Pentagon: US-led strikes help rebels retake key city

Photo by: Manuel Balce Ceneta

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Photo

Mariam Jamal Ismail, front right, and Randa Elzouzary, center, both from Libya, join protestors in front of the White House in Washington, Saturday, March 26, 2011, condemning Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi and in support for the U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973, approving a No-Fly Zone over Libya and authorizing all necessary measures to protect civilians.

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

A barrage of U.S.-led airstrikes opened the door for Libyan rebels to retake the eastern city of Ajdabiya on Saturday, handing President Barack Obama a tangible example of progress as he defends the military action to war-weary Americans.

The administration has been under pressure to better explain why the U.S. was embroiling itself in another Muslim conflict and to clarify what America’s continuing role will be as it begins to turn control of the week-old operation over to NATO.

Obama cited “significant success” in the war Saturday, and he and others defended the U.S. intervention as lawful and critical to save thousands of lives and stabilize a strategically vital region in the Middle East.

“The United States should not and cannot intervene every time there’s a crisis somewhere in the world,” Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address Saturday. But with Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi threatening “a bloodbath that could destabilize an entire region ... it’s in our national interest to act. And it’s our responsibility. This is one of those times.”

And Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the events in the Middle East could be “the most important geostrategic shift since the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

Without military intervention by the U.S. and NATO, “the promise that the pro-democracy movement holds for transforming the Arab world could have been crushed,” he said in an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal.

The Pentagon said U.S.-led forces pounded Libyan ground troops and other targets along the Mediterranean coast and in Tripoli, and the contested cities of Misrata and Ajdabiya in strikes overnight, but they provided no details on what was hit.

Obama, who will speak to the nation Monday evening, has been roundly criticized by lawmakers for not seeking more congressional input on the war.