Libya: A morass of justifications, objectives, and scope

President Obama's speech on Monday did nothing to explain why the United States has launched its war in the Middle East

Earlier this month, Hollywood honored the brilliant British film The King's Speech, which told the story of a head of state overcoming a debilitating stutter to lead a nation at war, with an Oscar for Best Picture. Unfortunately, President Obama failed to overcome his administration's debilitating stutter on Libya and the Middle East with his speech Monday night.

First, this address to the nation was overdue by 10 days. After sending the American military to war in Libya on March 18, the president then flew to South America for several days and talked trade rather than war. He became the first commander in chief in memory to leave the country in the first hours of a new war for an unrelated tour, and the first in memory not to speak directly to the American people to explain why he put men and women in harm's way in a new foreign adventure.

The performance of his administration only became worse as the week progressed. After both Democrats and Republicans in Congress angrily rebuked Obama for failing to properly consult Congress before going to war, he finally wrote an official notification of the hostilities to Capitol Hill two days after war operations commenced. The White House also arranged photo ops of the president juggling a soccer ball in the street and chair-dancing with children while U.S. planes and ships launched bombardments aimed at Moammar Gadhafi's army. 

By the end of the week, the administration was reduced to denying that it had committed acts of war at all. In a briefing for the press on Wednesday, Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes called the attacks a "kinetic military action," a term straight from the Department of Redundancy Department. Is any "action" not "kinetic"? A day later, the Obama administration had deep-sixed the KMA nomenclature for the even more unwieldy "time-limited, scope-limited military action" to avoid using the word war.

The explanations of scope and time in this "action" also grew more confused. Obama insisted during the week that the scope of American action would be limited to protecting civilians from Gadhafi's forces. Yet the coalition instead broadly attacked the Libyan military to reduce or eliminate its effectiveness, and, as The Washington Post noted on Wednesday, March 23, was not doing much to protect civilians in the near term at all. Obama himself appeared to leave open the possibility of coordinating military action with the rebels in a CNN interview on Thursday. 

By Sunday, the administration's arguments were in such disarray that Obama's proxies couldn't even agree on the same talk shows. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told ABC's Jake Tapper on This Week and NBC's David Gregory on Meet the Press that the United States had no "vital national interests" in Libya before Operation Odyssey Dawn began, nor did the country pose an imminent national threat. In the same interviews, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton insisted that America did have vital interests at stake, while also claiming that the multilateral agreement on the use of force overrode the need to consult Congress to commit U.S. troops to the effort — a sentiment hardly likely to be popular on Capitol Hill. 

During the week, Obama insisted that the military engagement would last "days and not weeks," but Gates contradicted that as well. Tapper quoted assessments from NATO officials that Odyssey Dawn could last three months or longer and asked Gates whether it would be over by the end of the year. Gates replied, "I don't think anybody knows the answer to that."