The U.S. should also bar Gadhafi’s agents from U.S. soil and world councils. His government has requested that senior diplomat Ali Abdussalam Treki be recognized as Libya’s new ambassador to the U.N. A U.N. spokesman naturally says this is Libya’s right, but the U.S. ought to deny Mr. Treki a visa. If Libyan officials realize they are going to be persona non grata around the world, more of them might defect.

The U.S. and U.N. may also be repeating their Bosnian mistake with their arms embargo on Libya. In the 1990s, a U.N. embargo didn’t hurt the Serbs, who were already well-armed, but it crippled the Bosnians, who lacked the weapons to defend themselves.

The current U.N. embargo may have been intended to apply only to Gadhafi’s government, but we saw conflicting reports on the weekend that some countries may be interpreting it to apply to the opposition too. Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama ought to correct the world’s understanding straightaway, or rewrite the resolution. Even short of providing arms—which we would support—the U.S. could help by jamming Gadhafi’s propaganda or military communications, as well as providing intelligence.

As for the no-fly zone, the Administration is far too solicitous of U.N. and Arab approval. The approval that matters is from the Libyan opposition. The Arab League is heavily influenced by the Saudis, who have their own budding problem with popular dissent. Moscow and Beijing don’t want a no-fly zone in Libya, but so what?

We didn’t need Chinese or Russian support to keep Iraqi Kurds safe from Saddam Hussein’s bombers in the 1990s. NATO can act without U.N. approval, or at least it could before this Administration. Even Senator John Kerry thinks the Administration is making too much of the risks of a no-fly zone. “This is not a big air force,” he says about Libya. “It’s not an enormously complicated defense system.”

We suspect the real reason for Mr. Obama’s passivity is more ideological than practical. He and his White House team believe that any U.S. action will somehow be tainted if it isn’t wrapped in U.N. or pan-Arab approval. They have internalized their own critique of the Bush Administration to such a degree that they are paralyzed to act even against a dictator as reviled and blood-stained as Gadhafi, and even though it would not require the deployment of U.S. troops.

Mr. Obama won’t lead the world because he truly seems to believe that U.S. leadership is morally suspect. But if Mr. Obama thinks George W. Bush was unpopular in the Arab world, he should contemplate the standing of America—and the world reputation of Barack Obama—if Gadhafi and his sons slaughter their way back to power.