HERITAGE FOUNDATION: HEY, OBAMA, YOU'D BETTER NOT SCREW UP ON LIBYA MORE THAN YOU ALREADY HAVE!

The Obama policy on Libya seems to have achieved the intended results, but the Heritage Foundation still wants you to know that it was right all along about the policy's likely failure. From the Foundation's blog:

...The Obama Administration, which stumbled into the war in Libya with no clear military plan or exit strategy, now must fashion a suitable and acceptable way forward. The Administration's short-sighted effort to score a quick and easy military victory over Qadhafi's regime failed to end the threat to civilians in "days not weeks," as President Barack Obama promised....

Go to that "way forward" link and you get this, posted by Heritage in June:

As frustrating as Obama's Libya policies are, however, Congress should not immediately terminate funding for the operation, which would force the U.S. to abandon its NATO allies in the middle of a war. Given the commitments already made by the President, Congress should support military operations until the end of the 90-day extension NATO authorized for "Operation Unified Protector" in Libya. Any funding of operations beyond that date should be prohibited unless supported by specific congressional approval....

By adopting this course, the U.S. fulfills its obligations to its NATO allies and extricates itself from a failed policy.

Elsewhere, in the piece, that "failed policy" is called a "Slippery Slope to Stalemate." I know saying all that was politically effective for these folks back then, but I'm amused that they still want you to read it now.

The righties love saying that if we'd done in Iraq what Obama and Nancy Pelosi and all those patchouli-drenched hippies demanded in 2007, we'd never have had the glorious surge that's made Iraq the paradise that it is now. Doesn't Obama get to say that today? That if he'd had a cutoff of funds after 90 days, Qaddafi would still hold Tripoli?

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I've been of two minds about this intervention -- it's been killing innocent people and it's expensive at a time when everyone apart from the rich and the military is being told to do without. But I never thought it was inevitable that we'd wind up in the kind of quagmire that results so easily in a boots-on-the-ground intervention. I thought this outcome was possible. War sucks, but every U.S. war doesn't end like Vietnam.