Thoughts on Libya

posted at 1:10 am on March 22, 2011 by Steven Den Beste

First, let me put something important to rest: The bombing isn’t illegal. Obama isn’t violating the Constitution or the law.

The operative law is the War Powers Resolution. It isn’t very long; you can read it here. There are people who think that the WPR is itself unconstitutional, but so far the courts have not said so, and it isn’t for the President to make such a decision for himself. (If the President can unilaterally decide that any particular law is unconstitutional and thus should be ignored, then the balance of power is fatally unbalanced.)

Under the War Powers Resolution, the President can commit American military forces to combat for 60 days on his own say-so. He is required to brief leaders of Congress but he doesn’t need their permission.

If he expects military operations to last longer than that, he is required to go to Congress before the 60 days elapse, and ask for an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). Legally speaking, an AUMF is a “declaration of war”, and getting an AUMF satisfies the constitutional requirement of a congressional declaration of war. It is legally irrelevant that the AUMF doesn’t contain the phrase “declare war” or any variation of it.

When the WPR was passed, it was implied but not explicitly stated that the President would not use this as a way of getting the US involved in a big war so that Congress was ultimately forced to approve it retroactively. And when Bush decided we had to invade Iraq, he got an AUMF from Congress before the first bullet was fired.

But the WPR doesn’t explicitly require that. Instead, it contains that 60 day period, to cover cases where the President really does expect limited action, for a brief period.

Now as I say, there are many who think that the AUMF itself is unconstitutional. But until the Supreme Court so rules, it is the law of the land, and for the time being Obama is operating within its bounds.

Whether he is violating that unspoken pact of getting us involved in something bigger before asking Congress to approve, well that remains to be seen.

(I should also probably mention that the WPR requires the President to brief Congress within 48 hours after such hostilities begin, and it does appear that Obama missed that deadline. I seriously doubt that Congress would consider that, by itself, to be an impeachable offense.)

The other thing I wanted to talk about is the decision itself.

There can be no more important decision made by the President of the United States than to commit our military to combat. Before that is done, the President owes it to them, and to the citizens of the United States, to answer the following questions:

1. What are we trying to achieve? How will we know when we’ve won?

2. Who is the enemy?

3. What is the enemy trying to achieve, and in what ways do their objectives and our objectives come into conflict?

4. And finally, why are these things important enough to ask our young men to die for them?

This is all straight out of Clausewitz. He said that the generals (and by implication, admirals, but Clausewitz was an Army man) could not competently direct and fight the war without knowing those things.

Long time readers will know that I was a major advocate for the invasion of Iraq, and I stand by that. I still think it was the right thing to do. But the Bush administration was never willing to truly identify our enemy, and to this day the “War on Terror” has suffered from an unwillingness of our leaders to say who we’re fighting, and why. This is a self-inflicted wound of tremendous proportions, and we have suffered for it.

But in the case of Obama’s decision to bomb Libya, he seems to have topped Bush. In this case, the only thing Obama has identified is the enemy: Qadaffi. The enemy’s objectives are clear: to remain in power.

But what, exactly, are we trying to do? Boot Qadaffi? well, no… according to Obama. He says that Qadaffi must go, but he must go peacefully. Obama says we are not going to use military force to eject him. Then what?

Nominally the excuse is “protecting civilians”, but if that’s really the job, this is the wrong way to go about it. And some of the operations taking place (e.g. reported bombing of Qadaffi’s palace) don’t make sense.

Obama has made a comment to the effect that we’re involved in this in order to prove that coalition operations can be made to work. As a generic statement that was never in doubt. (Study the combined British/American operation in Europe in WWII for an example.) This may have been “code words” for Obama trying to make points about Bush “unilateralism” versus Obama’s clearly superior “multilateralism”, but I don’t buy that, either.

I’ve come to the conclusion that Obama is doing this because of two weeks of rising criticism of his inaction. In other words, he’s doing it to prove he has balls. Obama has a thin skin and doesn’t like to be criticized, and he’s sending men into combat in order to stop the criticism.

And that is one hell of a stupid reason to ask men to risk death.

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