Kissinger: Gadhafi Remaining ‘Incomprehensible’

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger says he can’t comprehend what it means when President Barack Obama says the United States will soon be “getting out of Libya,” and that if Moammar Gadhafi remains Libyan leader then the logic behind U.S. intervention is “incomprehensible.”

“I don’t understand what the phrase: ‘We are getting out of Libya’ means. I suppose we are going to turn it over to some kind of a NATO command or a Franco-British command,” Kissinger told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren Tuesday. “But we are in Libya, and we are committed in a way. And if Gadhafi now stays in power and if Libya gets partitioned – which would be the result – it will be absolutely incomprehensible why we mounted such a big operation.”

Van Susteren asked Kissinger – who has said if Gadhafi remains in power, the Obama administration would appear weak – what he sees as the outcome of the Libyan campaign. Kissinger echoed the Obama administration and said Gadhafi must go.

“I want to make clear, I am not necessarily in agreement with every step that got us to where we are. But now we are in a military operation, we have committed major American forces, and we will be judged by the outcome,” Kissinger said. “And if the outcome is that Gadhafi stays in office and that, therefore, Libya will be either partitioned, or in the worst case, fall … increasingly under his rule, then the American actions will be considered incomprehensible by people who judge our international behavior. So I'm assuming that the outcome will be that Gadhafi will be overthrown.

“Then we will have the problem of preventing another failed state from emerging and to prevent a situation in which we will be asked to organize a territory that has never really had a regular government because they used to have a king, then Gadhafi came in and ran it as a feudal regime,” Kissinger continued. “And we haven’t any idea who these rebels are in Benghazi.

“But being where we are, the outcome has to be that Gadhafi leaves. And then some international effort is made to create … some kind of a political structure,” he said. “We should not put American troops in there. But we cannot just get out and then say, ‘Now we are out,’ whatever we may argue about whether we should have gotten in the way we did.”