David Brooks' love letter to President Barack Obama today is nauseating:
President Obama took this decision, I'm told, fully aware that there was no political upside while there were enormous political risks. He took it fully aware that we don't know much about Libya. He took it fully aware that if he took this action he would be partially on the hook for Libya's future. But he took it as an American must — motivated by this country's historical role as a champion of freedom and humanity — and with the awareness that we simply could not stand by with Russia and China in opposition.
In this decision, one could see the same sensitive, idealistic man who wrote “Dreams From My Father.”
Bonus smooch: Brooks says the intervention in Libya was in the spirit of Obama's favorite philosopher, Reinhold Niebuhr.
It is tiresome to harp on this sort of thing, but this is an intervention done in the spirit of Reinhold Niebuhr. It is motivated by a noble sentiment, to combat evil, but it is being done without self-righteousness and with a prudent awareness of the limits and the ironies of history. And it is being done at a moment in history when change in the Arab world really is possible.
Niebuhr, of course, always argued that it the danger of power came when "the wisdom which directs it is trusted too confidently." If Niebuhr argued anything, it was that a fixation on the purity of one's intentions would ultimately lead to disaster, and that the difference between liberal capitalism and communism was that the former trusted in its own virtue too confidently. Intervening in a civil war in a country we don't understand because we are a "champion of freedom and humanity" strikes me as the kind of thing Niebuhr was trying to warn us about.
While Obama's speech justifying intervention in Libya also struck me as more modest and realistic about the capabilities of American power, Brooks could not have written a column more diametrically opposed to the man's ideas than this one.
