Welcome to the Muddle East, which these days extends across North Africa to Tripoli and points west. Now that Barack Obama has explained this country’s policy toward Libya – or by maybe by now it’s NATO’s policy, or the UN’s, or the European Community’s, or anybody’s but his – it’s as muddled as ever. If not more so.

How sum up that policy?

To sum up the president’s long-awaited speech about American policy toward Libya, which isn’t an easy task, and may be an impossible one, the president believes that country’s long-time dictator and nutcase (not necessarily in that order) must go, but doesn’t believe in ousting him.

Got that?

Furthermore, all the airstrikes now being unleashed against Moammar Gadhafi’s regime have only a humanitarian aim: to protect Libya’s civilian population.

In that case, the best way to protect Libya’s people from a protracted civil war with all its death and destruction would be to get rid of Col. Gadhafi and so end this war as soon as possible.

But that’s not American policy, either, or if it is, the president doesn’t dare say so, perhaps even to himself.

A nice palace in Saudi Arabia surely awaits Gadhafi and his clan as soon as they quit Tripoli. Or maybe a nice island retreat can be found for him – on Elba or St. Helena, which is where the European powers finally dispatched their Napoleon.

Yet the president pretends that overthrowing this little Bonaparte is not American policy. It’s just something to be hoped for.

But hope, as Margaret Thatcher used to say, is no substitute for an effective policy. Like ending this war by getting the rebels what they need to win it and overthrow the tyrant.

Yet our president disdains the very words Regime Change. He shouldn’t.

The air campaign in Libya, explains the president, isn’t ours any longer but is now under the command of NATO.

Oh, well, that changes everything, doesn’t it? Never mind that the United States is still a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, indeed its leading member, and that most of these airstrikes are being made by American forces.

Do you think they even bother to paint over the U.S. insignia on the jet bombers and Tomahawk missiles?

But the president and commander supposedly in chief says different. He says he’s no longer in charge of this operation. In short, pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

At this point, it could be the Wizard of Oz explaining American/NATO/UN/EC policy, but even a little girl from Kansas like Dorothy could see this is still basically an American operation whatever the president pretends. Maybe even little Toto could see as much.

Our mission in Libya may remain largely undefined, unfortunately, but it’s undeniably ours. Yet our president pretends it’s somebody else’s, maybe the world’s in general.

At the moment official American policy has so many reservations, evasions, zigzags and gaps in general that it remains, in Churchill’s phrase, a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, wispy as a cloudbank.

Do you think even the president knows what his policy is? Or has thought it through? If so, he’s not telling the rest of us, not clearly. Here’s my best guess: It consists mainly of hoping for the best. Plus a lot of gestures that cancel each other out.

If you’re looking for a clear, concise editorial judgment on the president’s explanation of his (non)policy, look no further than this observation from straight-talking, agree-with-him-or-not Mitch McConnell, the minority leader of the U.S. Senate:

“If the American people are uncertain about our military objectives in Libya, it’s with good cause.”

© 2011 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.