Alex Johnson – Journalist at Large

President Barack Obama declared Monday night that the U.S. military action in Libya had “stopped (Moammar) Gadhafi’s deadly advance,” fulfilling what he said was a U.S. responsibility not to “turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries.” …

In a nationally televised address from the National Defense University in Washington, Obama sought to convince a skeptical Congress and a doubting nation that he was doing the right thing by intervening militarily in a third Muslim nation. He did that by casting the conflict as a moral response to oppression by Libya’s leader, whom he called “a tyrant.” …

The administration has struggled to make clear what it hopes to achieve in Libya, where U.S. forces were sent March 19 while Obama was out of the country on a South American tour. …

Obama acknowledged that “Americans continue to have questions about our efforts in Libya.” To allay those concerns, he stressed that enforcing reform in Libya “will be a task for the international community and, more importantly, a task for the Libyan people themselves.”

Full story (Alex Johnson/msnbc.com)