I think Roger Simon overstates the case a bit, but he certainly says what a lot of people are thinking: Jets over Libya as H. Clinton Assumes Presidency:
This division in our leadership could not have been more evident today watching Obama speak from Brazil followed by Clinton’s Paris conference. Obama was a blip, his vaunted verbal facility from the ’08 presidential election now seeming a distant memory from a particularly bland and pompous advertising campaign. Meanwhile, Clinton handled her press conference like a true statesman, fielding questions exactly with ready answers. She had thought things through and it showed. The woman had not been off playing golf or taking samba lessons in Corcovado. She obviously skipped the March Madness, as well, for more significant matters.
Like Roger, I am a hopeless neocon. So I sympathize with these sentiments:
I know there are some extreme libertarians that think Libya is none of our business — that we, and the international community, should stay out and let the locals blow each other to smithereens until the next dictator takes the throne or the old one keeps it and locks his enemies in torture chambers. Attractive and consoling as that idea may be, the world is nowhere near that simple. We live on a tiny globe that is shrinking by the moment for a myriad of reasons from instant communications to limited energy to a global economy. The bloodshed in Benghazi affects the refineries of Texas just as the tsunami at Fukushima rocks the boatyards of Crescent City. And those are only a couple of the most obvious instances this week.
We’re all in this together. Sorry.
And I have to tell you one other thing. Remember this: We’re Americans. Good is what we are supposed to do.
I would add this footnote: while there is no substitute for American leadership on the horizon, it is probably a good thing if Britain and France, both of which have more immediate interests in North Africa than we do, take the laboring oar on the current military action.
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