The Egyptian protest of January and February saw a new siege of wishful commandments and reversals by the president. He told Mubarak to go. Then he told him to stay a while. Mubarak said he would stay, but after a time, he went; and in the mind of Obama, it appears, there was a relation of cause and effect between his initial request and the final result. He was consequently emboldened.
He said that Muammar Gaddafi must go. Gaddafi stayed. When the protest that gathered against Gaddafi would not disperse, the dictator shot at the protesters; and when some of them turned to armed rebellion, he went to war against the rebels. Obama for his part seemed ready to retire from an unpromising scene. His dryly prudent secretary of defense encouraged him to do so.
Then other forces intervened. We were told the forces were "the women around the president" -- Susan Rice, Samantha Power, and Hillary Clinton. These officials admired what they thought the U.S. had done in Kosovo, and they felt remorse about what the U.S. failed to do in Rwanda. President Obama was brought to think that three members of his "team of rivals," including a member of his cabinet, ought to prevail against another member of his cabinet whose cautious advice he was tempted to follow. So, it is said, the president followed the women and obeyed a principle higher than prudence, a principle that he named, in his belated speech of explanation on March 28, "the conscience of the world."
READ MORE: Huffington Post
