What Is U.S. National Interest In Libya?

Libya: As the coalition buckles and the objectives of our Libyan adventure remain a mystery, a neglected question has emerged: Is President Obama surreptitiously reshaping U.S. values?

Last Friday, in an article about how President Obama "turned on a dime toward war" in Libya, Foreign Policy magazine reported on a group of outside "experts" at a White House meeting who were told by "a senior administration official" that attacking Libya was "the greatest opportunity to realign our interests and our values" — a quote "from Obama himself," according to the official.

Right now, Libya looks like an object lesson in the failure of multilateralism.

The official objective is to save civilians, but the president says Gadhafi must go. The U.N.'s official aim is only "to protect civilians and civilian-populated areas under threat of attack." Yet 2,200 Marines from Camp Lejeune in North Carolina have been given the mission of "protecting the Libyan people from Gadhafi forces."

Are we helping the Libyan rebels? "I haven't had any unofficial communications or official communications" with the opposition forces, the operations commander, Adm. Samuel Locklear, tells reporters.

Who'll ultimately be running military efforts in Libya?

"This is still being worked in Brussels," according to the National Security Council. Who'll pay for establishing a no-fly zone costing $400 million to $800 million, then maybe $100 million a week to maintain? That's as unknown as Operation Odyssey Dawn's objectives.

The U.S. appears to be doing the U.N.'s bidding in Libya. But is there another goal that has less to do with Libya than with transforming America's global role?

Hudson Institute and Ethics and Public Policy scholar Stanley Kurtz on Tuesday reminded National Review Online readers that "Obama has had a longstanding interest in multilateral efforts to combat war crimes and genocide." Kurtz notes that Obama's senior director for multilateral engagement in the National Security Council, Samantha Power, has been seeking a way "to solidify the principle of 'responsibility to protect' in international law," which "requires a 'pure' case of intervention on humanitarian grounds." Libya may fit perfectly.

It would explain why Obama didn't go to Congress; as Kurtz put it, "he cannot afford to specify broader ideological motivations he knows the public won't buy."

But it also exposes this administration's hypocrisy.

Campaigning in Iowa in 2007, Vice President Joe Biden said that based on a treatise he had five leading constitutional scholars draft, if President Bush "takes this nation to war in Iran without congressional approval, I will make it my business to impeach him."

Islamofascist Iran, with its nuclear weapon ambitions, is a real threat to the U.S. The dangers of Gadhafi, whose nuke program was neutralized by the Bush administration, pale in comparison.

If the left's "responsibility to protect" ideology is to become official U.S. foreign policy, it should be debated openly first.