The issue: Despite criticism, U.S. support has been integral to rebels’ success so far

Coming after the killing of Osama bin Laden, President Barack Obama has another foreign-policy success — the impending, if it hasn’t happened already, fall of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, which the U.S. played a material role in organizing.

OBAMA, WHO IS often, and sometimes accurately, accused of being too prone to vacillation and inactivity, did so in the face of withering Republican criticism to the effect that nothing the president did was right.

Once the decision was made that NATO would support the Libyan rebels by using air power to enforce an arms embargo and a no-fly zone and protect civilians in missions that were only thinly disguised as tactical air support for the rebels, Obama decreed that the U.S. would play a supporting role and let Britain and France take the lead.

“Supporting” rather understates the American role. At the outset, U.S. war craft carried out airstrikes and throughout provided aerial refueling, surveillance, logistical support and intelligence.

This established an important principle that seems to have been lost on Obama’s critics: When acting in concert with its allies, the U.S. doesn’t have to run everything and the U.S. doesn’t have to do all, or at least most, of the fighting.

Britain, France, Canada, Belgium, Denmark, Belgium, Spain, Norway and the others, including a handful of Arab nations, did fine on their own, although with substantial help from the U.S. on the sidelines.

OBAMA WAS CRITICIZED for coming late to the fray, generally by people who had been opposed to intervention in the first place. The U.S. joined the intervention only after Gadhafi had pledged to exterminate “like rats” the pro-rebel population of Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city.

At this point, Obama was attacked for failing to “show leadership,” the Republicans’ all-purpose charge when they can’t think of anything else bad to say about the president.

However, their definition of “leadership” came with caveats: Don’t get us into any actual fighting, usually expressed as no American “boots on the ground” and, for heaven’s sake, don’t get us into a third war in a Muslim country.

Obama was criticized for the expensive cost of the Libyan operation, $896 million, through late July, but last Sunday GOP Sens. Lindsey Graham and John McCain criticized the president for not taking the hugely expensive step of employing “the full weight of our air power.”

THE TWO REPUBLICANS said in a joint statement: “Ultimately, our intervention in Libya will be judged a success or failure based not on the collapse of the (Gadhafi) regime” — as it happens, the point of this whole exercise — “but on the political order that emerges in its place.”

That’s a nice-sounding sentiment, but, as in so much of the criticism of Obama’s handling of the Libyan situation, rather lacking in alternatives and details, other than, one surmises, don’t use any troops and don’t spend any money.

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