Quote Originally Posted by Dayuhan View Post
I can't see how the need to balance ends with means and costs with benefits is a sign of bad leadership.
Probably because balancing ends with means and costs has nothing to do with an arbitrarily instigated and calibrated reaction "in this particular country...in this particular moment."

Seems to me something we could use a good deal more of. Anyone with limited means - and that's everyone - needs to choose their battles wisely, and choosing battles unwisely has left American means more stretched than ever.
This is a particularly pernicious tautology as far as truisms go, in that the realization of risk is ultimately caused by acting unwisely.

Obviously the US is not going to square off with the Russians over Georgia or with the Chinese over Tibet, that would be idiocy of the highest order.
And yet the US did square off with the Russians over Afghanistan, to great material (and consequently measurable) benefit: the destruction of the Red Army as an expeditionary force for the cost of a shuttle launch per year. And yet where it concerns the same family of intangible qualitatives Obama reaches for when weighing the risks and gain of the Libya operation, America is widely perceived as rolling snake-eyes.

We are neither global policeman not guarantor of the world's freedoms. We've no desire or capacity to serve those functions and the world has never asked us to serve those functions.
Then don't. And don't pretend that the world will view this operation as anything less than unreliably assuming the role of a cop--and only under the most expedient, transient conditions.

But if you do, then do not be surprised when--not if--events conspire against the "limited" universe of outcomes you aspire to realize and the world moves on from "hey, Obama saved Benghazi for one week in March" to "why is Gaddafi still in power?" or "where the hell where the Americans when Tripoli turned into rivers of blood?"