It’s just part of the larger war:

What are the Libyan government’s options? It can try to appease the opposition by more Islam. But that won’t work really. It can try to appease the opposition by distancing itself from the United States, but given its weakness that won’t work. And it can try to repress the rebels, but since it cannot depend on its own military forces — which are riddled with jihadists — that won’t work either.

That is the real lesson in Libya. For once, Obama took sides against the revolutionary Islamists. We are seeing in Egypt and the Gaza Strip that appeasement doesn’t work; we are seeing in Libya that engaging in conflict has its high costs, too. Obama claims to have “liberated” Libya, but to many Libyans he has enslaved it to infidels.

So what next? American military aid to the Libyan government and U.S. military advisors? An endless war against the jihadists? And what if the government in Libya, which is pretty fragile and cannot fully depend on its own military, starts to fall? In Somalia, the local al-Qaeda branch didn’t win only because Ethiopia and other African nations sent in thousands of troops. In Bahrain — a complicated situation in which there is a mistreated Shia population whose opposition has both moderates and radicals — the government was only saved by Saudi troops and against the will of the White House.

Treating what has happened in Libya as an isolated tragedy misses the point. Viewing it as generalized proof of Obama’s terrible policy doesn’t get us to the solution. There is a battle going on in the Middle East that will continue for decades. Obama has largely helped the enemy side. In Libya, while he gave some help to the Islamists, his basic policy supported the moderates for once. Now the price must be paid or one more country will fall to revolutionary Islamist rule and U.S. influence and credibility will decline even further.

This is a war, not a misunderstanding. It is a battle of ideologies and a struggle for control of state power, not hurt feelings over some obscure video.

And it’s a war that the administration pretends doesn’t exist, and (like all foreign wars) certainly doesn’t want to win.

Read all, it also has a well-justified criticism of our anti-Israel foreign service.

[Update a while later]

Mark Steyn: An act of war, not a movie protest.