Obama sings his half-step with the Arab Spring

Much has been written about the tension between Obama the idealist, spokesman and putative embodiment of American ideals that he loves to cast as universal, and Obama the realist, coldly pursuing American interests, often with stealth lethality, and weighing the costs of intervention with hyper-rationality. 

With that tension in mind, take a look at Obama's careful presentation to the U.N. of American response to the Arab Spring (my emphasis):

The slippage in Obama's "days, not weeks" promise

James Fallows, soberly upbraiding Obama for blowing off Congress in his prosecution of the isn't-war in Libya, repeats a quasi-misconception that in an odd way illustrates his point.  Arguing that Obama set himself up for Congressional rebuke by not seeking Congressional buy-in from the start, he writes:

This was a problem foreseeable from the very start* -- more than three months ago, when we were told that this would be a campaign of "days, not weeks."

Obama did not quite say that -- though there is some ambiguity in reports of what he did say on the two occasions when he used the phrase "days, not weeks."

First, on March 18, ABC's Jake Tapper relayed second hand what Obama reputedly said behind closed doors to Members of Congress.  The headline of the short item misrepresents the body content:

O Captain! My Captain! Make us all get in the boat together....

Anne Applebaum invites us to imagine "that President Obama had spent the past few weeks denouncing Moammar Gaddafi, using the soaring rhetoric he has deployed in the past." The results would not be pretty:

Had he done all of that, there would certainly be fewer European members of the “coalition of the willing” that has formed, tentatively, to prevent Gaddafi from entering Benghazi: I can’t see the French or the Spanish falling in behind an aggressive-sounding American campaign. There would probably be no Arab coalition members either...

Enthusiasm and soaring rhetoric would also now lock the United States and its allies into an implied set of promises. If we’d compared Gaddafi to Hitler we’d have to eliminate him. If democracy were the only solution in Libya, we’d have to stay in Libya until it was democratic. If Obama had been talking about nothing else for the past three weeks, his entire presidency would be on the line.

Does that mode of "leadership" in response to the Libyan uprising remind you of anything?  Remember all those calls for a Presidential crusade against the structural budget deficit? The urgings that he embrace the Bowles-Simpson plan, or lay out a detailed blueprint of his own in the State of the Union address and/or in his proposed budget? Obama has been quite explicit about why he refrained from doing this:

“If you look at history of how these deals get done, typically it’s not because there’s an Obama plan out there. Its’ because Democrats and Republican are serious about dealing with [these issues] in a serious way,” the president said. “This is not a matter of you go first or I go first,” he said before describing a goal of “everybody…ultimately getting in that boat at the same time so it doesn’t tip over.”

No risk-free course in Libya

Max Hastings writes a powerful brief in today's FT against yet another military plunge into the unknown in Libya:

The first principle for any nation using force is to ensure it succeeds. But in Iraq and Afghanistan the west has learnt that unseating regimes is relatively easy; the hard part is to promote acceptable alternatives.

The intelligence failure in Libya, and indeed across the Maghreb, has proved absolute. Western leaders know almost nothing either about the Libyan insurgents or about what is happening on the ground. It would be madness to commit US and allied forces to destroy Col Gaddafi, with no notion of what would follow.

What Hastings doesn't acknowledge, though, are the perhaps equally fraught consequences of standing aside. He overstates the upside of eschewing military intervention: