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Gadhafi’s fall another victory for Obama’s style
The death of Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi expands the growing string of security victories on President Barack Obama’s watch and reinforces his own style of dealing with enemies without immersing the United States in war. Even skeptics offered congratulations.
For Obama, the outcome allowed him to stand victorious in the Rose Garden on Thursday, taking note also of the death this year of prominent al-Qaida leaders at the hands of the United States.
His message: The United States showed it can help rally an international campaign to protect Libyans and rid the world of a killer without a single U.S. troop dying.
His vice president, Joe Biden, went further.
“This is more of the prescription for how to deal with the world as we go forward than it has been in the past,” Biden said in New Hampshire, as the administration sought again to distance itself from an era of politics once dominated by the Iraq war.
For Obama, the larger story is of an administration with deepening credibility on how to handle bad actors or international tinderboxes without immersing the United States in war.
It is not expected to impact his re-election chances; 2012 will be the economy election.
But it burnishes his standing on how to protect the country and work with the rest of the world.
As Obama likes to remind Americans, he is the president who hastened the end of the war in Iraq, and he is now winding down the one in Afghanistan after expanding it greatly. And in a span of months, the country has seen the demise of infamous men who either had killed Americans or haunted the United States by targeting it for terror attacks.
Obama’s ordered a daring special forces raid in Pakistan in May that led to the killing of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, the architect of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001.
Last month, a U.S. drone strike in the mountains of Yemen killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen and prominent al-Qaida figure who was deemed as having an operational role in plots against the U.S. The plots included two nearly catastrophic attacks on U.S.-bound planes, an airliner on Christmas 2009 and cargo planes last year.
And then came the confirmed reports Thursday that Gadhafi was dead. There were conflicting accounts on how he died, but little doubt he suffered a grisly end.
Libyans celebrated and Obama spoke of a victorious revolution for those who had suffered under Gadhafi’s rule.
“The dark shadow of tyranny has been lifted,” Obama said. He spoke of Gadhafi as a man who beat and killed his people and who for decades robbed a nation of its potential.
