Taken from The Highchair Analyst
In the midst of Egypt's uprising, a couple days after Mubarak stepped down, and before events in Libya spiraled the way they have, I wrote about Obama's Plan saying,
It’s not that Obama isn’t a student of history without a clue, it’s precisely BECAUSE he and his advisers have followed history that they reacted in the way that they have. The events that are occurring all over the Middle East are not about, created or directed by the United States, they are indigenous movements spawned from the aspirations of people.
We are in an age that allows us to be both incredibly global and local at the same time, but that doesn’t mean just because we can see what’s going across the oceans that we need to be anything other than spectators. We don’t need to bring democracy to anyone, like Prometheus gifting fire to humanity, the world is a pretty capable place and it’s a symptom of American Arrogance to think anything otherwise.
An Age of American Observation doesn't mean an Age of American Isolation either. It means being a global listener and observer and entering into meaningful dialogue that is neither dictations nor ultimatums. We have an almost uniquely American need for ACTION, and often that comes at the expense of our observations and prevents measured and thought out behavior.
While unfortunately restraint indeed gave way to action in Libya, I believe that this was not Obama's first choice. If indeed American military involvement is going to last "days, not weeks," I think that much of what I've said remains true: Obama would prefer to stay on the sidelines as events in MENA play out as an extremely interested observer and not as a nation builder or in another expanded role.
Finding myself going back to Obama's Cairo speech, two moments in his address keep striking me. Firstly, Obama's acknowledgment that, "tension [between the West and Muslim world] has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations." And secondly his statement that, "[when] innocents in Bosnia and Darfur are slaughtered, that is a stain on our collective conscience. That is what it means to share this world in the 21st century. That is the responsibility we have to one another as human beings." When held together, these two lines are definitive of what is happening in Libya right now. They signify Obama's balancing act to both move away from a perspective that didn't pay any heed to Arab agency while also maintaining a global responsibility for humanitarian issues and human rights.
This is a much greater test for Obama than Egypt ever was. In Egypt he could commend the Egyptian people for taking hold of their future, while defending their human rights without having to do much more than talk. But in Libya, in order to maintain the second of these two principles, having witnessed the Libyan people's desire to claim the first, he saw it necessary to intervene. Yet by doing so, he may have risked the very thing he is seeking to protect--the independence of Libyan aspirations. Now the same powers that have played their colonial chess games have returned as post-colonial saviors in a new iteration of two steps forward, one step back.
Let's hope we, and all the interventionist powers, indeed stick to a limited timetable, otherwise we may destroy whatever it is we are hoping to save.