by Jules Witcover

We Americans are great at putting fancy names on things. The latest is the moniker hung by the Pentagon on the war against Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi: "Odyssey Dawn," whatever that's supposed to mean.

Like the French in the "My Fair Lady" lyric who don't care what they do as long as they pronounce it correctly, it's almost as if by calling battlefield mayhem by some poetic term you can cast it as a more noble cause. We can't seem to call a spade a spade when it comes to using bloody military force, which is what war is under whatever name you choose to give it.

President Obama's effort to put his own spin on his objective in this one -- that it all depends on what the meaning of the phrase "regime change" is -- has already led to the kibitzers labeling it the Obama Doctrine. It seems to say he will use force primarily in concert with others under international sanction, and with stated limited goals and means.

Thus, he will act as part of a multilateral partnership under a clear UN mandate to protect Libyan civilians from repression from Gadhafi's armed forces, but not explicitly to overthrow him. As a punctuation mark to the limited objective, Obama promises that no American troops will be sent into Libya, or as the Pentagon likes to say, "put boots on the ground" there.

But his actions so far seem clearly to go beyond those limitations by introducing low-flying aircraft with major capacity for attacking enemy tanks and mobile artillery. It can be argued that they, too, are protecting Libyan civilians under fire, as did the U.S.-led imposition of a no-fly zone over the country. But these latest efforts look much more like taking sides in this embryonic civil war.

So the Obama Doctrine increasingly is taking on the semblance of regime change, which the American president has repeatedly said he favors but wants achieved by the Libyan people themselves, or other more willing members of the latest "coalition of the willing."

Obama obviously feels he must walk this thin tightrope in deference to the two small Arab members of that coalition, Qatar and the Arab United Emirates, who have indicated they want no part of participating in the regime change of another Arab state.

One defender of and apologist for the so-called Bush Doctrine of the previous American president argues that the Obama Doctrine is essentially a recycled version of the one under which George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003. Michael Gerson, the former Bush speechwriter metamorphosed into a columnist by The Washington Post, writes that "having had a hand in shaping that doctrine, I know it when I see it."

He observes that "it begins with the idea of preemption -- confronting dangers to America before they fully emerge." Then he cites Obama's 2009 decision to surge 30,000 U.S. troops into Afghanistan, increase drone attacks in Pakistan and continue detention of suspected terrorists at Guantanamo prison, and says "Obama's opposition to preemption consists mainly of criticisms of the Iraq war made years ago."

But Bush's invasion of Iraq was rationalized on a fallacy, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction poised to attack the West, a notion at the least based on flawed intelligence. Obama, in using force in Libya, was not preemptive but reactive to actual military force against Gadhafi's own people.

Also, Bush invaded Iraq in contravention of the UN Charter that sanctions such action only in self-defense, and he led the military action after deriding the UN as risking irrelevance by not explicitly approving it. Obama in Libya has insisted on being part of a true coalition of the willing, not the ragtag version that Bush patched together through intimidation and even bribery of reluctant partners.

So casting Obama as some kind of Bush disciple in foreign policy is a self-serving reach. It's true that he is infuriating liberals in his party by sustaining the war in Afghanistan, keeping Guantanamo open and playing word games over seeking regime change in Libya. But equating the Obama strategy and demeanor in international affairs with the reckless and calamitous record of his predecessor is name-calling on another level.

 

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