OPINION_Not-so-great communicator

Not-so-great communicator

On Libya, Obama has once again undermined a justifiable policy by failing to explain it to Congress and the public.

Posted on Fri, Apr. 1, 2011
By Carl Leubsdorf

The revamped White House has a new chief of staff and a new press secretary. But President Obama's handling of the military action in Libya suggests he hasn't corrected his persistent problems communicating with Congress and the American people.

Those shortcomings undercut Obama's long fight for his far-ranging health-care reform bill. They also complicated his increasingly successful efforts to rescue the economy from the mess he inherited.

Now they've recurred as he moved from his initial reluctance to intervene in Libya to an active American military role in preventing the massacre of anti-government rebels and putting pressure on the brutal dictator Moammar Gadhafi. It's a major reason many Americans have doubts about a campaign that, considering the target, should be overwhelmingly popular.

On Monday, Obama finally delivered the nationally televised speech he should have made last week, defending the Libya campaign as necessary to prevent "a looming humanitarian crisis." By acting, he said, "we have stopped Gadhafi's deadly advance."

Simultaneously rejecting those who oppose any military action and placing limits on what the United States will do, Obama said he had no intention of using ground troops or broadening the effort to force "regime change" in Libya. Reinforcing the contrast with his predecessor, he said pointedly, "We went down that road in Iraq," noting that "regime change" took eight years, thousands of lives, and nearly $1 trillion.



The right thing

The irony is that, as with his much-derided economic stimulus and his controversial health plan, he is basically doing the right thing in Libya. Republican critics, especially in the Senate, seem to have conveniently forgotten that they voted for U.N. imposition of a no-fly zone, not to mention the inherent complexities of the situation.

Rather than a third U.S. war in an Islamic state, the Libya operation seems more like the campaign President Bill Clinton and NATO mounted a dozen years ago to protect ethnic Albanians in Kosovo from Serbian persecution. It caused more than 10,000 civilian deaths but minimal U.S. and allied casualties, and it led within a year to the ouster of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, who had been charged with crimes against humanity.

Interestingly, aside from the usual naysaying, antiwar liberals like Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich, most of the initial congressional criticism focused less on Obama's actions in Libya than on his failure to consult more with Congress and to give a better explanation to the American people. That criticism was valid because, in contrast to other presidents who have launched international hostilities, Obama announced the action and notified lawmakers in a manner that was cursory at best: an early-afternoon statement for the cameras, and a White House briefing for some congressional leaders a day after the U.N. Security Council voted to impose the no-fly zone.

Then Obama flew off to Latin America, where his main explanations of the Libya operation were at brief daytime news conferences with Latin American presidents - hardly the most effective venues for reaching the American people. Only after House Speaker John Boehner asked pointed questions about the mission and the president returned from his trip did his aides hold a second briefing and schedule Monday's speech.



Weak support

Polls illustrate the problem Obama caused himself. Support for the operation, while favorable, was well below that for prior U.S. military actions. In one recent Pew poll, fully half of those responding saw no clear goal.

Obama's speech won't fully satisfy those concerns for the simple reason that only time can answer the inevitable uncertainties. He wisely refused to set firm rules for future interventions, declaring that they would depend on both the circumstances and the prospects that U.S. actions would help.

And by stressing the substance of his actions, the president gave only passing acknowledgment of congressional complaints about the lack of prior consultation. He knows that this has been a common thread in legislative-presidential relations for nearly a half-century and that, in the end, the key factor will be the degree to which the Libya operation succeeds.



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Carl Leubsdorf is a former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. He can be reached at carl.p.leubsdorf@gmail.com.