Sri Lanka Puts Obama to the Test - and He's Failing, Time Says

Sri Lanka Puts Obama to the Test - and He's Failing

During the campaign, Barack Obama hinted at how his future Administration might act to stop suffering in the world. American foreign policy should focus on more than just killing terrorists; it needs to address "challenges of the 21st century" such as "climate change and poverty, genocide and disease." Obama and his advisers all but called for Robert Mugabe's removal in Zimbabwe and advocated more aggressive U.S. action to halt the genocide in Darfur. "When genocide is happening," said candidate Obama during the second presidential debate, "when ethnic cleansing is happening somewhere around the world and we stand idly by, that diminishes us." The emerging Obama doctrine seemed to signal a new age of liberal interventionism — the idea that the U.S. has a right and obligation to intervene, by force if necessary, to protect civilians from war and ethnic violence, even in places where the U.S. has no vital national interests at stake.

That doctrine is being tested today in Sri Lanka. And unlike Darfur, where the most egregious crimes were committed long before the current Administration took office, the humanitarian disaster in Sri Lanka has unfolded within the past 100 days, on Obama's watch.