Warren Dew wrote:Coito ergo sum wrote:I wonder, too, about another complaint leveled against the Iraq War. The anti-Iraq War folks were very adamant about there not having been a debate in the US prior to war - even though there was, as I recall, vigorous and rabid debate on the subject for about a year prior to war. Strangely, those same folks do not oppose the Libyan War for that same reason - zero debate - the President o.k.'d the Security Council resolution and then proceeded to implement before any Congressional authorization was given.
Most people view politics as a team sport: if my guy authorized a war, it's a good war, if your guy does it, it's a bad war. Your more rational approach obviously makes more sense, but is quite unusual.
I strongly suspected that most of the folks, with the exception of more consistent folks like sandinista and Dennis Kucinich who strongly oppose Libya as well as Iraq, did not oppose the Iraq War qua war, but rather because of the person who started it. I think we are seeing proof of that with the pregnant silence that we see from the usual "antiwar" (inaccurate euphemism) folks like International ANSWER, Code Pink, Moveon.org, and the general "liberal on the street."
Humanitarian crisis in Libya justifies military action without prior Congressional authorization, and despite the fact that more egregious humanitarian issues exist in non-oil producing countries, and in oil producing countries friendlier to the US. We don't hear the arguments about it being a pretext for oil seizures, or a pretense to get revenge on a dictator who we "don't like." We don't hear the arguments about it being a domestic issue in Libya, none of our business, and not our place to "impose" anything on the people of Libya. We don't hear the argument that Libya has not threatened the U.S. or any other western country - we don't have cries from the liberal wing that Qadafi opened his doors to inspections and gave up his ambitions on WMD and is therefore not an "imminent threat" of any kind.
The precedent set by Libya is that if the President determines that there is a humanitarian issue in a country, he may start a war without congressional authorizations, at least as long as the few countries on the UN Security Council agree. That, to me, seems to be a far more dangerous precedent than the Iraq War, which HAD prior congressional authorization, resulted from a long serious national debate on whether to go in, and involved a coalition of about 37 nations that all agreed on the interpretation of Resolution 1441 that no further resolution was needed for use of force to compel Hussein's compliance.
I don't see how anyone who doesn't make the argument now "there are humanitarian issues and dictators all over the place, but we're not invading those places..." can make that argument later (or about Iraq anymore).
Warren Dew wrote:
Coito ergo sum wrote:If that is true, then the exclusive authority to authorize the executive to go to war would lie in the Congress, and if the executive proceeds to wage war without the authorization of congress, then he is acting unconstitutionally and unlawfully.
Yes.
So, the question then becomes - is employing carrier groups, launching missiles and aircraft sorties and bombing runs, considered the waging of war. If so, the Libyan war was illegal under US Constitutional law. If not, then we need to know what level of military action constitutes "war" and what level is just "military action that doesn't rise to the level of war."
