Our feeble Libya policy - Washington Post (blog)

The perception that the Obama administration's Middle East policy is feeble, if not pathetic, grows daily. This report makes clear how little we are doing in comparison to our allies:

British and German military planes swooped into Libya's desert, rescuing hundreds of oil workers and civilians stranded at remote sites, as thousands of other foreigners are still stuck in Tripoli by bad weather and red tape.

The secret military missions into the turbulent North Africa country signal the readiness of Western nations to disregard Libya's territorial integrity when it comes to the safety of their citizens.

Three British Royal Air Force planes plucked 150 stranded civilians from multiple locations in the eastern Libyan desert before flying them to Malta on Sunday, the British Defense Ministry said in a statement.

The rescue follows a similar secret commando raid Saturday by British Special Forces that got another 150 oil workers from the remote Libyan desert.

Separately, Germany said its air force had evacuated 132 people also from the desert during a secret military mission on Saturday.

As Jamie Fly, executive director of the Foreign Policy Initiative, put it to me this morning: "First the Chinese; now we are being outdone by the Germans and the British."

In a real and very visible way we have ceded leadership. Writing in Politico over the weekend, Paul Wolfowitz of the American Enterprise Institute and Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution argue for more robust action, even if the administration insists on multilateralism. They suggest four course corrections:

1) Immediate organization of humanitarian relief efforts;

2) An explicit decision that Qadhafi must go as a matter of U.S. policy -- which, it appears, has just been announced;

3) Establishment of a dialogue with anti-Qadhafi forces in the liberated cities;

4) Immediate diplomatic action to pave the way for international action of a more forceful sort should the situation take further turns for the worse in Libya.

In a separate piece in the Enterprise blog, Wolfowitz questions whether the arms embargo that was part of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1970 does more harm than good. From a summary of the resolution, Wolfowitz relates that the resolution appears to bar arms from going to either side in Libya.

He cautions:

No one who is thinking of supplying Qaddafi with arms at this point is going to care about what a UN resolution says. So this provision has no effect on Qaddafi now, though it might have sent a useful signal a week earlier.

However, the United States and other countries who might supply the rebels may not be able to legally do so until the resolution is changed. This will cause further delay and put weight on the side of those who are probably arguing that supplying arms to anyone would represent too much U.S. involvement.

If that sounds absurd, it is exactly what the United States and the "international community" did at the outset of the war in Bosnia 19 years ago. The embargo on the Bosnians remained in effect for years, depriving them of the means to defend themselves, with the argument advanced that supplying arms to either side would simply prolong the war. In fact, what prolonged the war was the weakness of the Bosnians. By depriving them of the means to defend themselves, the arms embargo caused tens of thousands of deaths and eventually required the United States to intervene militarily, deploying tens of thousands of American troops over the course of a decade. It left the government of Bosnia permanently shattered and strengthened radical influences, including foreign Islamist extremists, in Bosnian politics.

In other words, the U.S. has abdicated its role of international leadership, and what we are doing might be counterproductive. If not its intention, the Obama foreign policy team has certainly managed to minimize America's profile and influence in the Middle East at a critical juncture.