Is President Obama Playing the Role of Hamlet?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

Who could have imaged that, three weeks into a rebellion against the mad despot Moammar Gadhafi’s repressive rule in Libya, the world’s most powerful nation would continue to sit on the sidelines, offering little but platitudes and wringing its hands?

Barack Obama seems so afraid of Gadhafi’s shadow that won’t even commit to a no-fly zone over Libya, to prevent Gadhafi from butchering his own people from the air. The most absurd rationalizations are offered up as excuses to do nothing. Obama makes Hamlet look decisive.

General Merrill McPeak, a former U.S. Air Force chief of staff, who helped oversee no-fly zones in Iraq and the Adriatic, told the New York Times that he is mystified by the lack of action.

“I can’t imagine an easier military problem,” he said. “If we can’t impose a no-fly zone over a not even third-rate military power like Libya, then we ought to take a hell of a lot of our military budget and spend it on something usable.” Well stated.

He continued: “Just flying a few jets across the top of the friendlies would probably be enough to ground the Libyan Air Force, which is the objective. If we can’t do this, what can we do?” he added.

Along with a no-fly zone, another important step would be to use American military aircraft to jam Libyan state television and radio propaganda and Libyan military communications. General McPeak said such jamming would be “dead easy.”

It would be bad enough if Obama did nothing and said nothing. Instead, day after day, like a broken record, he keeps calling for Gadhafi to step down. (I’m sure the Tripoli tyrant finds this amusing.)

Obama is now in the political equivalent of a rundown play in baseball. This situation occurs when the base runner is stranded between two bases.

When he attempts to advance to the next base, he is cut off by the defensive player, and attempts to return to his previous base before being tagged out.

As he is doing this, the defense-man throws the ball past the base runner to the previous base, forcing him to reverse directions again. This is repeated until the runner is put out.

Should Gadhafi lose to the opposition – increasingly unlikely, as things now stand – Obama will get no credit; he ignored their pleas for help.

However, should the dictator prevail, what is Obama going to do?

Pretend he never said those “nasty” things about the great leader? Try to go back to business as before? There won’t be enough eggs in the world to cover his face!

This American passivity will make the United States look worse in the Arab world than it did before these revolutions against oppression began.

All the people who already hated the United States because of its support for dictators (and Israel) will continue to do so.

But now those who expected America to help them gain freedom from thugs like Gadhafi will also despise it.

As Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum has remarked, Obama is about to learn a lesson: “because of America’s size and military power, the American president does not have the option to remain neutral indefinitely, to let others lead or to offer mere moral encouragement – even though those are the policies this president would prefer.”