gadhafi. so my recommendation to nato and the administration is to cut the head of the snake off, go to tripoli, start bombing gadhafi s inner circle, their compounds, their military headquarters in tripoli. the way to get gadhafi to leave is have his inner circle break and turn on him. that s going to take a sustained effort through an air campaign. i think the focus should now be to cut the head of the snake off. that s the quickest way to end this. here s the problem. the u.n. resolution calls for protecting the libyan people. it is going to be hard to make that connection saying, listen, we re going after gadhafi, we re going after his men. that is not within the mandate. well, it is my belief that it is going to be hard for american national security interests to survive intact if gadhafi stays. you know, i like coalitions. it is good to have them. it is good to have the u.n. involved. but the goal is to get rid of gadhafi, a military stalemate is
will this be my last. the military commanders in tripoli supporting gadhafi should be pounded. so i would not let the u.n. mandate stop what is the right thing to do. you cannot protect the libyan people if gadhafi stays. you cannot protect our vital national security interests if gadhafi stays. the long drawn-out protracted engagement is not good for the libyan people. a lot of people are going to die unnecessarily. let s get this guy gone and the way to get him out of libya is to go after him militarily through the air. you don t need ground troops to do that. you know, nato, within the countries within nato, there are not a majority of countries participating in this to begin with. the u.n. was reluctant even to do what it did. but you re saying that you think, regardless of what and you re going to get backlash from this. if the u.s. goes in and takes out the leader of a nation, however illegitimate we consider him to be, there is going to be a lot of backlash.
tripoli, start bombing gadhafi s inner circle, their compounds, their military headquarters in tripoli. the way to get gadhafi to leave is have his inner circle break and turn on him. that s going to take a sustained effort through an air campaign. i think the focus should now be to cut the head of the snake off. that s the quickest way to end this. here s the problem. the u.n. resolution calls for protecting the libyan people. it is going to be hard to make that connection saying, listen, we re going after gadhafi, we re going after his men. that is not within the mandate. well, it is my belief that it is going to be hard for american national security interests to survive intact if gadhafi stays. you know, i like coalitions. it is good to have them. it is good to have the u.n. involved. but the goal is to get rid of gadhafi, a military stalemate is ensuing and the only way i know to make this thing successful is to put pressure on tripoli. the people around gadhafi need to wake u
if gadhafi stands off the u.s. navy and air force know the rest of it and survives, the question is if if gadhafi stays, does obama go, quite frankly? that will be an issue in 2012. if he is taking us to war against libya, that guy is sitting there in tripoli defining the defying the united states. the other thing about that, the american public i don t believe have the stomach to go any distance on libya at all. i mean, one part of what the president was saying was, you know, you don t want to wait to get the images. that s also part of their problem which is that there are no images. there is no one to empathize. charles hangover from egypt looking at those images and projecting them on to libya. but, you know, every other humanitarian case, iran, young woman was shot in the street, somalia where there were people starving, kosovo where families
military, we need to do this, you can see the subtext clearly ca just, our cause is righteous, we ll see it through to the end. instead you hear him saying, we ll be in and out. it s limited in duration. we won t be the ones enforcing the no-fly zone. won t be our ships enforcing the arms embargo. you see that reluctance shot through his rhetoric. tom ricks, we began the discussion this morning, richard engel reporting on the rebel, they re getting closer to tripoli. then what that s when we leave? if gadhafi stays, can we really say this is mission accomplished? i think they ll say we can. all obama is saying is give war a chance. not all war. all we did was kick the door down, let the brits and french and others do it. and i think his notion is we re going to be out of there long before this is resolved. that s the hope. that s the best and we don t have to stick around. there is this receiticencretice