There is something positively mythological about Maureen Dowd’s latest column. If Hillary Clinton were National Security Adviser or Secretary of Defense, she would have opposed intervening in Libya. That’s because the mission isn’t in our national security interests or something the military needs to take on right now. If you ignore those two rather relevant facts and focus only on our diplomatic concerns, then intervening seems like a slam-dunk. It’s not weird that the State Department disagrees with the National Security elite, and the genders of the players are basically incidental. That’s not to say that no one has any agency in what advice they give, but the primary motivation is to one’s own department, sometimes to the detriment of other departments or the country as a whole.
Finally, it wouldn’t have mattered what the women counseled if Gaddafi had kept his big, fat mouth shut. But he had to go on the air and threaten to exterminate his own people. It’s hard to ignore something like that, and Obama did not.
MoDo is so predictable. And so dated. Can’t the New York Times hire someone with an original thought? Why do they keep their columnists until they die?
