Qaddafi’s offensive has rebels in retreat

What happened

Hopes that Muammar al-Qaddafi’s regime would quickly crumble suffered a major setback this week, as his loyalists drove rebel forces back dozens of miles under a hail of tank and rocket fire. “Where is Sarkozy?” the retreating rebel fighters asked. Just days earlier, they had raced westward toward Tripoli under cover of punishing air strikes from U.S., French, and British warships and fighter jets. The rebels had been advancing on the Qaddafi stronghold of Surt—his birthplace—when they were confronted by Libyan armor. Over the following days, Qaddafi’s better-trained and better-equipped forces counterattacked, routing the ragtag band of rebels and driving them out of the strategically important oil towns of Ras Lanuf and Brega.

The alarming string of setbacks came as NATO took control of the military operation in Libya, amid sharp disagreement over how to end Qaddafi’s 42-year regime. American missiles rained down on Qaddafi’s elite brigade in Tripoli, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hinted that cracks were appearing in his inner circle. “We have a lot of evidence that people around him are reaching out,” she said. NATO members met to discuss options for bolstering the rebels, including the possibility of providing them with weapons. But President Obama’s response was ambiguous. “I’m not ruling it out, but I’m also not ruling it in,” he said.

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What the editorials said

President Obama has successfully prevented the massacre of thousands of civilians, said The Washington Post. But “the war in Libya is far from over.” It will end only when Qaddafi is forced from power. Unfortunately, the Obama administration appears to lack any coherent strategy to achieve that aim, other than hoping for “a sudden coup.”

Before it’s too late, the allies should “arm the rebels,” said The New York Times. Yes, there are still questions over who these rebels are. But they have already stated that their goal is “a constitutional democratic system that guarantees elections and human rights.” Only by ousting Qaddafi, said The Wall Street Journal, will we show the “Assads and Ahmadinejads that the West is willing and able to act against tyrants who slaughter their own people and foment terrorism.” That outcome will deliver a Middle East that is “freer and less hostile to American purposes.”

What the columnists said

In case you hadn’t noticed, Obama isn’t in charge of this intervention, said William Saletan in Slate​.com. France, the U.K., and Italy led the charge to beat Qaddafi back, because they fear having a wounded madman right on their doorstep. The Obama administration agreed to loan our military to Europe for the operation as payback for NATO’s help in Iraq and Afghanistan. What that means, in the end, is that Obama has failed to get Congress’s approval for this military action, while submitting to the authority of an international coalition.

By being led instead of leading, said Gideon Rose in The Washington Post, President Obama broke the first rule of military engagement: Know your goals before you enter a conflict. U.S. forces are now engaged in a battle “with no clear vision of what a successful and stable outcome” might be. Worse still, said Byron York in the Washington Examiner, it looks as though some of the rebels are Islamists who only recently returned from fighting U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. According to a recent study, one fifth of foreign fighters in Iraq come from Libya. A major source of those fighters was the rebel stronghold of Benghazi, where Qaddafi had to put down an Islamist insurgency in the mid-1990s.

“Welcome to the Middle East of 2011!” said Thomas Friedman in The New York Times. It’s a messy, dangerous place, “fraught with moral and political ambiguities” involving autocrats we need but dislike and revolutionaries we support but distrust. Anyone who claims to know precisely what we should do in Libya—or Syria and the rest of the region—is a fool. Obama is carefully picking his way through a minefield, and I’m “just praying that he’s lucky.”