Visual source: Newseum
NY Times:
The president made the right choice to act, but this is a war of choice, not necessity. Presidents should not commit the military to battle without consulting Congress and explaining their reasons to the American people.
Fortunately, initial coalition military operations have gone well. Unfortunately, it is the nature of war that they will not always go well. Mr. Obama needs to work with Congress and keep the public fully informed. On Monday, he made an overdue start on that.
Dana Milbank:
As a doctrine, Obama’s is maddeningly subtle. Cost-weighting can’t compete with “smoke ‘em out” and “dead or alive.” But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
The Villagers decide nuance is okay. The last guy didn't do "moral clarity" a lot of good as a doctrine.
Richard Cohen:
We heard some of those same sentiments expressed by opponents of U.S. intervention in Libya. I do not liken the situation there to the imminence of the Holocaust, only the startling willingness of good people to mask their cold indifference with appeals to fiscal prudence or something similar. Commentator after commentator, person after person, told me that the United States had no business interfering in Libya — that it needed an exit strategy or permission from Congress, and that if the United States could not intervene everywhere (Newt Gingrich mentioned Zimbabwe, manufacturing a civil war just for the occasion), then we could not intervene anywhere. This, somehow, gets stated as if were a logical principle — do nothing unless you can do everything.
Jonathan Capehart:
For a man who didn’t want to elevate U.S. actions in Libya to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq by delivering an Oval Office address, President Obama just delivered a speech worthy of the venue. Did it answer all of the questions asked by members of Congress on the right and the left, particularly the one about what victory would look like? Um, no. But Obama did state clearly why the United States stepped in to corral an international coalition and why it must relinquish its customary lead role.
Stephen Stromberg:
The plan bets on the relatively quick success of the Libyan opposition and the coalition’s ability to promote rebel efforts from afar. It could work. But if one or both of those are inadequate, we could we be patrolling Libya’s skies for a long time yet. The president didn’t fully explain why he doesn’t think this will happen.
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NY Times:
Last week, the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, an independent think tank in the United States, said that since the quake and its aftermath, the plant has already released far more radioactivity than the 1979 Three Mile Island accident. The institute, based in Takoma Park, Maryland, said that by March 22, the Fukushima reactors had released about 2.4 million curies of iodine 131, about 160,000 times the best estimate of the amount released at Three Mile Island, and about 10 percent of the amount released in Chernobyl in 1986. Fukushima Daiichi has also released half-a-million curies of cesium-134 and cesium-137, which have longer half lives, also about 10 percent the amount released in Chernobyl.
This is going to be a "long-haul" crisis with no quick fix. Figuring out where to put the radioactive water that's piling up there is today's new problem.