Despite all the presidential huffing and puffing, the feckless launch of a hundred or so cruise missiles, and the expenditure of several billion dollars, Col. Qaddafi is still alive and his people increasingly are not. Mr. Obama sent our military to Libya on a humanitarian mission to protect the Libyan people from genocide, but was inexplicably punctilious in assuring the chief genocider that he was immune to attack. We had few qualms about killing off his military minions, and even some civilians, but the man who was pulling the strings and giving the orders was, for reasons not clear to anyone outside the White House, safe from our bombs.
Mr. Obama heeded the advice of the "chick hawks" in his administration (Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, Samantha Power), gave the order to lob a few munitions at Libya, and promptly traipsed off to Rio to vacation.
Upon his return, however, the Libyan leaders were still not truckling to Mr. Obama's demands that they relinquish power. After a week or so of playing Commander-In-Chief with nothing to show for it except a couple hundred dead Libyans, President Obama was anxious to get back to his golf game, so he decided to turn the whole mess over to NATO, and pretty much walk away from it.
Ever since, the insolent Col. Qaddafi, in defiance of Mr. Obama's clear and unambiguous order to say "uncle" and step down from his office, has been revivified. His troops are everywhere on the offensive, the rebels are in disarray, the genocide that Qaddafi promised seems to be occurring unabated, and with the abdication of American leadership, the NATO coalition is falling apart.
The President hasn't had much to say about all this of late, preoccupied as he's been with calling Paul Ryan a coward for coming up with a plan to rescue the U.S. from bankruptcy, but one wonders if it all couldn't have been averted had he had the common sense to realize that if you're going to go to war, the best strategy is to end it quickly by decapitating the leadership. Had we done this at the outset Mr. Obama would be free to play an entire round without having to be interrupted by those pesky calls from Robert Gates at the Pentagon.
Maybe, though, that's just not the sort of thing one learns to do in the faculty lounge at Harvard Law School where Mr. Obama prepped for being President and where such extreme tactics are deemed warranted only if they're to be employed against Republicans.