The New York Times Praises Obama’s Confusing Libyan Speech

Not surprisingly, the New York Times lead editorial today praised President Obama’s speech Monday night on Libya. The editorial claimed he made a “strong case” for America’s military intervention.

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For the reasons I describe in more detail in my Front Page article today, Obama’s speech did little to dispel the fog surrounding his objectives and endgame. But I want to focus here on two themes the Times emphasized in its laudatory review of Obama’s speech. First, the Times bought Obama’s argument that if we had not intervened in Libya other dictators would conclude that

violence is the best strategy to cling to power

Iran has long since reached that conclusion, bolstered by the Obama administration’s passivity while dissenters were being killed or beaten in the streets of Tehran and other cities. Syria’s dictator Bashar Assad, whom the Obama administration has tried to court as a potential ‘reformer,’ has drawn the same lesson from Obama’s passivity in the face of the Syrian regime’s slaughter of its own people. More...