Supplied by his friends, the Republican Party.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Reuters is reporting a leak disclosing that President Obama signed a finding “within the last two or three weeks” authorizing the covert arming of rebel forces seeking to oust Muamar Qaddafi.

We certainly wouldn’t want weapons we supplied winding up in the wrong hands.

Members of Congress have expressed anxiety about U.S. government activities in Libya. Some have recalled that weapons provided by the U.S. and Saudis to mujahedeen fighting Soviet occupation forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s later ended up in the hands of anti-American militants.

There are fears that the same thing could happen in Libya unless the U.S. is sure who it is dealing with. The chairman of the House intelligence committee, Rep. Mike Rogers, said on Wednesday he opposed supplying arms to the Libyan rebels fighting Gaddafi “at this time.”

“We need to understand more about the opposition before I would support passing out guns and advanced weapons to them,” Rogers said in a statement.

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But, President Obama assured CBS News that he knows what he’s doing.

Well, first of all, I think it’s important to note that — the people that we’ve met with have been fully vetted. So, we have — a clear sense of who they are. And so far, they’re saying the right things. And most of them are professionals, lawyers, doctors — people who appear to be credible.

Pundit & Pundette responds with this photo from The Guardian:

A credible professional brandishes his machete over the heads of captured Subsaharan mercenaries loyal to Qaddafi.

and comments:

Relax: They’re “professionals.”

The enemies of our enemy are doctors and lawyers. I for one am greatly relieved.

Quick — someone from the White House — get that man a labcoat!

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

Dictator Longevity Chart

Hat tip to The Cold Equations via John Derbyshire via Ace

Michael Oren, yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, makes the same point.

America and its allies, empowered by the United Nations and the Arab League, are interceding militarily in Libya. But would that action have been delayed or even precluded if Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi had access to nuclear weapons? No doubt Gadhafi is asking himself that same question.

Barack the Unready’s intervention against the un-nuclear-developing Qaddafi contrasts so strongly with the immunity from external threats of regime change enjoyed by the nuclear-developing or equipped even more loathsome tyrannies in Teheran and Pyongyang that the president has undoubtedly sent a very loud and very clear message to dictators everywhere: Get yourselves some nukes and you’re safe from us! Without nukes, we might just intervene.

Obama pretty much wrapped himself in the flag. He stood in front of at least six of them.

You can find the text of Obama’s Libya speech from last night here, or watch the 26:36 video.

Ace had a few choice rejoinders.

“We Took A Series of Swift Steps:” Oh, you mean after you dithered around with the same basic facts for three weeks.

You mean after all that delay, you finally made a decision, and then the military acted swiftly.

“I Refused to Let That Happen:” Ah, okay, just as long as I know who the hero is here.

By the way, he’s super-proud that he waited until the last possible moment to save Benghazi (but none of the towns and cities along the decimated way to Benghazi). Apparently those other towns he let be demolished as he dithered didn’t count.

Only the dramatic, last-second decision to spare Benghazi specifically should matter.

Hilarious: He says that he’s all about getting other countries to bear the burdens. He says, to that end, that he’s transferred command to NATO.

Um, so, if I’m getting this right, our pilots and seamen are still fighting this war, they’re just being bossed around by a foreign general, right?

And that general isn’t actually in the fight, right?

Seems to me that all Obama is doing is distancing himself from any possible failure while keeping our troops in harm’s way.

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AndyLevy summed up Obama’s rhetorical style:
If the straw men ever unionize, Obama’s gonna be in trouble.

Charles Krauthammer rants over the disarray of the NATO coalition and the irresolution of its leadership.

As of this writing, Britain wanted the operation to be led by NATO. France adamantly disagreed, citing Arab sensibilities. Germany wanted no part of anything, going so far as to pull four of its ships from NATO command in the Mediterranean. France and Germany walked out of a NATO meeting on Monday, while Norway had planes in Crete ready to go but refused to let them fly until it had some idea who the hell is running the operation. And Turkey, whose prime minister four months ago proudly accepted the Qaddafi International Prize for Human Rights, has been particularly resistant to the Libya operation from the beginning.

And as for the United States, who knows what American policy is. Administration officials insist we are not trying to bring down Qaddafi, even as the president insists that he must go. Although on Tuesday Obama did add “unless he changes his approach.” Approach, mind you.

In any case, for Obama, military objectives take a back seat to diplomatic appearances. The president is obsessed with pretending that we are not running the operation — a dismaying expression of Obama’s view that his country is so tainted by its various sins that it lacks the moral legitimacy to . . . what? Save Third World people from massacre?

Obama seems equally obsessed with handing off the lead role. Hand off to whom? NATO? Quarreling amid Turkish resistance (see above), NATO still can’t agree on taking over command of the airstrike campaign, which is what has kept the Libyan rebels alive.

This confusion is purely the result of Obama’s decision to get America into the war and then immediately relinquish American command. Never modest about himself, Obama is supremely modest about his country. America should be merely “one of the partners among many,” he said Monday. No primus inter pares for him. Even the Clinton administration spoke of America as the indispensable nation. And it remains so. Yet at a time when the world is hungry for America to lead — no one has anything near our capabilities, experience, and resources — America is led by a man determined that it should not.

A man who dithers over parchment. Who starts a war from which he wants out right away. Good God. If you go to take Vienna, take Vienna. If you’re not prepared to do so, better then to stay home and do nothing.

Hat tip to Richard Fernandez who reflects on history, while contemplating the unhappy spectacle of escalating regime violence in response to protests in Syria:

Deraa, the site of one of the many protests, was where the fledgling Royal Air Force won its first ground-air battle in 1918 in support of Colonel T. E. Lawrence’s Arab Revolt. He was cutting the lifeline of the Ottoman empire. Viewed from the 21st century, the battle seems almost quaint: biplanes dropping a few pounds of bombs from low altitude and landing to rendezvous with riders in flowing robes on steaming horses. But those riders, all encased in cotton, creaky leather and sweat, had the virtue of knowing which end was up. Today we are even luckier to be led, not simply by the competent and daring, but by leaders who are truly awesome.

Reportorial jaws were heard dropping out as far as the Blue Ridge, when Barack Obama hinted yesterday that regime change in Libya might not be essential.

The Politico reports

President Obama indicated on Tuesday that Muammar Qadhafi may still have an opportunity to “change his approach” and put in place “significant reforms” in the Libyan government.

Asked by NBC’s Savannah Guthrie what the U.S. commitment is in Libya if Qadhafi remains in power but continues to pose a threat to his people, Obama appeared to leave the door open for political reforms.

“You are absolutely right that as long as Qadhafi remains in power, and unless he changes his approach and there are significant reforms in the Libyan government that allow the Libyan people to express themselves, there are still going be potential threats against Libyan people—unless he is going to step down,” Obama said.

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James Poulos contends that this kind of erratic policy shifting has become a recognizable pattern of the Obama presidency.

Obama’s puzzling leadership style has driven more than a few critics to plunge into labyrinthine investigations of his personality in the hopes of finding some explanatory key tucked away at its center.

Nonetheless, this is a fool’s errand. What matters is not whether the president is, for instance, a passive-aggressive guy, but whether he is a passive-aggressive president. The soap opera surrounding our Libyan engagement, and Obama’s halting and irregular efforts at managing it, have me convinced that the answer is yes.

A pattern has emerged. With the Wisconsin union drama, with the long, tormented passage and reversal of Obamacare, even with the Skip Gates scandal, the president has oscillated, one way or the other and sometimes both, between a mild-mannered non-interventionism and a terse, testy, yet attenuated variety of interventionism. So it is again with Libya. Neither the passivity nor the aggressiveness is without its bemused critics, right and left. And neither has proven very effective. Put together, they seem to deliver the worst of both worlds. His errors unforced, his support unreliable, his strategy inscrutable, Obama as president has time and again left allies and opponents in an uncanny perpetual lurch.

I think myself that, as was speculated by some on the basis of Obama’s autobiography and his 2008 campaign, that Barack Obama operates in most circumstances with the most extreme caution, voting “Present” 130 times in the Illinois State Senate, defining himself with broad strokes of gorgeous rhetoric, and intentionally allowing his audience to project their wishes and fantasies onto him without committing himself to very much.

Barack Obama proved to be personally deeply invested in socializing health care, but beyond that single issue he has merely played the part of a conventional democrat, faithfully delivering the goods to important constituencies from SEIU to Goldman Sachs. Outside of trading political favors for support, and extending the welfare state one more big step, Barack Obama has proven timid, indecisive, and prone to reverse positions.

He has not withdrawn from Afghanistan, he has not closed the holding facility at Guantanamo, and he has reversed course on civil trials for terrorists. Serious issues, particularly risky choices in the realm of foreign policy (where former law lecturers, foundation board members, and state senators may feel just a bit out of their depth) seem to induce paralysis and vacillation.

Watching Obama’s behavior with respect to the civilian insurrection against the Libya dictatorship, I find myself reminded of John Randolph of Roanoke’s description of his cousin Edmund Randolph: “Like the chameleon on the aspen, always trembling, always changing.”

Carl Rove: “God bless her for doing it.“

Robert Krikorian, at NR’s The Corner, warned that weak presidents can provoke US adversaries (even with strong female staffers to take up the slack) and provoked squeals of girlish outrage from Jamison Foser.

Prof. Althouse notes, “A feminist milestone: Our male President has been pulled into war by 3 women,” and Senator Graham scored points with “I Thank God for Strong Women in the Obama Administration,” but we’re going to pay for this.

One of the reasons Khrushchev gambled on missiles in Cuba is that he perceived JFK as a weak man when they met in Vienna. Conversely, one of the reasons Khomeini released the hostages just as Reagan was taking the oath of office was his “Ronnie Ray-guns” reputation (something the air traffic controllers ignored — which itself became another lesson for our enemies). Do you think Putin and A-jad and Chavez and the ChiComs are more afraid of Obama now? It was obvious to most of us that Hillary has more, uh, stones than Obama, but to have it confirmed so publicly for less-attentive foreign goons means they’re that much more likely to try to push us and see how The One responds.

Before you send me any burning bras, the problem is not with women leaders — the enemies of the Virgin Queen and the Iron Lady can attest to that. The problem is not even with the president having strong female subordinates. Rather, Obama’s pusillanimity has been hugely magnified by the contrast with the women directing his foreign policy and the fact that they nagged him to attack Libya until he gave in. Maybe it’s unfair and there shouldn’t be any difference from having a male secretary of state do the same thing, but there is.

So we have the worst situation of all. Instead of a strong leader resisting calls for an unjustified military action — or even a strong leader resolutely supporting the military action — we have a timorous and irresolute leader reluctantly caving in to the demands of his staff. We are in for a heap of trouble.

But even Robert Dreyfuss, at the Nation, (who denounces them for it) agrees that the resolve to act in the Libyan crisis was supplied by several women in the Administration, not by Barack Obama.

We’d like to think that women in power would somehow be less pro-war, but in the Obama administration at least it appears that the bellicosity is worst among Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Samantha Power. All three are liberal interventionists, and all three seem to believe that when the United States exercises military force it has some profound, moral, life-saving character to it. Far from it. Unless President Obama’s better instincts manage to reign in his warrior women—and happily, there’s a chance of that—the United States could find itself engaged in open war in Libya, and soon. The troika pushed Obama into accepting the demands of neoconservatives, such as Joe Lieberman, John McCain and The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol, along with various other liberal interventionists outside the administration, such as John Kerry. The rode roughshod over the realists in the administration

Jezebel’s Irin Carmon categories the discussion under “Emasculation,” and headlines her link collection “The Many Ways To Say “Hillary Stole Obama’s Balls.”

I get dragged, these days, into aimless arguments with liberals on Facebook. Jim Scheltens taunted overnight: “[T]he federal deficit didn’t matter until we had a black democrat president.”

I think the Bush deficit mattered, but deficits are normal in times of war, and the 9/11 attacks inevitably resulted in military operations. Obama’s deficits are, by contrast, deficits of choice and are of a completely different order of magnitude.

Victor Davis Hanson observes:

Obama has scheduled $5 trillion in new debt since he took office, in part as Keynesian stimulus to snap us out of a slowdown that seemed instead to get worse. The massive debt was incurred in service to new redistributive entitlements that, we are told, will level the playing field. And to implement a new government absorption of health care, the administration has so far granted over 1,000 exemptions from its own landmark legislation. Many of the labor unions that were the most vocal supporters of the president’s agenda are the most eager to be freed from the consequences of his health care mandates. …

Debt is now the father of us all. In some sense, every cruise missile fired, every Social Security check cashed, ever NPR show aired is done so in part with borrowed money. In response, the president saw the impending doom of insolvency, appointed a bipartisan commission to draft a solution, and then ignored his own appointees’ recommendations. So far the excuse is largely that George Bush ran up debt as well, although last month Obama’s red-ink exceeded the entire 2007 budget deficit under Bush — 30 days of Obama trumping 365 of Bush.

The Obama deficit is different in character. Unlike other past presidents’ deficits, the debt resulting from currently projected federal spending has no possibility of being repaid at practicable or conceivable tax levels, the federal government as it exists is unsustainable, and that unhappy situation directly and immediately threatens America’s economic future, military capabilities, and role and position in the world.

When previous presidents overspent, we knew we could write the check today and cover it tomorrow. This time there is a real likelihood that the check will bounce, i.e. that the entitlement obligations the government has assumed are unaffordable and can in no circumstances be met. The police will not arrive to take all of us to jail, but before long, the existing systems of federal spending and entitlements will not undergo some process of orderly reform, but will collapse in a rout. The US dollar may no longer be the world reserve currency, the US may very well not be the world’s principal financial center or leading military power, and American presidents may be obliged to run US foreign policy past the foreign ministries of our leading creditors.

First tomahawk launched from US missile destroyer in Operation Odyssey Dawn

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Barack Obama has now fired more cruise missiles than all other Nobel Peace prize winners combined.

—Iowahawk.

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From Abu Muqawama:

A Tomahawk Missile cost $569,000 in FY99, so if my calculations are correct, they cost a little over $736,000 today assuming they are the same make and model. The United States fired 110 missiles yesterday, which adds up to a cost of around $81 million. That’s… about 33 times the amount of money National Public Radio receives in grants each year from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which the House of Representatives… wants to de-fund.