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ONE OF THE main problems with the Obama administration’s policy on Libya has been its incoherence. Americans have been given contradictory signals about what is at stake and what President Barack Obama is prepared to do.

Monday night, nine days after airstrikes began, the president finally tried to lay out to the American people the full case for war. He cleared up some of the confusion, but his presentation fell short in many ways.

Obama had shown considerable reluctance to intervene in the weeks after an anti-Gadhafi insurgency erupted. What obviously changed his mind was the tyrant’s chilling threat to “cleanse Libya house by house.” The chief administration goal was humanitarian: preventing what Obama called “a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”

In that, the attack succeeded. Stymied in their effort to crush the rebels, Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s forces were forced to fall back.

The president suggests that from here, other countries will stand up as we stand down. If things go well, he is probably right. In recent days, the rebels advanced toward the government stronghold of Sirte. But their lack of training raises serious doubts about their ability to topple the regime.

That raises a couple of important questions: How does the president define success, and how much is he resolved to do to achieve it?

He didn’t address that issue – preferring to assume that the great bulk of the mission already has been accomplished and that our allies will do the rest.

Obama complicated matters by demanding Gadhafi’s departure. That means the dictator will be in a position to declare victory if he merely survives. And since the president, thankfully, emphatically ruled out the use of ground forces in Libya, Gadhafi has a good chance.

The humanitarian mission, meanwhile, sets a precedent that will be used to demand American involvement in other places.

Do the president and his team have a coherent set of views that provide a principled basis for how to handle the next crisis, and the one after that? Or are they merely indulging gut impulses, without appreciating how their decisions will play out today and tomorrow? Big questions, not answered.

Obama complicated matters by demanding

Gadhafi’s

departure.