A missed opportunity?

Had President Obama forcefully ostracized Moammar Gadhafi in the very first hours of the crisis in Libya, there might be no need for the no-fly zone in place there now, former National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley said Thursday in an exclusive interview.

"Remember, in the opening days, the rebels were taking town after town, and Gadhafi was largely confined to Tripoli," Hadley said, speaking on the sidelines of a World Affairs Council reception. The council was holding a daylong conference at the Union League on the rapid changes in the Middle East. The event included expert panels on the turmoil engulfing the North African and Persian Gulf regions.

"You've got to seize the moment," Hadley said. "When momentum is on your side, you need to double down. And that's what we failed to do. We paused. We started this talk about a no-fly zone, which I think was a red herring.

"We said we needed legitimacy from the U.N. and the Arab League. There are a lot of ways to get legitimacy. Helping people fight and win their own freedom, that's legitimacy enough. We could have gotten U.N. resolutions and the like down the road. The momentum was going heavily against Gadhafi. At that point, the assumption was, Gadhafi's toast."

With the Libyan dictator "on the ropes," U.S. diplomacy should have hit harder on essential themes: "The international community has turned against him, the tide of history has turned against him, his own people are uprising against him," Hadley said.

Then, as French President Nicolas Sarkozy did, the United States should have immediately recognized the rebels as Libya's legitimate government and started to arm them, Hadley said.

"It may not have worked," he said. "But we didn't take that approach, and I think it was a missed opportunity. We let Gadhafi catch his breath" and mount a mechanized war against his own people that necessitated U.S. military intervention to preserve civilian lives.

The U.N. resolution approving military action in Libya does not specifically call for Gadhafi's removal. But now, "a bit late to the party," in Hadley's estimation, Obama says the Libyan leader must go.

"If President Obama had simply said our objective is to prevent Gadhafi from slaughtering his own people . . . and once we've done that, the future of Libya would be dictated by the Libyan people, that is an achievable objective.

"But what we got instead is the president [now saying] our objective is to get rid of Gadhafi," Hadley said. "So you have this mismatch between the stated objective of the president and what we have applied in terms of [U.N.] authority and resources to achieve that goal. That's a dangerous situation for the United States because it sets you up for failure."

The idea that the United States can hand off responsibility for enforcing the no-fly zone and other aspects of the military operation is another problem, said Hadley, who served in the administrations of Presidents George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush and now is senior adviser for international affairs at the U.S. Institute for Peace, an independent, nonpartisan Washington think tank funded by Congress.

"If any major military operation around the world is going to succeed, the U.S. has to be part of it," he said. "That's just the way it is. We have capabilities nobody has. You can say the French or the British are in the lead. But if they stutter and stumble, the first thing they will do is call on the United States."

Hadley did not completely criticize Obama's administration. In fact, he thinks it handled the crisis in Egypt just about perfectly.

"We got ourselves on the side of the Egyptian people," he said. "We articulated that [Egyptian] security forces should not use violence. That helped to open the space [for demonstrators]. The Egyptian people . . . in 18 days, got rid of President Mubarak. All of that worked."

There are no vital U.S. interests in Libya, he said, except the benefits that derive from keeping our word.

"I have a view which I call Yoda's Rule," he said. "You remember the Star Wars movies? Remember Luke Skywalker lands his Starfighter in a swamp? And he's got to get it out of the muck? Yoda says to him, 'Use the force, Luke.' And Luke says, 'OK, I'll try.' Yoda says: 'No, no, no. Either do, or not do. No try.'

"That's a rule for the United States in the world. If we set an objective, we better have a plan to achieve it. It's what the American people expect and it's what's important for our international credibility."