From Charles Cogan, the Huffington Post:  The French press (or a part of it) is calling it "Sarkozy’s War." Certainly the French president [Nicolas Sarkozy] precipitated the Allied intervention over Libya beginning on March 19, backed by a UN Resolution and a declaration by the Arab League. An equally charged David Cameron went along with Sarkozy’s interventionism, as did Barack Obama, "leading from behind" and in second place. . . .

The Libyan intervention is, if you will, the "anti-Suez" — that moment in 1956 when Britain and France decided on a military intervention to remove Gamal Abdal Nasser of Egypt — without telling the U.S. and with disastrous consequences. Now, some fifty-plus years later, the "world powers of the West," as Charles de Gaulle referred to the U.S., Great Britain, and France, have intervened together to help remove a sanguinary dictator west of Suez.

Charles Cogan was the chief of the Near East-South Asia Division in the Directorate of Operations of the CIA from August 1979 to August 1984. From September 1984 to June 1989 he was CIA Chief in Paris. He is now a historian and an associate of the Belfer Center’s International Security Program at Harvard University’s Kennedy School.  (photo: Dwight D. Eisenhower Library)

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