(Image source: The White House)

BY ANLI XIAO

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Libyan rebels won their freedom by ousting Muammar Gaddafi. But is Gaddafi’s downfall a win for President Obama’s political career? A Harvard professor says absolutely -- Obama will get the credit for what’s happened in Libya.

“His strategy of going in; going in with NATO; putting more of the burden of responsibility on our allies … I think that strategy has succeeded. I think the president deserves a lot of credit for sticking with this. It wasn’t easy.”

An analyst from The Huffington Post agrees -- the Libyan victory validates Obama’s policy. He adds, the success is not all Obama’s -- it’s the result of his entire administration.

“The administration has put these policies into practice over the past two years. Not always smoothly, not always consistently...But the overall results have been impressive. He has steadily pulled U.S. national security policy out of the ditch in which he found it.”

This puts Obama’s critics in an interesting position, says the Daily Beast’s Tara McKelvey. Months ago, Obama was accused of being “slow to decide on military intervention.”

“Obama trumps Libya critics. Now that Gaddafi is on his way out, President Obama and his advisers believe they are on the right side.”

But some critics are not calling this a win for Obama. A writer for The Atlantic contends the president waged this war illegally, which could prove to be a nightmare in 2012.

“He willfully broke a law that he believes to be constitutional; he undermined his own professed beliefs about executive power, and made it more likely that future presidents will undermine convictions that he purports to hold”

Although the Atlantic is criticizing Obama’s illegal war, a writer for the Washington Post says, the President can take some credit -- but certainly not all of it.

“Gaddafi was engineered not by foreign powers but by a brave rebellion organized in Libya by its people...his was not a made-by-America revolution...”

Regardless of if the president gets credit or not, Real Clear Politics’ Alexis Simendinger says -- that won’t be a deciding factor in the 2012 election.

“Even the president’s least-debated achievements as head of state are unlikely to tip the political scales in November 2012...the prosperity of families in, say, Tripoli, Iowa, outweighs Americans’ concern for rebel fighters in Tripoli, Libya.”

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