So Who Has Really Brought Down Gadhafi, the Ruler of Libya?

Now that Gadhafi is falling, there’s a need to divide the credit — and it turns out Obama wants a share. His men said this week that they have assisted without making the U.S. the centerpiece.

“Gadhafi’s rule is over,” announced U.S. President Barack Obama. Not that anyone asked, not that Gadhafi was waiting for a specific signal from him, not that any press release out of the president’s cozy resort spot in Martha’s Vineyard was going to change the reality in some way. Still, a notice should be given. Let them know.

“We’re fighting three wars now,” Jay Leno reminded his viewers several months ago when Obama dispatched U.S. troops to participate in the NATO operation — Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq. “Imagine how many we’d be fighting if President Obama hadn’t won the Nobel Peace Prize.”

Only the president has never accepted the claim that the United States is at war in Libya. What he acceded to take part in originally was a humanitarian mission to prevent mass murder; and those who led it were not the Americans but instead the European members of the Atlantic alliance, spearheaded by France and Britain.

Now that Gadhafi is going down, they need to share the credit — and it appears Obama actually wants a piece of it. Here is the argument his administration raised this week: We have acted wisely, we lowered the profile, we helped the rebels out without turning America into the focus of the whole thing. This is how you bring about a revolution; this is how you overthrow a Middle East tyrant.

“[I think] ... this is a tremendous achievement,” praised James Steinberg, who until two weeks ago was Hillary Clinton’s deputy secretary of state. “The biggest factor to date is the fact that we [Americans] have not been the problem. People aren’t saying the Americans are trying to do regime change” — as they used to say in the days of George Bush’s administration.

“Leadership from Behind”

Nevertheless, as expected, not everybody was generous toward Obama. And not everyone is positive that “leading from behind” — the title given to the updated American policy — deserves to be qualified as “leadership” overall. Mitt Romney, the Republican Party’s front runner for the 2012 elections — meaning, Obama’s emerging rival — asserted: “We’re following the French into Libya.”

And indeed, there could be nothing worse than “following the French” to a war. (Here’s one more Leno line: “Did you see the footage of French planes bombing Libya? The planes look brand new, like they’ve never been used before.”)

Obama’s critics welcomed the Libyan ruler’s walking away this week; however, they refused to attribute the credit to their president. “Americans can be proud of the role our country has played in helping to defeat [Gadhafi],” wrote the Republican senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham in a joint statement. “... [B]ut we regret that this success was so long in coming due to the failure of the United States to employ the full weight of our airpower.”

Between Libya and Iraq

The heavy shadow of the war in Iraq still hangs over every decision President Obama makes that involves the use of force. The Republican right and the liberal left — both in the shadow of the trauma of Iraq — attacked Obama when he opted to join the fight in Libya for not obtaining “congressional approval on [the] military operation.”

They even threatened to restrain him through legislation — that is, to set a bar that should prevent an alleged return to the days of messing up in Iraq. It was an unnecessary outburst of anxiety. Obama has never intended an invasion, never risked a scenario like that. On the other hand, he also has not agreed to stand aloof without acting at all. You can carry on arguing whether he has applied enough power or not. Either way, it’s obvious that he has yielded a ruling that is, in principle, in favor of intervention — that he refrained from isolationism.

Behind his decision, there stood a few resolute ladies of the administration who objected to letting the government roll down the superhighway of irrelevance: Secretary of State Clinton, adviser Samantha Power and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice. To these three, the voice of another woman might as well be added: Anne-Marie Slaughter, now a professor at Princeton, who served under Clinton for two years as the Director of Policy Planning for the State Department.

Slaughter’s voice was heard loud and clear when she warned the American left against over-reaction to the years of Bush’s rule. Slaughter feared a pendulum motion that would bring the United States back to the days when the “realist” camp in Washington would dictate the policy of “order and stability over ideology and values.” She and her friends were watchful not to allow Obama to turn in such a direction. They want not only “stability” but “values,” too.

In any case, when the time came to call the shots on the questions of war, there broke out a struggle within the administration between the proponents of the “just not Bush the son” approach and those opining “just not Bush the father.” This happened when the president was required to make up his mind how he’d run the continuation of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan (he decided to send reinforcements for a limited period), and even more so when a new war stood on his threshold — in a distant land, with an objective not completely specified.

Between Guiding and Participating

Obama already knew at the beginning of the journey that Libya is not his problem. “Not America’s baby to solve,” as his former adviser Bruce Riedel put it. “Most Libyan oil and natural gas is sold in Europe — not the U.S. It’s Italy and France that have the biggest interest in stabilizing this area.” America may lend a hand; however, there’s no reason to keep dragging the trolley by herself.

Obama’s emissaries have found in Europe ears attentive to this message, particularly in the French President Nicolas Sarkozy. He didn’t want to guide from behind. He wanted to lead — to thrust ahead, sometimes so fast that he has surprised both his European friends and his French friends, perhaps even himself.

Some ascribed this to political ambitions. Some said that Sarkozy wanted to prove to Obama (there’s no great affection between the two) which one of them is the real leader. One way or another, the Europeans, with France and Britain at their head, decided to undertake the task. Washington got what it wanted. The unmanned aircrafts it sent to the campaign are an appropriate symbol of the engagement the Americans chose for this time: without human touch, with low signature.

Had the combat over Libya been over this week, truly, that would have been the end of the story. The full credit [would have gone] to the two European chieftains and, only after that, to the American president. Obama can live with this — the war in Libya is not the one to determine his future. It’s just that the battle for Libya is only getting started; and the United States, which consented to be drawn into indirect involvement at the stage of fighting, is going to need to deal anew with the same dilemma at the stage of stabilization, like in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This is the phase when the foreign detachments pay a high price in blood for their intervention. This is the phase to begin next week in the decisions to be made in Paris, London and Washington regarding the extent of the involvement and the sacrifice they’d agree to take upon themselves, in an effort not only to demolish the fundament of the old world but also build a new one on its ruins.