When it came to American intervention into the hellhole of Libya, there seemed to have existed in every American mind a precise and ideal moment for that intervention. Of course there were roughly 300 million such ideal moments, which ranged from instantaneously to never and every second between, yet President Obama was somehow expected to satisfy each and every one of them. Ideally.
That he could not meet this existential impossibility has thus resulted in opinion columns, such as Richard Cohen's "Mixed signals from Obama and the Middle East," whose chief merit is their entertainment value.
It is one thing to decry American unilateralism and quite another to await international action when time is of the essence. It is not necessary for America always to lead, but it is sometimes necessary for it to do so — and always necessary for the president to know when that moment has arrived. Obama seems not to know.
And there you have it: From his desk at the Post Mr. Cohen perceived a precise and ideal moment, just as he grasped all the elaborate complexities of structuring international coalitions precisely and ideally, just as he knew when that necessary "sometime" had arrived, and just as he knew the president did not.
Confused? Well I should think so. Cohen's piece turns on itself: Having assaulted the Obama administration for "appl[ying] incoherence to confusion," it provides little else but High Indignation that in a region which Cohen freely characterizes as "a mess and a muddle," Obama did not -- perhaps because he could not? -- provide ringing clarity, on top of precise and ideal timing.
Some of us, Mr. Cohen, don't so much embrace complexity as we feel bound to accept it.
You write, for instance, that "Libya is — and ought to remain — a humanitarian mission, one that would have been better undertaken sooner rather than later by a unified administration that had a coherent message and was clear on its goals."
I've little patience with this sort of musing, what I guess one could call a kind of instant utopianism: Bad, bad Obama for having failed to pull together the perfect intervention, for having permitted complexities to reign, for having allowed some incoherence to peep through in a region magnificently known for its inescapable messiness and muddlement.
But thank you, Mr. Cohen, for at least coming through with the grandest of entertainment, which in your case was exemplied by utter incomprehension:
I don’t know whether it was appropriate for Obama to go through with his trip to South America, but it sure was symbolic. Here was his country entering yet another military operation, and there was the president in Brazil. The contrast was jarring — as if he was quite literally distancing himself from the consequences of his own policy.
I can understand that a partisan opponent would, after giving this a great deal of thought, level the thoughtless designation of a "jarring contrast." But as a keen observer of political symbolism, Mr. Cohen, how in God's name did you so altogether miss the meaning of Obama's uncancelled trip? -- that it resoundingly "symbolized" his restrained response to the Libya situation, that there was no reason for national panic, that we were but one among many, that the president was not charging up San Juan Hill.