Unless Obama gets very lucky, we are enmeshed in a new Mideast war.
To understand why, we must revisit how we got mixed up in Libya in the first place. For weeks Obama resisted any military involvement, for good reasons: Libya was not critical to U.S. security or Arab democracy and produces only 2 percent of the world's oil. And we still have tens of thousands of troops in two Muslim countries.
As Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates bluntly told West Point cadets last month, any U.S. leader who sent American troops into another Mideast war "should have his head examined."
So who or what changed the president's mind?
The buzz in Washington gives credit (or blame) to three women. Intervention was pushed by the National Security Council's human-rights expert, Samantha Power, who studied U.S. failures to stop mass murder in Bosnia and Rwanda, and by U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, who pushed (unsuccessfully) for U.S. intervention in Darfur. Power and Rice supposedly won over a reluctant Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton just as Moammar Gadhafi's troops were about to erase the last rebel stronghold in Benghazi.
I, too, believe a looming humanitarian crisis changed Obama's mind. But there are far worse humanitarian crises where we have avoided any intervention, especially when they involve civil warfare. So why Libya?
My guess is Obama's about-face was driven by two factors: the CNN-Al Jazeera-Facebook effect, and the over-the-top rhetoric of Libya's leader.
Much of the Mideast press corps moved en masse from Egypt across the border into Libya after Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak fell. So they were on hand to tell the tragic tales of beleaguered Libyan rebels and to broadcast video images forwarded by trapped civilians.
