The Obama Doctrine’s outlines are clear, but the details are hard to make out

[ProSense]

The Obama Doctrine’s outlines are clear, but the details are hard to make out

By Eugene Robinson

The Obama Doctrine, it turns out, is not for the meek.

Tonight, a president portrayed by his critics as professorial and bloodless expounded a theory of U.S. military power that was muscular and unapologetic. President Obama vowed to use force not only in situations where vital U.S. interests are at stake, but also to defend our most deeply held values.

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“To brush aside America’s responsibility as a leader — and more importantly, our responsibility to our fellow human beings — under those circumstances would be a betrayal of who we are,” he said. “As president, I refuse to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.”

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Obama was less than charitable to previous administrations. In a subtle swipe at Bill Clinton, he noted that it took a year to mount an intervention to halt the carnage in Bosnia, while in Libya it took just 31 days. In a not-at-all-subtle dig at George W. Bush, he explained his refusal to expand the Libya mission to include regime change by saying that “to be blunt, we went down that road in Iraq.”

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The good thing is that the President doesn't have to answer questions in the aftermath of a massacre. Could you imagine?

[tabatha]

1. K n R.

[dkf]

2. This is like talking about preventing the economic collapse that never happened. .

You still get rapped because you can't really prove you saved anything.

[ProSense]

5. Really?

"This is like talking about preventing the economic collapse that never happened"?

We're not doomed?

No, it's not remotely the same friggin thing.

[Igel]

3. I can imagine.

I can imagine all the countless lives saved by massacres that wouldn't have happened, clearly written on the ledger opposite all the lives taken in order to prevent the imaginary massacres. It's rather like jobs saved from being lost, and the only evidence that they would have been lost is a model that can't actually be falsified.

I can also imagine events that occur with little warning or heed, where for all our bloviating about values we fail to recognize a humanitarian disaster that looms and then actually occurs, where a bit of genocide occurs where we simply weren't looking. And the self-flagellation for failing to enforce our moral code around the world when it's our responsibility to ensure others' righteousness.

[ProSense]

6. I can imagine

the compassionate conservative (fuck em) mentality becoming the norm. Are we there yet?

[Life Long Dem]

4. I don't think there was a choice.

How fair would it have been with the slaughter from the air by the Libyan military? That's hard to sit back and imagine.

[Vattel]

7. It seems likely that in the short term

our intervention in Libya is saving many innocent lives. If only the United States actually limited its use of military power to such interventions. I wish Obama had the courage to be much more critical of Bush's war in Iraq than he has been, but in this speech he at least suggested that we can't afford to go down that path again at this time.

[bhikkhu]

8. I think one point is - there is no doctrine

just as no two countries or no two points in time are equivalent, Obama has made it clear that we are not setting up some doctrine that must apply in any other case. As much as people like having some simple rule or other to go by, there's little in the study of history to recommend them.

"Nuanced" is a good word for the perspective, which I'm happy to see a president apply.