Obama laments fallout from Libya on White House foreign policy

[umbertino]

March 11, 2016 6:40 pm

Geoff Dyer in Washington

 

 

The military campaign to topple Muammer Gaddafi in 2011 was Barack Obama’s own intervention, the one time he embraced a recommendation to pursue regime change. Five years later, he considers the decision a “mistake”.

 

The US president provided the unprecedented insight into his foreign policy views in a series of long interviews given to The Atlantic, in which he acknowledges that the Libya experience played a big role in shaping his world view.

 

The country is, he is quoted as saying, now a “**** show”. “It didn’t work,” he admits.

 

Libya is re-emerging as a major topic in American political life in part because Isis has used the continued chaos in the country to gain territory, sparking a new debate about western intervention, and because of the presidential campaign of Hillarious Clinton, as one of the main supporters of military action.

 

The Libyan intervention also crystallised many of the ideas that, for better or for worse, have come to define his presidency — a belief in the limitations of American power to shape societies, irritation at “freeriding” by allies, frustration with a Washington conventional wisdom that always wants to take action and a deep aversion to new entanglements in the Middle East.

 

“There is no way we should commit to governing the Middle East and north Africa,” he is quoted as saying about the Libyan intervention. “That would be a basic, fundamental mistake.”

 

His frustration at how the situation in Libya played out, where the death of Mr Gaddafi soon led to a country dominated by armed militias, prompts some of Mr Obama’s most withering criticisms of US allies.

 

David Cameron, the British prime minister, soon became “distracted by a range of other things”, while Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French president, was more interested in “trumpeting” France’s role in the air campaign.

 

“I had more faith in the Europeans, given Libya’s proximity, being invested in the follow-up,” he said.

 

With 10 months still in office, Mr Obama may be using the sorts of barbed reflections normally reserved for memoirs to get his personal argument across early.

 

They also anticipate the political attacks that will surround the Libyan action in the November election, where Mrs Clinton is likely to be criticised for both the decision to attack Mr Gaddafi and for not doing more to prevent the country from unravelling afterwards.

 

Yet, as Mr Obama makes clear, the events in Libya are one of the essential prisms for viewing the subsequent controversies of his foreign policy — the decision not to bomb the Assad regime in 2013 over its use of chemical weapons, his response to Russian intervention in Ukraine and the rise of Isis. “Libya is a mess,” he admits.

 

Mr Obama says that without the failures in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan, he might have been willing to take more risks in Syria. “A president does not make decisions in a vacuum. He does not have a blank slate.”

 

For critics of the Obama administration, the original sin was the 2013 decision to use Russia to negotiate a deal to get chemical weapons out of Syria, rather than take military action as Mr Obama had threatened. Mrs Clinton is quoted as giving the warning: “If you say you’re going to strike, you have to strike. There’s no choice.”

 

But Mr Obama describes the decision as both a success and a defining moment when he was able to step out of what he sees as Washington groupthink. “There’s a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow. It’s a playbook that comes out of the foreign-policy establishment . . .[that] tends to be militarised responses,” he says. “But the playbook can also be a trap that can lead to bad decisions.”

 

To critics, much of this rationalisation is an exercise in “straw men” arguments. In Syria, they say, the objective has never been to topple Bashar al-Assad, but to use US military power to force the regime to the negotiating table.

 

The Atlantic article reveals that John Kerry, secretary of state, has put forward a series of proposals over the past year for targeted air strikes against the regime that would “send a message”. However, the president has rebuffed the suggestions, commenting once: “Oh, another proposal.”

 

Behind all these decisions, Mr Obama reveals a stark view of Middle Eastern society which is far removed from the optimism of his famous Cairo speech in his first year in office.

 

He admits he enjoys meeting young people in Asia and Latin America because “they are not thinking about how to kill Americans . . . What they’re thinking about is ‘How do I get a better education? How do I create something of value?’

 

“If we’re not talking to them [young Asians and Africans and Latin Americans] because the only thing we’re doing is figuring out how to destroy or cordon off or control the malicious, nihilistic, violent parts of humanity, then we’re missing the boat.”

 

 

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/faab6a96-e7ac-11e5-a09b-1f8b0d268c39.html#axzz42icHrcJA

 

 

[skeetdog]

Thanks umbertino...This's the results of putting an inexperienced community organizer that has the qualifications of a junior senator into the world's most powerful office...Odummer came out of nowhere and rode an emotional tidal-wave of new idea hope that was a scam from the moment it left his mouth...The Puppet-Master and the extreme left wing-nuts made their little token dance his part in a play for their own gains and Odummer will feel the ramification of being their fool after his tenor of ''Play-my-Beoch'' is over in 10 months...