SHORTER ROSS DOUTHAT

Wars fought the Obama/Clinton way are doomed to failure, unlike the really successful wars fought by cowboys like Bush.

No, really, that's what he says:

In its month-long crab walk toward a military confrontation with Libya's Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Obama administration has delivered a clinic in the liberal way of war.

Just a week ago, as the tide began to turn against the anti-Qaddafi rebellion, President Obama seemed determined to keep the United States out of Libya's civil strife. But it turns out the president was willing to commit America to intervention all along. He just wanted to make sure we were doing it in the most multilateral, least cowboyish fashion imaginable....

This is an intervention straight from Bill Clinton's 1990s playbook, in other words, and a stark departure from the Bush administration's more unilateralist methods. There are no "coalitions of the willing" here, no dismissive references to "Old Europe," no "you are with us or you are with the terrorists." Instead, the Obama White House has shown exquisite deference to the very international institutions and foreign governments that the Bush administration either steamrolled or ignored.

...there are major problems with this approach to war.... Because liberal wars depend on constant consensus-building within the (so-called) international community, they tend to be fought by committee, at a glacial pace, and with a caution that shades into tactical incompetence....

Yes, that's the risk when you don't do things the unilateralist, cowboy way -- you might have a war conducted "at a glacial pace" and with "tactical incompetence." I sure wish we had Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al., to save us from those possibilities!