Daniel Larison explains what a huge liar our president is here, pointing to the president’s pronounced regret that the U.S. and its allies didn’t do “more” in Libya after dislodging long-time dictator Muammar Gaddafi:
“In his U.N. speech, Obama lamely tried to spin the problems in post-intervention Libya as a result of not doing enough to follow up that regime change with even more outside intervention, which just shows how oblivious he remains to the original error of taking sides in Libya’s civil war. The revisionist idea that the U.S. and NATO could have stabilized the country after the regime was destroyed leaves out that the Libyan transitional government at the time wanted no part of an outside force, and no other government was prepared to commit to providing one. The lack of any follow-up effort was not really an oversight of the governments that intervened in Libya. On the contrary, it was one of the intervention’s original selling points.”
Of course it was. The whole point of the Libyan intervention was that it was the opposite of Iraq. Hey, no boots on the ground for this one! And now the president is wishing it had been Iraq III!
In the meantime, over at Reason, Benjamin Friedman does the unthinkable and reads Dick and Liz Cheney’s soul-leeching Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America, noting that, after touting the virtures of “strength”–endorsing every war the U.S. has ever fought–and lambasting Obams for “weakness” for several hundred pages, the Cheneys make zero policy recommendations that call for actual, you know, action! Despite depicting both Putin and the Iranian mullahs as Hitlers reborn, except more crazy, it appears if we just talk tough they’ll give us whatever we want. Who knew it was so easy!
