Obama’s Libya Speech Was for the Homefront

What the intervention in Libya is all about needs to be understood by the American electorate, not the rest of the world.

The tone of Obama’s speech was reminiscent of one of those books that treats every subject from square one: “Intervention in Libya For Dummies.” That gives a broad hint at who the intended audience of the speech was. The American voter, and not the world, is supposed to understand what the intervention in Libya is all about — Libya, a place that most Americans would be hard put to find on a world map, if they could find it at all.

In those terms, the mission was a success. The president assured his war-weary compatriots that “Operation Odyssey Dawn” would remain a militarily limited venture, with no possibility of becoming another Iraq. The only thing he omitted was a timeline. At the same time — and the rest of the world should take note — after diplomatically vacillating to and fro for several weeks, he decided on a realpolitik stance: Obama clarified the political and military goals of the operation in that he reversed his position of last week and will not support regime change in Tripoli. The operation is therefore open ended.

Anyone who may be inclined to think of Obama as a chicken-hearted peacenik need only consider Afghanistan, where the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Commander in Chief escalated hostilities and increased unmanned drone strikes as never before. Even dummies should now understand that a theoretical war looks a lot different.