Courageous and optimistic, he knew the country he was assigned to like no other diplomat. His tragic death leaves an enormous hole in the American foreign service—and in Washington’s fitful dealings with the Arab world.
Libya
A Victim of Others’ Idiocy: U.S. Ambassador to Libya Killed in Benghazi
The news of the killing of Chris Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, in an attack at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi is bitter. It was Benghazi, after all, that was the heart of the Libyan revolution last year. Libyan leader …
The Military Lessons of Gaddafi’s Fall
Moammar Gaddafi’s death makes for an interesting punctuation mark in the ever-evolving U.S. approach to war. The key issue: is it an exclamation point (“We got him! And not a single American died!) or a question mark (“Did we …
Hillary Clinton’s Priorities in Libya
Hillary Clinton landed in Tripoli on Tuesday morning on an unannounced visit, the first to Libya by a U.S. cabinet official since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi. Shifting from her regular State Department plane to a C-17 in Malta for security reasons, Clinton and her staff are taking the trip as a combination of victory lap, exercise in …
Strange Bedfellows: The Weekly Standard and Obama
The latest Weekly Standard opens with a remarkable editorial on Libya, offering some of the kindest words about the Obama administration you’ll ever read in the conservative media. It’s true that the Robert Kagan piece casts the fall of the Gaddafi regime as a triumph for “the United States and NATO.” And it isn’t until its seventh …
Lessons in Libya
In this week’s issue of the magazine, now available on tablets and the web to subscribers, Fareed Zakaria argues the U.S.’s restrained role in the Libya campaign was everything the invasion of Iraq wasn’t:
In deciding whether to intervene, President Obama was clearly trying to avoid the mistakes of Iraq. He insisted on a set of
…
You Remember Libya
While Washington was dealing with the absolutely crucial debt ceiling waste of time, the world has remained in business…or, perhaps, in chaos. Libya, for example. No sooner did the primary western countries, including the U.S., recognize the Libyan rebel “government,” than did that government start fracturing. A military leader was …
The Libya Conundrum
The House of Representatives on Friday is expected to hold two votes on U.S. action in Libya. One will fail and one will pass. House GOP leaders are hoping that the Democratic-controlled Senate will take up the one that passes. …
White House: Libya Campaign Isn’t War – UPDATED
The United States is not engaged in a war with Libya and the War Powers Resolution does not apply to U.S. military action there, according to two White House officials who briefed reporters on Wednesday. “We’re now in a …
Congress Clashes With Another President Over War Powers
The right and the left are taking President Obama to task over his involvement in Libya. House Speaker John Boehner sent the President a letter on Tuesday informing him that as of this weekend, he will be in violation of the War …
Gaddafi’s Corporate Quislings
Things are looking increasingly bleak for Muammar Gaddafi, as the West and its allies continue to pressure those in his inner circle to abandon him. But Gaddafi isn’t the only uncomfortable one, as revelations continue to emerge about the massive, immoral suck-up western companies undertook during the dictator’s brief period of …
A Silver Lining in Libya
With the NATO campaign in Libya growing ever more thorny (and tragic), the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen, conceded that the fight between the rebels and pro-government forces is “moving towards stalemate.” And it’s not clear how that stalemate will be broken. Western countries don’t want any substantial escalation of …
The Knee Jerks…As Expected
It was inevitable, of course, that the neoconservatives egging Obama into action in Libya would start sliming him when things got…complicated (as some of us predicted they would). So here’s Pete Wehner on the current situation: