"It's our policy that Gadhafi has to go." "Policy" doesn't work in that sentence. "Belief" works. "Opinion" works. "Policy" works only if you're declaring a plan or course of action.
That's judging by a lexical standard. If you judge by a rhetorical, or political, standard, it works. If a President prefaces a crisis statement with "Let me be perfectly clear" (as nearly every American president since Nixon speaking about, and presumably to, a potential enemy has done), sets his jaw, and speaks strong words ("has to" is strong; "policy," as a statement of aim is strong) then his statement, whatever its lexical shortcomings, is going to do some work on a lot of people.
The times determine what work is needed. Our failure in two quagmire wars has been attributed to lack of a clear, firm statement of aims by the President taking us into them. That hangs over Obama's head, along with the vocabularies used to take us in.
At the moment, since "regime change" (Iraq) has joined "surgical strike" and "evil" on the contaminated list, Obama can't finish his sentence with the lexically appropriate conclusion to "It's our policy": "to remove dictators like Gadhafi from office." He must leave his country out of the moving, the quagmire direction. ("No, no," he had Admiral Mullen reassure us, "we are not targeting Gadhafi.") You can see why Obama (or his writers) like "has to"; it has the firmness of necessity while leaving agency up in the air. Who knows who the remover will be?
Obama's problem, like that of every president considering the use of military force, is to find good words ("protecting civilians," "meeting the humanitarian threat") broad enough to cover the bad things he has to do at the moment (kill people, the end military force is driven to) to gain a good thing in the future (people not being killed). It's the old ethical problem of a good end requiring bad means, and the old political problem of the public not being able to see, or bear, the means to the good end they really want, and will vote you out of office if they don't get.
Thanks for this string of articles that make sense of the words and the rationale associated with this event. It beats my initial response: putting an index finger into each ear and going "LA LA LA LA LA."
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