Janet Daley: If the Founding Fathers could see Obama now
[Janet Daley is an American-born British journalist who is currently a columnist and leader writer for the Daily Telegraph.]
So the West got it together in the end. By the time you read this, it may be clearer whether that happened at five minutes to midnight or five minutes past. If the latter – if it proves to be too late for the people of Libya – then the blame will lie almost entirely at the door of the Obama administration. After weeks of dithering and mixed signals (remember that jibe from the US Defence Secretary about David Cameron’s “loose talk”?) punctuated by periods of impenetrable silence, the White House had a sudden epiphany and declared itself in favour of a UN resolution allowing much more than a no-fly zone.
The word from Washington is that Hillary Clinton was behind this conversion: Barack Obama had joked publicly about the pressure that the Secretary of State was putting on him to overcome his reservations – which seemed to revolve primarily around his reluctance to bear any resemblance to his predecessor in the run-up to what is clearly going to be a difficult election. But the history of this ignominious chapter in American foreign policy is already being re-written in Washington with an enthusiastic chorus of support from Obama fans here: on Friday, Labour backbenchers and the BBC were already suggesting that all this apparent floundering was actually part of a superbly clever strategy. America had deliberately refrained from taking the lead on Libya, thus allowing “space” for the Arab nations and the UN to “take their proper place” as the authors of any intervention policy. Contrary to appearances then, Mr Obama is not out of his depth. Neither is he a cynic who secretly wants to keep Gaddafi in power for the sake of a quiet life (sometimes known as “stability in the region”) while he struggles with Congress over his tricky domestic programme. In other words, they were only pretending to be useless: it may have looked like a collapse of moral leadership to you but it really went completely according to plan.
Even if we take this wildly charitable interpretation at face value, what does it say about the role that America is choosing to adopt on the global stage? That in future we can expect it to follow rather than lead? That it has abdicated its role as defender and standard bearer for the principle of freedom – the idea that all men are born with inalienable rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, which the great founding documents of the United States declare to be universal and not simply the birthright of residents of one nation? If America is now to make its commitment to those values conditional – even when the oppressed populations of totalitarian countries are putting their lives at risk to embrace them – then we are living in a very different world from the one to which we have been accustomed. And this is a far, far bigger leap than is assumed by the champions of “international law” and multinational bodies who are happy to see America take a back seat – at least until the ammunition starts to fly...
Read entire article at Telegraph (UK)
So the West got it together in the end. By the time you read this, it may be clearer whether that happened at five minutes to midnight or five minutes past. If the latter – if it proves to be too late for the people of Libya – then the blame will lie almost entirely at the door of the Obama administration. After weeks of dithering and mixed signals (remember that jibe from the US Defence Secretary about David Cameron’s “loose talk”?) punctuated by periods of impenetrable silence, the White House had a sudden epiphany and declared itself in favour of a UN resolution allowing much more than a no-fly zone.
The word from Washington is that Hillary Clinton was behind this conversion: Barack Obama had joked publicly about the pressure that the Secretary of State was putting on him to overcome his reservations – which seemed to revolve primarily around his reluctance to bear any resemblance to his predecessor in the run-up to what is clearly going to be a difficult election. But the history of this ignominious chapter in American foreign policy is already being re-written in Washington with an enthusiastic chorus of support from Obama fans here: on Friday, Labour backbenchers and the BBC were already suggesting that all this apparent floundering was actually part of a superbly clever strategy. America had deliberately refrained from taking the lead on Libya, thus allowing “space” for the Arab nations and the UN to “take their proper place” as the authors of any intervention policy. Contrary to appearances then, Mr Obama is not out of his depth. Neither is he a cynic who secretly wants to keep Gaddafi in power for the sake of a quiet life (sometimes known as “stability in the region”) while he struggles with Congress over his tricky domestic programme. In other words, they were only pretending to be useless: it may have looked like a collapse of moral leadership to you but it really went completely according to plan.
Even if we take this wildly charitable interpretation at face value, what does it say about the role that America is choosing to adopt on the global stage? That in future we can expect it to follow rather than lead? That it has abdicated its role as defender and standard bearer for the principle of freedom – the idea that all men are born with inalienable rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, which the great founding documents of the United States declare to be universal and not simply the birthright of residents of one nation? If America is now to make its commitment to those values conditional – even when the oppressed populations of totalitarian countries are putting their lives at risk to embrace them – then we are living in a very different world from the one to which we have been accustomed. And this is a far, far bigger leap than is assumed by the champions of “international law” and multinational bodies who are happy to see America take a back seat – at least until the ammunition starts to fly...