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.
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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.”
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Putin’s threat to fracture Ukrainefeature Fears that Russia was building a pretext for an invasion of eastern Ukraine grew, as pro-Kremlin protesters occupied government buildings in three cities.
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Curbing NSA surveillance
feature The White House said it will propose a broad overhaul of the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program.
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Downsizing the military
feature A new budget plan for the Pentagon would save hundreds of billions of dollars by taking the military off its post-9/11 war footing.
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Putin ratchets up pressure on Ukraine
feature Russian President Vladimir Putin put 150,000 troops at the Ukraine border on high alert and cut off $15 billion in financial aid.
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Ukraine on the brink of civil war
feature Ukraine’s capital was engulfed in flames and violence when hundreds of riot police launched an assault on an anti-government protest camp.
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Ukraine at the breaking point
feature An alliance of opposition groups vowed protests would continue until President Viktor Yanukovych is removed from power.
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Dim prospects for Syrian talks
feature A long-awaited Syrian peace conference in Montreux, Switzerland, quickly degenerated into a cross fire of bitter accusations.
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The fight over jobless benefits
feature A bill to restore federal benefits for the long-term unemployed advanced when six Republican senators voted with Democrats.