Lying about Libya

President Obama and other US officials have repeated over and over that the US-NATO war in Libya is all about "protecting civilians," and that it is limited and defensive in nature. But now that we are more than 90 days into an operation that Obama claimed would last "days, not weeks," it is time to state the obvious: the president has been fundamentally dishonest with Americans about the purpose and scope of the Libya war.

President Obama and his supporters argue that the US-NATO war in Libya was necessary to protect civilians from a hypothetical "genocide" that would supposedly have occurred had events in Libya been permitted to run their course. On this argument's own terms, the war would be defensible only as a limited action aimed at preventing the massacre of civilians. Obama and other leaders are aware of these limits — hence their continued insistence that the intervention in Libya is a short-term operation with purely humanitarian ends.

And yet the stated purpose of the NATO airstrikes in recent weeks has been to target and weaken Libyan president Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's military forces and to provide 24/7, low-risk air support for the offensive operations of Libya's rebels, who hope eventually to advance on Tripoli and overthrow Gaddafi.

Simply put, what was sold to the American public as a humanitarian intervention morphed almost immediately into unreserved support of one side in Libya's civil war and a commitment to overthrowing Libya's existing government.

MORE.