President Barack Obama, going through rising strain from Congress to clarify the U.S. military’s mission in Libya, will address the nation in a televised speech on Monday.
The president is expected to lay out his explanation for the U.S. involvement in Libya. Obama — who offered a brief explanation for his decision to support an expanded no-fly zone a week ago while touring South America — has been waiting for the U.S. to hand off primary command and combat responsibilities before charting the course forward to the American people, administration officials have said. On Thursday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that NATO will take the lead on air missions against Col. Muammar Qadhafi’s forces beginning Saturday, paving the way for Obama to speak to the nation.
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Unlike the president’s Dec. 2009 speech on the war in Afghanistan, his remarks on Monday are scheduled to begin at 7:30 p.m. ET — before the primetime TV viewing hours — and will be delivered not from the Oval Office, but at the National Defense University in Washington. The timing and location reflect Obama’s reluctance to equate what he regards as a smaller, time-limited,
Office Standard, United Nations-sanctioned mission in Libya with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In another sign the administration was heeding criticism that it has moved without adequate consultation on Libya, Obama convened a conference call with a bipartisan group of congressional leaders Friday afternoon.
The administration has always intended to make its case to the American people,
Office 2010 Pro Key, but Carney’s Thursday promise that the president would do it “soon” – upgraded to “very near future” on Friday — came amid withering bipartisan criticism that Obama has waged an unexplained, perhaps unnecessary war.
“What is he thinking?” asked former Ronald Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal on Friday. “I cannot for the life of me see how an American president can launch a serious military action without a full and formal national address in which he explains to the American people why he is doing what he is doing, why it is right, and why it is very much in the national interest… He has to sit at that big desk and explain his thinking, put forward the facts as he sees them, and try to garner public support.”
But fast-moving negotiations with NATO partners,
Office Pro 2010 Key, led by Britain, France and Turkey, changed that dynamic late Thursday. And for the first time since combat operations began,
Windows 7 sale, the majority of flights over Libya on Thursday were conducted by U.S. allies, a sharp contrast to the previous 24 hours when American planes flew the majority of missions.
In a complex deal that smoothed over arch disputes between France and Turkey, U.S. negotiators handed over control of the “no-fly zone” operation to a NATO command led by a Canadian general officer. Details of the command structure for air-to-ground attacks on Qadhafi’s armor and artillery, however, have yet to be fully agreed upon.
“We are already seeing a significant reduction in the number of U.S. planes involved in the operation as the number of planes from other countries increase,” Clinton said after the decision by NATO. “Today we are taking the next step. All 28 allies have also now authorized army authorities to develop an operations plan for NATO to take on the broader civilian protections mission.”
Yet even with the NATO deal, some Obama allies question the emphasis on a major address, arguing that it counters a week’s worth of effort to frame the U.S. as just one player among a larger international coalition that includes Libya’s Arab neighbors.
“This is not the president of the United States against Qadhafi,
Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007, it’s not the United States against Libya,” said former Gen. Wesley Clark, who oversaw NATO airstrikes in Kosovo in 1999.