President Obama, President Sarkozy, and Prime Minister Cameron take to today’s International Herald-Tribune op-ed page to clarify NATO’s mission in Libya:
Our duty and our mandate under U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973 is to protect civilians, and we are doing that. It is not to remove Qaddafi by force. But it is impossible to imagine a future for Libya with Qaddafi in power…
[S]o long as Qaddafi is in power, NATO must maintain its operations so that civilians remain protected and the pressure on the regime builds.
So there you have it: The military operation isn’t designed to topple the dictator, but the military operation will continue until the dictator is toppled. Naturally, there’s nothing in the op-ed about exactly how this toppling is supposed to happen.
