Doubling Down on Dumb Decisions.

Get this.  President Obama still would have supported NATO bombs overthrowing the established Qaddafi regime in Libya, even with the benefit of hindsight!

Intervening in Libya to prevent a massacre was the right thing to do, Obama argued, but doing it without sufficient follow-up on the ground to manage Libya’s transition to more democratic politics is probably his biggest foreign policy regret.

He wasn't enough like GWB, he realizes.  We're going the wrong way...

Had we not intervened, it’s likely that Libya would be Syria. ... And so there would be more death, more disruption, more destruction. But what is also true is that I think we [and] our European partners underestimated the need to come in full force if you’re going to do this.

Then it’s the day after Qaddafi is gone, when everybody is feeling good and everybody is holding up posters saying, ‘Thank you, America.’ At that moment, there has to be a much more aggressive effort to rebuild societies that didn’t have any civic traditions. ...

So that’s a lesson that I now apply every time I ask the question, ‘Should we intervene, militarily? Do we have an answer [for] the day after?’ ”

Easy, Barry:  No and No.
(I saw it then, you still can't see it now? Even with basic reports now coming out of the region?)

It was not in America's national security interest; we were coming out of another war that failed to deliver as promised; there was no internal support of the people to remake Libya.

George W. Bush tried that in Iraq.  Didn't work so well in practice.
Without the internal action driven in the sovereign country (Libya or Iraq), the strong-arming outside country (America or NATO) has to take over the internal leadership and politicking.  At what cost?

President Obama got himself elected by pretending to understand this.  Now, he tells us he would repeat the wartime mistakes of George W. Bush.  Who advises this man?

The answer, Mr. President -- Mr. Cheney, Mr. Bush and Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Obama -- is -- nevermind the popularity polls -- don't start a "war" that you know you cannot quickly win, and replace your destruction with plans the next day to build something bigger and better.   If you don't know how you are going to replace hospital and schools and government buildings and marketplaces and all the things we rely on for people to function day to day in society, hold your fire.

 The majority of the people are better off under a functioning stable society than in an unpredictable reckless chaos.

Can we bookmark that as a 21st century pragmatic American foreign policy?  For all the missionary zeal to help, and to wreck and rebuild, and train and grow and invest, too often America and her allies leave destruction and death in her wake, deliberately, without delivering the promised payoff.

Why?  Politics.

Asked whether he should be more vigorous in pressing Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, to reach a land-for-peace deal, the president said, it has to start with them.

Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “poll numbers are a lot higher than mine” and “were greatly boosted by the war in Gaza,” Obama said. “And so if he doesn’t feel some internal pressure, then it’s hard to see him being able to make some very difficult compromises, including taking on the settler movement. That’s a tough thing to do.

And more:

“We cannot do for them what they are unwilling to do for themselves.  Our military is so capable, that if we put everything we have into it, we can keep a lid on a problem for a time. But for a society to function long term, the people themselves have to make decisions about how they are going to live together, how they are going to accommodate each other’s interests, how they are going to compromise. When it comes to things like corruption, the people and their leaders have to hold themselves accountable for changing those cultures.... ... We can help them and partner with them every step of the way. But we can’t do it for them.”

“Our politics are dysfunctional,” said the president, and we should heed the terrible divisions in the Middle East as a “warning to us: societies don’t work if political factions take maximalist positions. 

...

Obama also acknowledged that gerrymandering, the Balkanization of the news media and uncontrolled money in politics — the guts of our political system today — are sapping our ability to face big challenges together, more than any foreign enemy. 

“Increasingly politicians are rewarded for taking the most extreme maximalist positions,” he said, “and sooner or later, that catches up with you.”

Tom Friedman forgot to ask the number one question of the president that the American people care about:  California, New York, Chicago or Hawaii? Where are you headed after retirement?  (It's not nosy, it's the American people living vicariously through the Obama family's success.  That too is politics, and his greatest contribution surely will be his representation, with his family, of the strides the country has made, even if we're lousing up all these other moments in history as we follow along now in the footsteps of international decisionmakers like Putin, Netanyahu, and sadly yes, Bush/Cheney.   Being a decisionmaker is tough too, you know.  Tough times call for tough people, and too often, the smart ones play it safe and follow the more macho, but ultimately dumber types.  Smart and strong.  Nevermind what the polls tell you, that's the ticket.)