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Townhall...
Mr. President: Lead
or Get Out of the Way!
By Michael Reagan
Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi is getting away with murder because the
president of the United States refuses to take action when that’s
exactly what is called for.
Gadhafi is thumbing his nose at the alleged leader of the Free World,
leaving the crazed dictator free to slaughter his own people in a
frantic effort to save his dictatorship.
t is hard for me to examine President Obama’s current behavior without
comparing it to a similar crisis during my father President Reagan’s
administration, and the way my Dad handled it.
In August 1981, two Libyan aircraft were spotted by U.S aircraft
carrier Nimitz cruising near the Libyan coast. As Time magazine
reported at the time, two Hawkeye fighters on surveillance missions
detected the Libyan planes and reported them to the Nimitz which sent
two F-14s aloft.
They “spotted the Libyans on their radar, and moved in to identify
them. As the two flights approached almost head on, one of the
Soviet-built Su-22 planes fired an air-to-air Atoll missile at the
F-14s. U.S. Forces heard the pilot say in Arabic, ‘I have fired.’
“He missed. The F-14s had seen the Atoll’s smoke immediately and had
violently broken away, evading the missile and wheeling sharply around
to come in behind the Libyans. U.S. Rules of engagement permit pilots
to shoot back if fired upon, and each of the F-14s triggered a single
heat-seeking Sidewinder missile, each scoring a hit on a Libyan plane..
The engagement, 60 miles off the coast, lasted no more than one minute.
It was the first U.S. Military action since the ill-fated attempt of
April 1980 to rescue the hostages in Iran.”
Within six minutes Washington was told of the incident, and National
Security Adviser Richard Allen and White House Counselor Edwin Meese,
who were in Los Angeles with President Reagan, received the news at 11
p.m. local time. They decided that there was no need at the moment to
waken the president. Instead, according to Time, “they monitored the
news for the next 5½ hours before calling Reagan, who was sleeping in
his suite at the Century Plaza hotel.” Meese told Time that “The
President was in charge, and if there had been any action he needed to
take, he would have been awakened.” Reagan saw nothing wrong with the
delay. Said he: “If our planes were shot down, yes, they’d wake me up
right away. If the other fellows were shot down, why wake me up?”
Time noted that there was no doubt that the site of the U.S. action was
a challenge to Gadhafi’s assertion that he controlled the Gulf of
Sidra, and that staging the U.S. fleet exercise there had been
intentional. When asked whether the naval exercise was meant as a
lesson to Libya, one State Department official replied: “Look at a map.”
Libya’s reaction to my Dad’s determination to show them he meant
business when he authorized the fleet’s maneuvers off Libya’s coast,
and happily approved of the response by the fleet, was all bluster but
no action.
Tragically, Barack Obama’s reaction to Libya’s provocations thus far
lacks both bluster and action.
Obama is frozen and is trying to be a community organizer when the
world needs a POTUS [President of the United States]. Lead or get out
of the way. The world is waiting.
Read it at Townhall
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