The president's decision was a humanitarian one, not a political one, officials said. | REUTERS Obama's Libya gamble

Military operations over Libya are proceeding according to plan, but the same can’t be said for President Barack Obama’s attempts to win support back home for the unexpected war.

Liberals are infuriated that a man who made his reputation speaking out against a “dumb war” in Iraq was so quick to join the fray in Libya. Conservatives, led by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), argue that he could have ousted Muammar Qadhafi weeks ago by acting boldly.


House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) seems to be aligning himself with many congressional Democrats — offering tempered support for Obama while warning against taking further steps without asking congressional leaders ahead of time.

And Sen. Dick Lugar of Indiana, usually Obama’s Republican security blanket on foreign policy, voiced skepticism about the Libyan operation’s cost and its nebulous objective, which seems somewhere between regime change and humanitarianism.

“We had better get this straight from the beginning … or there’s going to be a situation where war lingers on, country after country, situation after situation, all of them on a humane basis, saving people,” Lugar warned Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

In moving so quickly, without a serious stab at bipartisan consensus-building in Congress, Obama is taking on a political risk with an outcome as uncertain as the military operation itself.

Like a penny-ante poker player who stuns his sleepy companions by pushing all of his chips to the middle of the table at the end of the game, Obama has taken his biggest foreign policy risk to date at a time when caution is increasingly defining his domestic agenda.

In the past, Obama’s gambles mostly paid off. But this time, the results are in the hands of Qadhafi — an unpredictable villain straight out of a James Bond movie — a hastily assembled international coalition and, above all, an American public weary of endless wars in the Mideast.

“It’s a genuine test of foreign policy leadership. And this time, whatever happens can’t be blamed on his predecessor,” said longtime Republican pollster Frank Luntz. “Short-term, his base voters won’t be happy to see the U.S. engaged in now a third conflict when they are strongly opposed to the other two. But in the long term, if this leads to Qadhafi being removed, he will score real political points among independents and swing voters. Basically, it’s a high-risk, high-reward strategy.”

Luntz added, “I can imagine the line that opens the presidential debate on foreign policy: ‘Six presidents have talked about getting rid of Qadhafi. Six presidents talked. One president acted.’”

On Sunday, White House officials emphasized that the military action will be ending soon — and focused on attacking Qadhafi’s command and control structure, along with ground forces threatening to overrun rebel positions. Moreover, they said Obama’s decision to take action after weeks of reluctance was motivated by humanitarian concerns and that the politics of the decision haven’t entered the equation.

White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer, travelling in Latin America with Obama, blamed the media for whipping up controversy and focusing on the domestic political implications rather than the results that policy is yielding in Libya.

“There is a perpetual criticism in an industry that promotes every disagreement from every side on both issues,” he wrote in an e-mail to POLITICO. “There is no business model in the modern media that promotes comity. If we worried too much about criticism, we wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning.”

Still, the political dangers are real. Pollsters said Obama is likely to get a short-term bump from voters, who tend to rally behind the commander in chief in times of crisis, but where his approval rating goes from there depends on who is left standing when the shooting stops.

“Right now, Obama’s treading water,” said Bruce Buchanan, a presidential scholar at the University of Texas. “Anytime he does anything with a risk attached to it, he’s going to be vulnerable.”

What makes this situation especially fluid is the lack of a clearly articulated White House endgame, apart from Obama’s stated goal of stopping a massacre in Benghazi and his preferred outcome of driving Qadhafi from power.

That alarms many Obama supporters who had assumed — wrongly it turns out — that his opposition to the war in Iraq would make him wary of joining new fights. Pragmatic progressives also are scratching their heads, wondering why Obama is willing to commit U.S. forces to this fight.

“It strikes me as a mess — poorly conceived, ginned up by folks with their own weird agendas, carried out at a point well past the point that it was going to accomplish anything. Just all really bad,” Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall wrote.

A group of liberal House Democrats, led by Reps. Jerrold Nadler of New York, Dennis Kucinich of Ohio and Maxine Waters of California, “strongly raised objections to the constitutionality” of Obama’s commitment of forces without prior congressional approval, POLITICO reported Saturday.

They picked up an unlikely sympathizer in Boehner, who echoed their concerns.

“The administration has a responsibility to define for the American people, the Congress and our troops what the mission in Libya is, better explain what America’s role is in achieving that mission and make clear how it will be accomplished,” Boehner wrote in a statement.

“Before any further military commitments are made, the administration must do a better job of communicating to the American people and to Congress about our mission in Libya and how it will be achieved.”

GOP pollster David Winston warned Obama of a larger problem: selling his plan to independents and conservatives who are far less gung-ho for military action after bloody, protracted conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Even if Obama gets the policy right, he needs to “make sure there’s the broad context by which people can understand why decisions are being made. ... If there’s concern about the foreign policy goals being unclear, and we’re committing troops, I think that’s unsettling to the country.”

On Sunday, the administration’s top national security officials offered little additional clarity, apart from saying the U.S. won’t deploy ground troops and soon expects to take a back seat role to France, Britain and at least two Arab League nations.

National Security Adviser Tom Donilon stressed that while U.S. forces played a central role in initial missile strikes Saturday against air defenses under control of Qadhafi’s regime, the U.S. expects its allies and partners to soon take the lead.

“We expect that to happen in a matter of days, not weeks,” Donilon said.

“From the military perspective, the mission is very clear. And it’s limited in scope,” Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told CBS. “It’s for others to determine where this will go long term.”

Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters that disclosing too much about the administration’s specific goals would constrain the flexibility of commanders.

And he downplayed reports of a schism among Obama’s national security staff, saying that the decision to launch military action enjoyed “unanimous” backing from top advisers after a “spirited” debate.

“There has not been a question asked publicly in the last 24 hours or so that wasn’t discussed in depth in the lead-up to the launching of this operation,” he told reporters en route to Russia with him.