Article by George Will.
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At about this point in foreign policy misadventures, the usual question is: What is Plan B? Today’s question is: What was Plan A? When Obama inserted America into what was, and ostensibly still is, a preemptive war to protect Libyan civilians from Libya’s government, he neglected to clarify a few things, such as: Do the armed rebels trying to overthrow that government still count as civilians?

That is, however, irrelevant if the assumption is that no Libyan is safe as long as Moammar Gaddafi is in power. If so, regime change is a logical imperative of humanitarian imperialism.

Have you noticed how many of the U.S. armed services’ recruiting appeals, on television and in advertisements in airports and elsewhere, show this or that service engaged in humanitarian relief operations, distributing food and medicine? These present the U.S. military as the Red Cross with, for reasons that are unclear, weapons. Given that some of the services sometimes seem reluctant to recruit for their primary mission — maintaining a credible capability for war — it is not so odd that the Obama administration flinches from the word “war.”