The President’s Address to the Nation on Libya

[SolomonVII]

The Full Text of the NDU Libya Speech - By NRO Staff - The Corner - National Review Online

Obama in Libya - By Stanley Kurtz - The Corner - National Review Online
As his speech tonight confirms, President Obama intervened in Libya to prevent a massacre in Benghazi. That is the long and short of it. Yes, he also hoped that his action would blunt Qaddafi’s counter-revolutionary stroke, thereby putting us “on the right side” of the emerging revolt in the Middle East (Hillary’s chief concern). Yet that was a secondary motive. Fundamentally, Obama was unwilling to go down in history as the man who allowed a massacre in Benghazi. He also wanted to set a precedent for future multilateral humanitarian interventions under United Nations auspices. Everything else follows from this core motive, which is represented within his administration by Samantha Power and Susan Rice, above all.
Obama is not a neoconservative democratizer. When he talks about our values of human rights and democracy, he has in mind the progressive vision of a UN-dictated rights regime that constrains and encroaches upon national sovereignty, including our own. This is the portion of his policy goals in Libya (drawn from advisors like Power) that he does not explicitly spell out. It depends on doctrines like “responsibility to protect,” liable to future expansion and abuse by international bodies. Instead of going into all this, Obama merely highlights the “historic” UN resolution that enshrines the new doctrine, and speaks of his worry that a failure to act would have rendered the UN’s “writ” meaningless.

There is plenty of room for criticism too, as Stanley Kurtz for one points out, and every reason to note the precariousness of a ME future without the thugs as a counter-weight to the surging Islamists, but...

Americans have reason to be proud once more that they have used the gifts that God blessed them with to stand up to the tyrants of the world. It is good to see that Obama has come to recognize the unique and distinct role that America has always played in world poltics, and must continue to play.
Military intevention is not just a neoconservative prerogative. Even progressives can come on board and do the right thing.
The world dictators have been served double notice now.