Almost daily over the last four months we were told that Muammar Gadhafi was about ready to throw in the towel and give up.
Libya, after all, is not a distant Afghanistan or Iraq with a population of some 30 million. Yet this tiny police state of less than 7 million people, conveniently located on the Mediterranean Sea opposite nearby Europe, continues to thwart the three great powers of the NATO alliance and thousands of "Arab Spring" rebels.
In March, President Obama ordered the use of American bombers and cruise missiles to join in with the French and British to finish off the tottering Gadhafi regime. Obama was apparently stung by liberal criticism that the U.S. had done little to help rebels in their weeks-long effort to remove Gadhafi -- after only belatedly supporting the successful revolutionaries in Tunisia and Egypt.
Months ago, intervention to the Obama administration seemed a short, painless way of ridding the world of a decades-long international menace while gaining praise for helping "democratic" reformers. Oil, of course, is always a subtext in any Middle Eastern war.
