One of the more sadly amusing spectacles of the
American-European-Arab dance over Libya is the complete and utter
role-reversal that has taken place. Indeed, the Europeans are
leading; the Americans are following; and the Arabs are applauding
— publicly!
French jets are the ones now spearheading the attack on
Gaddafi’s forces in Libya. American pilots, meanwhile (despite some
late-breaking exceptions) mostly are sitting on their hands. As GOP
strategist Patrick Ruffini
quipped on Twitter, “In times like these, we look
to France for leadership.”
Whoa! What happened?
Well, despite everything that you heard when George W.
Bush was president, the fact is that the “international community”
does, indeed, look to the United States for leadership. And when
such leadership is lacking, or not forthcoming, the “international
community” starts to worry.
This seems to be what has happened re Libya.
On March 3, Obama said that Gaddafi “needs to step down
from power and leave.” He then did… nothing. Libya, apparently, was
not “our problem.”
Gaddafi’s mercenary army then proceeded to route the rebel
forces, and the Arab League got worried. Sane and moderate Arab
leaders, after all, have no use for Gaddafi, whom they
not-so-secretly loathe and fear.
So the Arab League did something that I’m not sure it has
ever done: It urged the United Nations to take military action
against a fellow Arab country. It voted for U.N. enforcement of a
no-fly zone over Libya.
Meanwhile, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British
Prime Minister David Cameron (both not coincidentally, political
conservatives) got spooked. Libya, after all, is in their backyard.
And Gaddafi, albeit neutered in recent years, has been an historic
and long-time terrorist sponsor.
Ultimately, then, everyone was urging the United States
to act and to
lead. And so, as I reported
here at the American
Spectator, Obama reluctantly agreed to support a
no-fly zone — so long, it seems, as the French and the British
spearheaded the operation.
Do our allies miss George W. Bush’s “cowboy diplomacy”?
They’d never admit it (at least not publicly), but I rather think
that’s the case. After all, as much as the Europeans and the Arabs
love to whine about us, the truth is they need us — and they know
it.
Indeed, as a frustrated Simon Tisdall
wrote last week in the English
newspaper, The Guardian: “No one wants to
act without the U.S… The EU’s pretensions to act as an independent
global power once again [have been] cruelly exposed.”
Tisdall may have spoken too soon. French jets, after all,
are now at the tip of the spear in Libya; and America, for the most
part, has been put to sea — literally.
It seems that all it took to unify Europe and to stiffen the
European spine was a weak and dithering American president. And if
that’s not progress, I don’t know what is.
