It’s Getting Bizarre With Obama And Libya

A quick recap for those out of the loop… The transition from monarchy to democracy across the globe in recent centuries had largely been ignored by Africa and the Middle East. Then suddenly in 2011, a bunch of citizens got fed up and started rioting, and it spread across several countries. Maybe it was food prices; maybe it was Twitter. But rulers started getting overthrown and it was officially dubbed the “Arab Spring.” Some of the rulers weren’t too excited about abdicating their thrones, and started mercilessly slaughtering protesters in an attempt to quell the rebellions.

Especially in Libya. Except the rebels became more organized and started fighting back. Dictator Gaddafi brought out military aircraft. Talk about escalation! Everybody from the U.N. and the Arab League started talking about creating a no-fly zone to protect the rebels. Finally, they did. Of course the United States, with a military budget nearly as big as the rest of the world combined (depending on who’s counting), helped out – firing over 100 Tomahawk cruise missiles and stuff like that.

At first blush, it seemed nice and decent. A dictator’s killing a bunch of citizens so the rest of the world steps and in says, hey, you can’t do that. But the whole thing was weird from the beginning. The rest of the world may have prevented some immediate slaughtering, but both sides were still attacking each other, and suddenly the world was involved in a civil war with no exit strategy, supporting one side of the conflict despite the fact that we didn’t know who their leader was or if there were any terrorists among them (sound familiar?)

Even weirder was that Obama made the decision to get involved without getting permission from Congress (apparently there wasn’t time?). Obama, who had just won a Nobel Peace Prize after spending a couple of years criticizing Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Weirdest of all was that he got on TV and told everyone that “we are part of a broad coalition… answering the calls of a threatened people…” eight years to the day (March 19) after Bush got on TV and told everyone that “American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people…”

So. That was all a couple months ago. I thought it was strange and didn’t really like it, but they said it’d be short, we didn’t have any troops on the ground (um, but we did have a CIA team), and we were handing control over to NATO. Hope for the best, right?

Well, now things have gotten downright bizarre.

Jeffrey Kuhner at The Washington Times explains:

[Obama] is violating the War Powers Act. Passed in 1973, the law clearly stipulates that the commander in chief can only deploy U.S. forces for 60 to 90 days without congressional approval.

OK, so that explains how Obama authorized the action without congressional approval to begin with. But now we are past 90 days. Why doesn’t he need it now?

For Mr. Obama, the War Powers Act does not apply because U.S. forces apparently are not engaged in “sustained hostilities” with troops loyal to strongman Col. Moammar Gadhafi.

…First, the administration claimed military intervention was necessary to save civilians from a potential Srebrenica-style massacre in Benghazi. When that was averted, Mr. Obama then argued that NATO bombing had to continue to prevent Col. Gadhafi from routing poorly organized rebel forces. Now the policy has evolved into overthrowing Libya’s police state.

So the commander in chief only has authority to engage in “hostilities” for 60 days without congressional approval, but the administration actually says that what they are doing in Libya now does not amount to “hostilities.” The Washington Times author basically says, “That’s bull****,” and the commenters seem to agree.

But the New York Times really made it interesting:

President Obama rejected the views of top lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department when he decided that he had the legal authority to continue American military participation in the air war in Libya without Congressional authorization…

Mr. Obama decided instead to adopt the legal analysis of several other senior members of his legal team…  argued that the United States military’s activities fell short of “hostilities.”

… [John Boehner] said, “The White House says there are no hostilities taking place. Yet we’ve got drone attacks under way. We’re spending $10 million a day. We’re part of an effort to drop bombs on Qaddafi’s compounds. It just doesn’t pass the straight-face test, in my view, that we’re not in the midst of hostilities.”

A sticking point for some skeptics was whether any mission that included firing missiles from drone aircraft could be portrayed as not amounting to hostilities.

I haven’t read enough content of the Washington Times to be familiar with their political slant, but when the New York Times is reporting something that makes Obama look bad, you know it’s legitimate.

Now I love it when there are comments on NYT content, because their clientele is liberal enough that if there’s a good point to be made for the liberal side, I know I will find it there and have something to think about. So I was very surprised to click on the “comments” link and find that Obama is getting completely skewered:

“Wasn’t Obama a constitutional lawyer before this job? Didn’t he campaign on being nothing like George W. Bush? This reeks of the same old tactics of the good ole’ Bush Doctrine.”

“Just what we needed, a Constitutional Law Professor taking the Constitution to the outhouse…”

“If this is not hostilities by his personal review, then striking his own people by way of drone is not hostile either.”

“On April 26, the Defense Department designated troops operating in Libya, Tunisia and a portion of the Mediterranean Sea as eligible for imminent danger pay… Maybe the White House can help Congress understand why U.S. troops are entitled to combat pay absent ‘hostilities!!’ ”

“The definition of ‘hostilities’ as given by the administration — where two parties must be able to fire at each other ‘meaningfully’ … makes the Libyan army (and any army) firing on civilians amount to less than ‘hostilities.’ ”

“Obama is acting exactly like a king, not the president of a democratic republic. Those who compare him to Bush are clueless, Bush went before congress and they voted to give him permission to use military force…”

It took a couple years, but progressives are actually saying “At least Bush” about something. At least Bush got Congressional authorization, they say. (“Yeah but he lied to get it,” others say. But even if that’s true, how is Obama’s redefinition of “hostilities” any better?) One more comment:

Obama shows contempt for the rule of law because he believes the ends justify the means…

This is what it ultimately comes down to. I don’t know why Obama hasn’t tried to get congressional authorization – one commenter says the Republicans oppose everything he does so why bother, but another says that he knows the war is unpopular with both the public and his own party and he wants to avoid a disastrous vote. Either way, I didn’t see anyone arguing that Obama’s definition of hostilities makes any sense at all.

The whole point of our transition to democracy was that no one would be above the rule of law. You can’t make up your own definition of a law to justify your actions – even if you’re a ruler who believes it’s for a greater good and the ends justify the means, because what if the next ruler has a different definition of the greater good? Then what kinds of power can you count on to be off-limits? That’s why we have laws that must be consistently followed. Otherwise we’re essentially back to absolute power.

There are plenty of remarkable ironies involving Obama’s intervention in Libya, but perhaps none more remarkable than this: By defending our military’s involvement in a nation that is attempting to get rid of an absolute monarch, Obama is starting to act like one.