President Obama during his news conference with PM Cameron in London today --
That's something we desperately want, because both the United States and United Kingdom, but also a number of our other allies, are more than prepared to invest in helping create border security in Libya, and helping to drive out terrorists inside of Libya, and trying to make sure that what could be a thriving society -- a relatively small population, a lot of resources -- this is not an issue where we should have to subsidize Libya. They're actually much better-positioned than some other countries that we've been helping, if they can just get their act together. And we want to help provide that technical assistance to get that done.
That logic -- that when a country has oil, it's up to the country to pay for putting the place back together after an intervention, and all that's needed is advice -- is what didn't help Iraq post-2003, and it certainly didn't help Libya in the last four years.
President Obama told Chris Wallace (Fox News Sunday) only a few weeks ago that his worst mistake was "probably failing to plan for the day after what I think was the right thing to do in intervening in Libya." In fact there was a plan then -- which was to let the oil pay for everything and send in lots of advisers. And that's the plan he says he has now!
That's something we desperately want, because both the United States and United Kingdom, but also a number of our other allies, are more than prepared to invest in helping create border security in Libya, and helping to drive out terrorists inside of Libya, and trying to make sure that what could be a thriving society -- a relatively small population, a lot of resources -- this is not an issue where we should have to subsidize Libya. They're actually much better-positioned than some other countries that we've been helping, if they can just get their act together. And we want to help provide that technical assistance to get that done.
That logic -- that when a country has oil, it's up to the country to pay for putting the place back together after an intervention, and all that's needed is advice -- is what didn't help Iraq post-2003, and it certainly didn't help Libya in the last four years.
President Obama told Chris Wallace (Fox News Sunday) only a few weeks ago that his worst mistake was "probably failing to plan for the day after what I think was the right thing to do in intervening in Libya." In fact there was a plan then -- which was to let the oil pay for everything and send in lots of advisers. And that's the plan he says he has now!
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