Found on a conservative blog:
“Well, you know, at first I was highly critical of kind of the foot dragging from the White House, but over time I think the negotiating ploy here is proving to be fairly… I mean I would say it’s brilliant. I mean I was surprised when the line was 'we won’t do anything unless the U.N. Security Council does something,' and NATO, and then NATO pointed to the Arab League and the African Union… you know, at that point you thought, 'wow, this is the lowest common denominator for strategic decision making – we’re never going to get anything on this basis.'
“But the foot dragging, I think, by Obama was purposeful. I think he really wanted an up-front approval by every relevant stakeholder to elicit and reveal a global demand for us to come in there and do what we can only… only we can do. And I think in that way he kind of launders our motives effectively through others, and the way that it should be when it is, in reality, a global demand that we come in and do something for the system that everybody wants done.
“So I’m… if there’s an Obama Doctrine I think that’s it. I think it’s sort of the polar opposite of the 'I’m going to do what I’m going to do' Bush model. And I think it’s more 'I’m not going to do anything unless I get up front approval and my responsibilities are limited and I’m going to incrementally negotiate every step along the way to make sure that I never get ahead of the global community on this one.'
“And to the extent that he can pull it off, I mean, that would be a heck of a model, if he can really do it, especially if we don’t have a big, you know, kind of, America hogs up the reconstruction process post-Gaddafi, God willing. That would be just a tremendous model, and in a way a triangulation between the Clintonian and of naïve expectations of handing-off to the U.N. and the Bush, kind of, you know too primacy oriented. It would be a nice balancing of those two and maybe the [inaudible] we’ve been looking for.”
Glenn Thrush piece in Politico called "In search of the Obama Doctrine."
Yet this is no blanket doctrine: Neither Obama nor anyone else in his administration has so much as whispered about a military response to the brutal crackdowns that are also taking place in Bahrain, Yemen, Syria and Iran.
“We’re going to go after dictators who are vulnerable, not countries with nuclear weapons or Iran with a population of 70 million,” says Thomas P.M. Barnett, a former Defense Department official who is now an analyst with WikiStrat, an international consulting firm.
“But,” pointing to Libya, “a country with 5, 6, 7 million people, all clustered on the coast in a few cities? Sure. Why not?”