Obama has embraced the Bartlett Doctrine

If you watched The West Wing, you might recall a plotline in the fourth season revolving around "Equatorial Kundu," where there was a tribal genocide occurring, and where President Bartlett decided to intervene, saying that until that day, the United States had never before practiced a doctrine of military intervention on purely humanitarian grounds.

That line, broadcast in 2003, can no longer be said to be accurate. We have fundamentally involved ourselves in a tribal conflict; acting to protect a population from oppression and murder at the hands of its own government and leadership, where our fundamental interests were based on conscience and a "common humanity," instead of essential interests.

Obama's line is that he skirted the full responsibility by placing this on international backs, but no one can doubt that we've seen American leadership at full display in the courtyard of international relations. We own this struggle now, and my greatest fear is that we will now be perceived to be in a proxy war, requiring more resources until our patience with the rebels has ended.

Possibly, possibly, they may succeed. But if the fundamentals of this conflict are geographically based on tribe, then I think al-Qaḏḏāfī will remain, and every day he stays in place will weaken perceptions of American power. I could be wrong - God willing, the President has intelligence that says otherwise, and may those events come to pass, but this is a big risk, and one that will have to be paid for, one way or the other, by Americans who never voted for any of the people that go us into this.


Perhaps all of our bombings have been about preventing genocide, but last I checked, many of the tanks we hit weren't on their way into Benghazi.