President Obama on Monday sought to define for a skeptical American public the U.S. military mission in Libya, predicting that President Moammar Gadhafi would surrender power even while insisting that the United States would not help overthrow Gadhafi militarily. “I said that America’s role would be limited; that we would not put ground troops into Libya; that we would focus our unique capabilities on the front end of the operation, and that we would transfer responsibility to our allies and partners,” Obama said before a respectful audience at the National Defense University in D.C. “Tonight, we are fulfilling that pledge.”
The early evening speech came nine days after the United States launched air strikes against Gadhafi’s forces, an effort to appease critics who have questioned the scope, cost, time frame and necessity of fighting a third expensive war in the heart of the Muslim world.
Unlike the missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Libyan intervention is of Obama’s choosing, making the episode his stiffest commander-in-chief test to date.
The president has cast the military effort as a multilateral, humanitarian mission necessitated by Gadhafi’s continual willingness to inflict violence on his own people, actions that threatened other pro-democracy movements already under way in neighboring Egypt and Tunisia, Obama said.
“To brush aside America’s responsibility as a leader and — more profoundly — our responsibilities to our fellow human beings under such circumstances would have been a betrayal of who we are,” the president said.
Despite calling for Gadhafi’s ouster, the president said it would be a blunder on the scale of the Iraq invasion to use military force to topple a leader with a iron grip on Libya.
“Broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake,” he said. “If we tried to overthrow Gadhafi by force, our coalition would splinter. We would likely have to put U.S. troops on the ground, or risk killing many civilians from the air.”
Addressing his critics directly, Obama said the U.S. and its NATO partners needed to act quickly in Libya to deter greater bloodshed that would have “stained the conscience of the world.” At the same time, however, the president insisted that the United States would by Wednesday turn over to NATO responsibility for enforcing the no-fly zone over Libya and to aid rebels fighting Gadhafi’s superior military forces.
Obama’s speech comes after a week in which both Republicans and Democrats criticized his decision to intervene in the crisis in Libya, including lawmakers who said he should have consulted at greater length with Congress before committing an already stretched military to a third front.
The speech left many Republicans wanting a stronger declaration against Gadhafi.
“Gadhafi must have been comforted” by the president’s remarks on regime change, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told CNN after the speech, comparing the strategy to the first Gulf War. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said the speech failed to give Americans clarity on the war.
