Everyone loves a winner and the fall of Muammar Gaddafi from power in Libya was certainly a winning proposition for U.S. interests. So should the Obama administration get credit for it?
According to Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, the Obama administration should, but not without some criticism. On Monday’s broadcast of “Special Report” on the Fox News Channel, he explained.
“It’s a good day for Libyans, America, and the world, but — and, I must say, Obama for the policy instituted. However, as John McCain has said, and I think he is right, this took longer and it cost more lives that it should be. All of these events, these revolutions have two phases. They happened in Afghanistan and it happened here. Chapter one, get rid of the regime. And then chapter two is stabilization.”
Krauthammer explained that Libya should have been easier to topple than Afghanistan and Iraq because it lacked the geographic obstacles of those two nations.
“Compare chapter one in three cases – Afghanistan, it took 63 days,” he continued. “That is a landlocked country, difficult access, no access on the ground. Iraq took three weeks – a small opening to the sea into Basra, no access from the north as a result of the Turks denying us access. Libya is a dictatorship with cardboard army lying on a long coastline with essentially nothing else on the doorstep of the Mediterranean in reach of American and European naval and air assets, and it took six months. It shouldn’t have. But, yes, in the end it did work, and I think the administration ought to get at least the credit for getting us involved even though it was late and slow.”