Over at The Daily Beast, their contributors are weighing in about the Obama speech. The reactions seem to be fairly measure, if not nuanced.
Here’s part of what John Avlon said: “President Obama tried to make a case for humanitarian war: the limited, U.S.-led, multilateral intervention in Libya. But as he weaved his familiar rhetorical path between the extremes—in this case neo-isolationist liberals and neoconservative regime-changers—Obama was on awkward footing trying to explain how insisting that “Gaddafi must go” did not signify a policy of regime change.”
Here’s Peter Beinart: “John Bolton recently said that Barack Obama doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism. (On Monday night), Obama answered. ‘Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries,’ Obama declared, in justifying the intervention in Libya. ‘The United States of America is different. And as President, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.’”
Daniel Larison was not impressed: “Obama boasted about the anticipated handover of control to NATO and the ‘supporting’ role of U.S. forces, which conveniently overlooked the ongoing escalation of U.S. involvement in Libya’s civil war, including low-flying AC-130 and A-10 aircraft. The speech created the impression that U.S. involvement in Libya will be brief, but Obama addressed none of the calls for defining the mission’s goals, duration, or cost. The public needed a forthright explanation and accounting of the risks that a Libyan war entails, and it received bromides instead.”
Howard Kurtz also touched on the American exceptionalism issue: “He even took on the thorniest dilemma — why Libya and not other brutal dictatorships? — with a burst of uplifting rhetoric: The fact that we can’t be the world’s policeman ‘cannot be an argument for never acting on behalf of what is right.’ There was even a hint of American exceptionalism: Let others ‘turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries,’ but that is not ‘who we are.’ It was a strong oration that played to the country’s best impulses, but also fudged key elements of the administration’s overall) response.”
Stephen Carter was impressed with the speech but said it raised more questions than it answered: “Back in December 2009, in his Nobel (Peace Prize) address, President Obama insisted that morality justified outside intervention ‘to prevent the slaughter of civilians by their own government.’ Most of those who read these lines probably dismissed them as a mere rhetorical flourish: When countries kill their own people, the rest of the world has a long history of wringing its collective hands. In his speech on Libya tonight, however, the president made clear that he meant what he said in Oslo:
‘There will be times, though, when our safety is not directly threatened, but our interests and values are,’ Obama said in that speech on the international stage. ‘Sometimes, the course of history poses challenges that threaten our common humanity and common security –responding to natural disasters, for example; or preventing genocide and keeping the peace; ensuring regional security, and maintaining the flow of commerce.’
Carter, a Yale Law school professor and prolific writer, concludes that Obama’s insistence that he could not wait for pictures of mass graves in Libya was a reference to America’s delayed involvement in Bosnia.
“But Bosnia helps illustrate the problem,” Carter said. “As Obama’s adviser Samantha Power has pointed out, there is no American tradition of intervening to prevent genocide or slaughter. NATO bombed, much too late. We did nothing whatsoever to stop the slaughter of perhaps a million Tutsi in Rwanda. Today, we have not gone to war with Sudan to stop the genocide in Darfur. True, as the president pointed out, it is not possible for the United States to be everywhere. The question is whether he adequately made the case that Libya (rather than, say, Darfur) is the right place to use our military might on the side of those being killed.”
