WASHINGTON – The Obama administration defended its intervention in Libya on Sunday by suggesting that refugees fleeing Moammar Gadhafi’s regime would have destabilized neighboring Egypt and Tunisia.
President Barack Obama is struggling to convince a war-weary American public preoccupied by domestic economic concerns that US involvement in Libya is necessary, and that he has a clear idea of what the endgame is.
Lawmakers, including many from Obama’s own Democratic Party, are angry that Congress was not consulted before troops were deployed and have raised concerns that the Libya mission is ill-defined and the exit strategy unclear.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton toured the Sunday morning news shows, paving the way for Obama to deliver a prime-time address at 7:30 pm (2320 GMT) on Monday to answer his critics.
But a frank admission from Gates that Gadhafi did not pose an “actual or imminent threat” to the United States and that Libya was not a “vital interest” provided yet more ammunition to the president’s foes.
Obama mentioned in his weekly radio message that intervention was in the “national interest” and Senator Richard Lugar, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, jumped on the apparent contradiction.
“Well, I was startled to hear Secretary Gates say that Libya was not a vital interest,” Lugar told NBC’s “Meet the Press” program.
“I think there should have been a plan for what our objectives were; a debate as to why this was in our vital interest before we committed military forces to Libya.”
Gates and Clinton offered the usual argument that the United States had to intervene quickly in Libya for humanitarian reasons and also made a broader case that inaction would have had disastrous knock-on effects for the region.
“It was not a vital national interest to the United States, but it was an interest,” Gates told ABC’s “This Week” program, pointing to the possibility of a mass exodus of refugees that could have overwhelmed Tunisia and Egypt.
“So you had a potentially significantly destabilizing event taking place in Libya that put at risk potentially the revolutions in both Tunisia and Egypt.
“Egypt is central to the future of the Middle East,” Gates added.
Speaking alongside him, Clinton urged critics to ask themselves where things would be now if the United States had not intervened.
“Imagine we were sitting here and Benghazi had been overrun, a city of 700,000 people, and tens of thousands of people had been slaughtered, hundreds of thousands had fled… either with nowhere to go or overwhelming Egypt while it’s in its own difficult transition,” she said.
“The cries would be, ‘why did the United States not do anything? How could you stand by when, you know, France, and the United Kingdom, and other Europeans, and the Arab League, and your Arab partners were saying, ‘You’ve got to do something?'”
The pair also sought to allay fears that the United States would get bogged down in a protracted conflict in Libya by highlighting the limited scope of the mission and, in particular, of the US role in that mission.
Pressed by Western powers, notably the United States, to take the helm as swiftly as possible, NATO ambassadors agreed at a meeting Sunday in Brussels to take command of all Libyan military operations.
As rebels, aided by coalition air strikes, wrested back control of several key Libyan towns from Gadhafi’s ground forces and pressed on westward toward Tripoli, Gates and Clinton appeared optimistic.
“Don’t underestimate the potential for elements of the regime themselves to crack,” Gates told CBS’s “Face the Nation” program.
Clinton said the allies would be encouraging defections through a UN special envoy, former Jordanian foreign minister Abdul Ilah Khatib, who is due to visit both Tripoli and the rebel stronghold of Benghazi.
Clinton told NBC the envoy’s message to Gadhafi and his cohorts would be: “‘Do you really want to be a pariah? Do you really want to end up in the international criminal court? Now is your time to get out of this and to help change the direction.'”
Clinton joins foreign ministers from 35 other countries Tuesday in London to discuss the Libya conflict before she and Gates can expect tough questioning behind closed-doors from congressional committees on Wednesday.
The White House said Obama planned to follow up his Monday night address by giving interviews with three network anchors on Libya on Tuesday.