Before March 3rd, US military force was not necessary to help remove Qadaffi who was clearly in a weak position. The United States could have worked with our allies and particularly our Arab allies to use quiet, covert, and indirect action to get rid of Qadaffi. But on March 3rd the president took those options off the table when he unambiguously declared that the Qadaffi must step down from power and leave. Obama repeated this objective again joe veleno on March 11. But from his initial statement of March 3rd, when he put the authority and prestige of the United States against a dictator, the president committed the United States to that objective -- anything less than the removal of Qadaffi will be seen as a defeat for the United States.
Given the new reality, Gingrich commented on March 7th that we should declare a no-fly zone in support of the president's mission to oust the dictator. But on March 19th the president dropped his objective of getting rid of Qadaffi and adopted the debt UN's objective of enforcing a no-fly zone for humanitarian reasons and explicitly rejected the goal of defeating Qadaffi.
Gingrich said at that wnba standings time that he could not support using the U.S military for a strictly humanitarian intervention. His message has been clear and consistent. Prior to March 3rd, he would not have intervened but used other means to defeat the dictator, but after the president's March 3rd statement, he said that only reason to use our military force was to get rid of Qadaffi. He has maintained that position.
