Glenn Beck asks:

Why did it take President Obama nine days to speak out against the atrocities taking place in Libya? After all, he immediately came out to condemn Mubarak when protesters spoke up in Egypt.

Jay Carney, the President’s new Press Secretary, explained, “This is just a scheduling issue. As I said, the president will meet with Secretary of State Clinton this afternoon, his regular meeting and they will obviously discuss Libya. He will have something to say at that meeting and it’s possible the president will speak this afternoon or tomorrow.”

Well, Obama finally did make one of his “let me be clear” speeches –  in which he never is clear – on what’s happening in Libya, without mentioning the name of the tyrant Gaddafi who’s trying to stop the revolution by having hundreds of protestors killed in the streets. But in the speech can be found, by suspicious minds like ours, the reason why he had to wait for nine days before he could say anything.

He had to wait until he knew what certain others thought about the issue. Which others? “The Arab League, the African Union, the Organization of the Islamic Conference*, and many individual nations.” (Oh, he also put in “the European Union”, perhaps to make the list look respectable.)

A list of those “individual nations” would be interesting, but we don’t expect to hear which they were. Russia? China? Probably the individual members of the Arab League, the African Union, and the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

The Washington Post, though its bias is generally towards Obama and the left, is not uncritical of the administration’s absence of a coherent foreign policy:

Jay Carney … is the mouthpiece of an administration that has painfully little to say. …

[But] the passivity wasn’t the fault of the new spokesman. He merely had the uncomfortable task of articulating a coherent policy in the absence of one.

What sort of leader is Obama then?

David Solway in a longish article trying to answer that question, arrives at this opinion:

There is no question that Obama is a man driven by a power pack of hard-left theories and precepts. Yet when responding to sudden events whether at home or abroad, he has no settled mind, only impulses and inclinations. This explains why he is constantly backtracking in trying to explain his switchback itinerary and impetuous behavior …

But then Solway wonders:

Which Obama inspires greater uneasiness, the dedicated socialist or the vacillating flibbertigibbet?

When it comes to foreign affairs, look for the flibbertigibbet every time.

*For the leading role of the OIC in advancing the spread of Islam in the West, see our post Europe betrayed, February 11, 2010; and see The trusted envoy, February 20, 2010, for Obama’s appointment of a US representative to the organization.