WASHINGTON—The death of Libyan leader Moammar 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 US 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 reelection chances; 2012 will be the economy election.
It burnishes his standing, however, on how to protect the country and work with the rest of the world.
Bin Laden killing
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 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 US 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 US. The plots included two nearly catastrophic attacks on US-bound planes, an airliner in 2009 as it tried to land in the United States and cargo planes last year.
Then came the confirmed reports on Thursday that Gadhafi was dead.
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.
Early criticisms
What the president did not note was the criticism he faced from some members of Congress earlier in the campaign, long before rebels got their foothold in overthrowing Gadhafi. Obama had gotten heat on various fronts: First for acting too slowly, then for acting without sufficient consent from Congress and acting in a way that left the United States vulnerable to endless trouble.
One top Republican, Sen. Lindsey Graham, said on Thursday that replacing Gadhafi with a representative democracy in Libya will be “worth its weight in gold in terms of our national security.” He added that fellow Republicans who “wanted the War Powers Act invoked would not have asked for it if President Obama wasn’t the president.”
Obama’s opponent in the 2008 election, Republican Sen. John McCain, told CNN that Obama’s administration deserved credit but could have accelerated Gadhafi’s fall by acting earlier and more expansively.
The US and Nato allies launched a bombing campaign in Libya on March 19 after the United Nations authorized military action in order to protect civilians from attacks perpetrated by Gadhafi loyalists.
The US took the initial lead in the campaign, launching an air and sea assault on Gadhafi’s forces in order to protect civilians and provide cover to the Libyan rebels.
By the end of March, the US assumed a secondary role in Libya, with the French and the British carrying out the bulk of the bombing missions. US assets turned their focus toward support and intelligence.
Vindication
When asked if the outcome was a vindication of his strategy, Obama said: “We did exactly what we said we were going to do in Libya.”
Obama’s response to Gadhafi’s death allowed him to keep the focus on Libyan civilians and not face charges that he was seeking unseemly political gain by declaring victory.