The Hill News

Flush with the early success of Operation Desert Storm, President George H.W. Bush publicly noted that one way to end that war would be for “the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands.” Kurds in the north and Shi’a in the south erupted.  Almost immediately, they learned that the U.S. had no intent to aid them militarily in resisting Saddam Hussein’s wrath. For survivors of that 1991 massacre, the memory is as fresh as though it happened yesterday.

President Obama is allowing his administration to make the same mistake with the Libyan revolution. He has only one duty to the Libyan people, and that is to tell them with absolute clarity what they can expect from the U.S. As President Bush learned in 1991, what matters is not the administration’s literal statements but rather what the revolutionaries read into them.  That will shape the long-term future of U.S. relations with Libya just as it did in Iraq.

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