Libya: the straw that broke the camel's back?

We won’t review the sheer un-believability of Obama’s claim that Libya isn’t a war. What bothers us most is McCain and Lindsay Graham’s cheap shots at Republicans as isolationists for not being willing to give a blank check to this feckless president. One who has managed to unify the country in opposition to his policies.

Jonah Goldberg:

If you set out to take Vienna, Napoleon advised, take Vienna. Similarly, if you invest America's and NATO's prestige in an obstreperous North African backwater, you'd better recoup a worthwhile return on that investment....

McCain and Graham are honorable men, but they wildly overestimate their moral authority and the intellectual power of their arguments. The desire to end prematurely the mess in Libya — or even in Afghanistan — may be wrongheaded, ill-advised or shortsighted, but there's little evidence it stems from anything that could be meaningfully called isolationism or a resurgence of the "Pat Buchanan wing of the Republican Party," as McCain calls it.

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If anything, it's McCain and Graham who are nurturing a rebirth of isolationism by going for the easy insult.