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- iHaveNet.com: Politics
by Jules Witcover
Now more than halfway through his four-year term, President Obama is a chief executive who set out to change Washington and instead is bogged down in efforts to change the world.
The president is gamely attempting to do both, not out of choice but in response to the unpredictability of events. The Arab Spring of popular protest against dictatorial regimes, born on a wave of optimistic revolt in Tunisia and Egypt, has now bubbled over into the beginnings of civil war in Libya. It has pulled the Obama administration into what it declares will be a limited but muscular military operation for humanitarian reasons.
Obviously torn between a desire to stem a civilian bloodbath in Libya but determined to pull back from America's history of unilateralism over last decade, Obama is trying to have it both ways. He is determined on UN collective action with a minimal U.S. footprint, short of ostensible regime change in Libya, while personally if injudiciously stating that strongman Moammar Gadhafi "must leave."
American presidents have learned, however, that their words can have consequences far beyond those of ordinary mortals. The senior President George Bush learned to rue the day he said, "Read my lips, no new taxes," as did his son in declaring that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction when none could be found in Iraq.
Obama has tied himself in a semantic knot now by trying to distinguish between protecting the Libyan people from Gadhafi's armed mayhem and getting rid of him. He has to know that the first ultimately will not be achieved without the other.
The matter of regime change goes back to the debate within
The latest UN use-of-force resolution against Libya likewise does not call for Gadhafi's ouster. Obama obviously has hoped to walk that tightrope as he seeks to restore American fealty to collective action through the international community. But in doing so, he would have been better served saying nothing about dumping Gaddafi and letting the circumstances of war take their course.
Instead, he has left himself open at home and abroad to allegations of temporizing at least and dissembling at worst. Members of the
"Because of the conflicting messages from the administration and our coalition partners," Boehner wrote in a letter to the president made public, "there is a lack of clarity over the objectives of this mission, what our national security interests are, and how it fits into our overarching policy for the Middle East."
While agreeing that the United States had "a moral obligation" to take action to avoid the slaughtering of Libyan civilians, Boehner complained that it was "regrettable that no opportunity was afforded to consult with Congressional leaders, as was the custom of your predecessors, before your decision as commander-in-chief to deploy into combat the men and women of our armed forces."
That lament of insufficient consultation, it should be noted, was the same heard from congressional Democratic leaders in 2003 when the second President Bush launched his war of choice in Iraq without a congressional declaration of war as specified in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. Obama did at least file a notification of intent under the War Powers Act, giving him 60 days to compete the mission or get congressional approval to continue.
But once again, as with the 2009 economic and financial market collapses, Obama finds himself diverted from his 2008 goal of changing how Washington does business. The unexpected comes with the job, and how he is responding to the Libyan challenge may govern his future more than any well-laid plans for change at home.
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