Why Obama Really Started the Libyan War
Ben Johnson, FloydReports.com
Anyone seeking to know why Barack Obama really committed U.S. troops to Libya’s civil war can begin by dismissing virtually everything he said in his speech Monday night out of hand. For instance, Obama claimed he initiated this military action for humanitarian reasons. Failing “our responsibilities to our fellow human beings…would have been a betrayal of who we are,” he said. “Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different.”
However, in July 2007 the Associated Press reported, “Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Thursday the United States cannot use its military to solve humanitarian problems and that preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn’t a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there.”
Consider: in July 2007, Obama was discussing a war already in progress, one Osama bin Laden called “the most important and serious issue for the whole world today.” America’s most wanted terrorist called Baghdad “the capital of the caliphate” and said the Iraq war will result in, “either victory and glory or misery and humiliation.” Yet just as the surge and a series of agreements with northern tribal leaders began pacifying the country, Barack Obama said the Helpless Giant should turn the country over to the jihadists and stand by as they systematically exterminated our allies. (As president, he has conspicuously failed to take his own advice.) Today, he claims our vital national security interests demand that we take sides in an internecine feud between factions of pro-terrorist Muslims.
Why does the president really support the action in Libya?
1. It serves no U.S. interests.
For most Americans, the fact that a war in no way promotes U.S. interests would be a prima facie argument against initiating it. For left-wingers, the less our nation has to gain from a war, the more apt they are to support it. Liberals are afflicted with irrational guilt over privileges they believe Americans enjoy due to exploitation and militarism. These impulses can only be quieted through irrational acts of self-sacrifice on behalf of those who disregard, dislike, or actively hate us. Thus, liberals view “humanitarian” wars as a means of righting the wrongs their ancestors perpetrated over scores of generations – consider it a form of “redistribution of bloodshed.”
Consider Barack Obama’s statement that “as president, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.” That eerily echoed a section of George W. Bush’s opening salvo against Iraq in his 2002 State of the Union Address….
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Video: Impeach Obama for One Constitutional Crisis After Another
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Pat Buchanan: Obama “Seems to Be” Impeachable
Patrick J. Buchanan, The American Conservative
In ordering air and naval strikes on a country that neither threatened nor attacked the United States, did President Obama commit an impeachable act?
So it would seem. For the framers of the Constitution were precise. The power to declare war is entrusted solely to Congress.
From King William’s War to Queen Anne’s War to King George’s War to the Seven Years’ War, the colonists had had their fill of royal wars. To no principle were they more committed than that the power to declare war must be separate from the power to wage it.
And Obama usurped that power.
His defenders argue that under the War Powers Act he can wage war for 60 days before going to Congress. But that applies only if the president is responding to an attack or has determined that the nation is under imminent threat.
Had JFK ordered air strikes on the Cuban missile sites, he would have been responding to an imminent and potentially mortal threat.
When Ronald Reagan ordered the liberation of Grenada after Marxist thugs murdered the president and 500 American medical students there seemed in danger of being taken hostage, he acted within the War Powers Act. Some 100,000 AK-47 automatic rifles were found stockpiled on the island.
Reagan again acted within the spirit and letter of the act when he used the New Jersey and carrier-based air to retaliate against the terrorist camps of those who engineered the massacre of the 241 Marines in Beirut and when he retaliated against Libya and Moammar Gadhafi for the attack on U.S. soldiers at the Berlin discotheque.
But before George H.W. Bush went to war to liberate Kuwait and George W. Bush took us to war against Iraq, each went to Congress and got roll-call votes authorizing those wars.
Obama worked the phones to get the approval of 10 of 15 members of the Security Council, but not Russia, China, Germany, India or Brazil. He then sought the benediction of the Arab League, which reveals much about where Obama thinks real moral authority in this world resides.
The president described his reasoning: “(W)hen innocent people are being brutalized; when someone like Gadhafi threatens a bloodbath that could destabilize an entire region; and when the international community is prepared to come together to save many thousands of lives — then it’s in our national interest to act. And it’s our responsibility.”
But if Obama’s UN mandate was to “protect civilians” in besieged Benghazi, why did we put a Tomahawk cruise missile down the chimney of Gadhafi’s compound, 600 miles away?
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