Ben Rhodes

And then Gaddafi massed an army and was marching on Benghazi to basically crush his opposition.

So there's nothing about terrorism or anything.

It's just like this bad guy who's kind of been an adversary of the United States and we know what he does to his enemies, he tends to kill them, is going and there's going to be a bloodbath in this place and we should stop it.

And I actually think the Europeans, they were the most gung-ho about this, the French and British, in part because they'd really let Gaddafi in from the cold and they'd done all kinds of deals with him.

I think Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of France, ended up going to prison because of some of his own dealings with Gaddafi.

And so the idea is, well, this could be a humanitarian intervention.

We can all get together, pass a UN Security Council resolution.

So it would be legal under international law, authorizing use of force.

And NATO is going to go in and stop Qaddafi outside of the gates of Benghazi, save the people in that city.

The problem is...

Twofold.

One, once we did that, it was like, well, we can't leave him in power.

He's a terrible guy.

And so we went down this slippery slope of we're not just stopping him there.

We're essentially going to keep this up until the Libyans oust him.

But I think the main lesson, John, is that

Whether it's the terrorism issue we've talked about, the nuclear issue we've talked about, or this kind of issue where it's the politics of a country, we cannot engineer those politics through bombing campaigns and through our military.

It doesn't work.

There's not a record of a regime change supported by the United States through military force that made a place better.

And so I think what we have had trouble coming to terms with is we like to think, and a lot of people, frankly, that work in foreign policy, they sit in Washington, like to think that they can move some pieces around a board and sanction these people and they'll do something or bomb these people and they'll do something.