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That’s almost exactly what Bush said about the UN’s fecklessness over Iraq. “The conduct of the Iraqi regime is a threat to the authority of the United Nations,” he warned in September 2002. “Iraq has answered a decade of UN demands with a decade of defiance. All the world now faces a test and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment. Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced or cast aside without consequence?”
Yet all of that has been airbrushed out of Obama’s version of history.
Now, let’s take a look at Obama’s subtle attack on the Clinton administration’s foreign policy record. “In just one month,” Obama gushed, “the United States has worked with our international partners to mobilize a broad coalition, secure an international mandate to protect civilians, stop an advancing army, prevent a massacre and establish a no-fly zone with our allies and partners.”
Wow. That’s almost on par with his 2008 Berlin speech, when the ever-humble Obama predicted that his election would mark “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal…when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth.”
But it wasn’t enough for Obama just to hail his achievements in Libya. To drive home the point, he needed to contrast his record with the lesser men who sat in the Oval Office before him: “To lend some perspective on how rapidly this military and diplomatic response came together, when people were being brutalized in Bosnia in the 1990s, it took the international community more than a year to intervene with air power to protect civilians. It took us 31 days.”
There’s the swipe at the Clinton administration. What Obama didn’t say or doesn’t care to learn is that in Bosnia, the Europeans kept America at arms length. A leading European diplomat typified the European view in this first post-Cold War crisis by calling Bosnia “the hour of Europe.” Washington took the hint and stepped aside. It would be a fateful decision. As historian William Pfaff notes in The Wrath of Nations, “In the Bosnian crisis, the United States didn’t act, so everyone failed to act.”
In other words, an unspoken reason the Europeans were cajoling Washington to get involved in Libya was the Balkan debacle.
Obama’s goldilocks approach to the office he holds—that he has somehow struck the perfect balance that eluded his predecessors—is not only dripping with hubris, but it also conveys a kind of myopia usually reserved for college kids. As a self-described “student of history,” Obama should know that history didn’t begin on January 20, 2009.
A more appropriate, more gracious, more politically effective approach to take in announcing the Libya intervention—in addition to seeking Congressional authorization before seeking the endorsement of the Arab League and UN—would have been for Obama to concede that his administration is learning from the precedents set by earlier administrations; that his preferred method of moral suasion and apology tours was no more effective at making the world’s rogues compliant than Bush’s hard-line approach; and that the world doesn’t magically bend to America’s will because of the pleasant sounding words of a president.
Alan W. Dowd writes on defense and security issues.
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