The Silence on Libya

The Washington Post has a 3 page apologia explaining our relative silence on the massacre in Libya--it was all done to protect American lives there.

While the president has a duty to protect Americans around the world this story needs some boiling down-- it appears Obama's administration is chocked full of professors who are using world events to prove their theoretical concepts, while other advisors apparently would prefer thousands of dead Libyans so long as said president avoids a politically taxing extended American hostage crisis with Gadaffi, justifying the silence. There will be adequate time to condemn the violence and claim victory when the rebels are holding the dictator's head on a pike.

We don't know exactly what's going on behind the scenes but our public image is important too--it's what the world sees. Even Human Rights Watch seems perplexed:

"You usually expect the United States to take action and the Europeans to make statements," Tom Malinowski, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch, said last week before the sanctions were announced. "So far, though, that seems reversed."

And here's John McCain, still alive and pontificating:

Well, the British prime minister and the French president and others were not hesitant and they have citizens in that country. America leads.

Our current strategy seems to be 'leading from the rear'. Seriously, can anyone envision Obama authorizing the kind of daring and uncleared rescue the Brits just pulled off? Hopefully he has it in him, should a future crisis ever dictate, but from reading this article the question is whether his collegiate advisors and legal team would ever allow it.