Obviously, this is intended to distract from the idiocy of Team Obama’s handling of Benghazi and the death of four Americans, before, during, and after. But, the Washington Post Editorial Board has a point of the overall rank incompetence of Obama regarding Libya
Other than the bombing? Pretty much everything.
REPUBLICANS HAVE a potentially strong case to make against the Obama administration’s handling of Libya, as the latest political developments there underline. On Sunday, a disputed vote in parliament led to the swearing-in of a new prime minister — the sixth since former dictator Moammar Gaddafi was overthrown in 2011 with the help of U.S. and NATO air forces. The new leader, an Islamist from the city of Misurata, replaced pro-Western prime minister Ali Zeidan, who was driven out of the country this year after his government proved unable to stop a militia from filling a tanker with stolen oil.
Awesome, another Islamist nation, thanks to Obama’s incompetence, inattention, and dithering. Unlike in Egypt, though, there is no strong military to take the nation back from the extremists.
From the safety of Europe, Mr. Zeidan conceded what was obvious all along: Libya’s post-Gaddafi government has no army and no way of establishing its authority over the hundreds of militias that sprang up in the vacuum that followed the revolution. Libya has fragmented into fiefdoms, its oil industry is virtually paralyzed, massive traffic in illegal weapons is supplying militants around the region and extremist groups such as Ansar al-Sharia, which participated in the Sept. 11, 2012, assault on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, are unchecked.
The Obama administration and its NATO allies bear responsibility for this mess because, having intervened to help rebels overthrow Gaddafi, they then swiftly exited without making a serious effort to help Libyans establish security and build a new political order. Congress might usefully probe why the administration allowed a country in which it initiated military operations to slide into chaos.
Essentially, Obama did what Obama always does: perform a seagull mission. Fly in, make a lot of noise, crap all over everything, then fly out, leaving the resulting mess for Someone Else.
It’s nice that the Washington Post is finally noticing that Libya is a mess. What, exactly, was Obama trying to do post-Gaddafi? Were there any plans? Any attempt to help the new government, particularly to stop the rise of Islamic extremists in the eastern part of the country?
Let’s face it, there was a dereliction of duty by Obama and his administration, but that is not unusual by this president, who likes to Be President, but doesn’t like to Do President. The hard work of getting things done seems to be beyond him, unless it is fundraising. He thinks making pronouncements is the same thing as fixing a problem. Having never run anything of importance, he doesn’t understand the phrase “inspect what you expect”. His runs a shiny quarter administration: he’s constantly distracted and moving on from issues. He doesn’t seem to be able to concentrate on more than one thing at once, and he quickly moves on. He doesn’t seem to want to do the hard work. And, thanks to all that incompetence, Libya is now a failed Islamic state, rife with hardcore Islamists. How, exactly, does that serve the national security of the United States, to have an Islamic state with a huge coastline in the western Mediterranean?
