Josh Rogin has a must-read on the internal deliberations over intervening in Libya. Though the difference in the international dynamics of what's happening from the war in Iraq can't be overstated, I found this rationale attributed to the president remarkable:
"This is the greatest opportunity to realign our interests and our values," a senior administration official said at the meeting, telling the experts this sentence came from Obama himself. The president was referring to the broader change going on in the Middle East and the need to rebalance U.S. foreign policy toward a greater focus on democracy and human rights.
This rationale, as it stands, is extremely George W. Bush-like. I don't mean that as a diss, just as a neutral observation. Here's Bush's second inaugural address:
We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.
America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.
There's also the Bush-like lack of self-awareness in the idea that the U.S. would be "realigning our interests and values" even as we turn a blind eye to repression conducted by allies in Yemen and Bahrain, much the same way the "freedom agenda" ignored U.S. client states.
Both of the above statements could not be farther from the man who, in 2002, said that Saddam Hussein "poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military is a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community, he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history." Whatever we're doing in Libya, it can't really be described as an attempt to eliminate an imminent and direct threat to the United States.
As Daniel Larison points out, all of what Obama said about Hussein can be said about Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi. But the Libya intervention seems to have revealed a genuine ideological transition from the Barack Obama of 2002, from a kind of neo-realist to a full-fledged liberal internationalist. Both approaches would have justified intervening on moral grounds, but the character of Obama's intervention is differentiated by its reliance on international institutions.
Conservatives, blinded by their dislike for Obama, seem not to have yet realized that when it comes to foreign policy, they may have gotten something close to the president they wanted all along.
