Daniel Larson’s Paragraphs about President Obama’s Libyan Intervention — Expose the Obama Doctrine’s Purpose-Lacking Immorality

© 2016 Peter Free

 

11 April 2016

 

 

Dancing in the Devil’s firelight

 

I thought I detested President George W. Bush’s mix of geopolitical stupidity and imperialistic arrogance. But Commander in Chief Barack Obama one-ups him for callously indulged pot-stirring.

 

The American Conservative’s Daniel Larson captured one prong of this implied comparison:

 

 

[I]t is revealing that [President Obama] remains convinced [see here] that this lack of post-Gaddafi planning is worse than the far greater error of intervening in Libya in the first place.

 

Obama knew at the time that there was absolutely no political support in the U.S. or anywhere else for a prolonged mission in Libya.

 

It was not an oversight by the intervening governments when they left Libya to its own devices. That was part of the plan . . . from the very beginning.

 

So it is hard to take Obama seriously when he faults himself for not committing the U.S. to a larger, costlier role in Libya when he and the other allied leaders deliberately decided against doing that.

 

[T]hey were willing to help throw the country into chaos and to destabilize the surrounding region and declare victory when the regime change they supposedly weren’t seeking had been achieved.

 

© 2016 Daniel Larson, The Libyan War and Obama’s “Worst Mistake”, The American Conservative (11 April 2016) (extracts)

 

 

The moral? — The Obama Doctrine creates chaos simply to create chaos

 

Totalitarian Muammar Gaddafi was a bad man, the Administration said. Getting rid of him justified the incomparably greater and easily foreseeable evils that followed.

 

Whose moral calculus would justify such a disproportionate outcome? The metaphorical Devil’s?

 

In truth, our Military Industrial Complex feasts on Chaos’s blood. Were there an “at home” price to pay for strategically foolish interventions, we would not do them.

 

My lack of appreciation for President Obama’s leadership is based on his evident inability to see this. Libya was not initially a difficult question.

 

The Obama Presidency has repeatedly demonstrated that a highly intelligent man can be just as callously inept a Commander in Chief, as a noticeably less gifted one.

 

The take-away message may be that developed ethical sense, combined with geopolitical realism, outweigh enviable intelligence and sly political maneuvering in achieving respect-worthy leadership.