Obama Doctrine Like Bush's, But with an Eye on the Costs
"The
president, who pursued his election campaign with slogans that were almost openly
pacifist, is now attempting to be seen as someone far less aggressive than Bush,
but much more prepared to use military force than the last Democratic U.S.
president, Bill Clinton."
America under the leadership
of Barack Obama will lead the country to war - but only when it can afford it,
said the U.S. president in one of his most important foreign policy speeches to
date [video below].
After being pressed for weeks
by the media and political allies and adversaries, Barack Obama finally decided
to outline his reasons for ordering the attack on Libya. During his speech Monday
night, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate explained why the use of force is
sometimes unavoidable.
According
to Obama, America has a moral obligation to send troops to different parts
of the world in the obvious case - when its national security is in danger,
but also "when our safety is not directly threatened, but our interests
and our values are."
That single sentence has led many
conservatives and supporters of the U.S. right claim that the Obama Doctrine almost
exactly coincides with Bush's dogma. But unlike the former president, Obama
sets an added condition: when deciding on the use of force, "given the costs and risks of intervention, we must always
measure our interests against the need for action.
Obama decided to strike Libya
- as he said in his speech - because he felt that the massacre of civilians
might be prevented with a fairly small amount of resources and with minimal risk
to the lives of American soldiers. As he said, a second Iraq "is not
something we can afford to repeat in Libya."
The president, who pursued his
election campaign with slogans that were almost openly pacifist, is now
attempting to be seen as someone far less aggressive than Bush, but much more prepared
to use military force than the last Democratic U.S. president, Bill Clinton.
Hence in his speech, which
was in large part devoted not to Libya, but to his overall vision of American
leadership in the world, Obama mentioned the two major wars of the two former
presidents.
On the one hand, America
cannot afford to repeat the mistakes that were made in Iraq (i.e.: Bush's war),
but on the other hand, the world cannot delay the provision of aid to citizens
being murdered by their own leaders, as occurred in the 1990s. Speaking of Clinton's
most significant war, NATO's intervention in Bosnia, Obama said, "It took the international community more than a year to
intervene with air power to protect civilians. It took us 31 days [in Libya]."
Posted by WORLDMEETS.US
"At this particular moment, we were faced with the
prospect of violence on a horrific scale. We had a unique ability to stop that
violence: an international mandate for action, a broad coalition prepared to
join us, the support of Arab countries, and a plea for help from the Libyan
people themselves. We also had the ability to stop Qaddafi’s forces in their
tracks without putting American troops on the ground."
This means that where such
ideal conditions do not exist, even such bloodshed would not persuade Obama to
intervene. Syria's revolutionaries can count only on themselves.
"America is prepared to use force"
- the president says - if it deems such actions to be moral, but drawing from
the lessons of Iraq, only when it won't have to fight alone, and where
there is a minimum likelihood of casualties among American soldiers.
But at the same time, Obama made
it clear that he will support the Arab Spring. He even compared events in Syria,
Yemen, Egypt and Libya to the 18th century American War of Independence, saying,
"Born, as we are, out of a revolution by those who longed to be free, we
welcome the fact that history is on the move in the Middle East and North
Africa."
America's first African-American
president even went a step further, saying that America must be the North Star
for enslaved peoples, showing the way toward freedom.
For those familiar with the
history of black-skinned Americans, this is a very clear allusion. The North
Star was the title of the newspaper published by legendary abolitionist
leader Frederick
Douglass. The newspaper, which encouraged U.S. slaves in the South to take break
their shackles and join the fight for freedom, did so without supporting resort
to violence though.
