Thoughts and Questions on Libya

Note: I started writing a post about Libya, but then Obama gave a prime-time speech before I could finish it, so I scrapped it and started it again.

I haven’t commented here yet about Libya. I think the situation creates more questions than answers. Six questions come to mind.

First, why are we there?

Second, what’s our goal?

Third, is this a war?

Fourth, why didn’t Congress approve it?

Fifth, who’s really in charge over there?

Sixth, who really stands to gain or lose?

Obama tried to address the first two in his speech. My original line of thought is that Libya was of very limited strategic interest to the USA, as Libya provides only about 7.5% of our oil imports (5% of our overall consumption). Libya supplies much more oil to Europe. Also, Libya’s not much of a threat to us since Gadhafi willingly dismantled his nuclear program after Bush Jr. invaded Iraq because Gadhafi was scared of us. Gadhafi’s (somewhat) cooperative. By contrast, Iran and North Korea are more defiant. All three dictators oppress their people and all three sought nuclear technology, yet Libya’s the only one we go after. I still don’t understand that logic.

Obama’s argument was basically two-fold, and I think it has some merit. One, there’s the humanitarian aspect in that we’re preventing the massacre of innocent people. The natural counter to that is how such slaughter occurs in other places and we do nothing, so why should we go to Libya? Obama countered this with magnitude, saying Libya’s casualties would’ve been larger than many other places. Two, if Libya destabilizes, that puts adverse pressure on Egypt and Tunisia as they’re trying to rebuild, also potentially destabilizing them (think Domino Theory here).

Personally, I think there’s an additional political element at work. I suspect Obama wants some kind of foreign policy event for reelection. Even though his handling of the Libya situation is hurting his short-term poll numbers, it may help his chance at reelection because then he’d be able to say that he handled a foreign policy crisis.

Here’s a counterpoint to my theory (I posted it somewhere else before here) from an older fellow in Michigan who’s an extremely intelligent, staunch conservative.

“You’re ascribing too much thought to the Libya escapade. Obama was literally hectored into this by prog-harpies Clinton, Rice, and Power. His trip to Brazil was the equivalent of me going fishing when my wife gets on my case about something I don’t want to do. This also explains the WTF (“Win the future?” –well, not exactly what I meant) speech the other night. As Napoleon said, “Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence.”

How do you counter that? :-p

Ok, next question. Is this a war? I’ve heard it called a ‘kinetic military action’ or ‘no-fly zone plus’. I would think a no-fly zone plus where we’re attacking Gadhafi’s ground forces would be considered an act of war. We wouldn’t like it if somebody tried that here. It’s a non-war war, I guess.

Why didn’t Congress approve? In his speech, Obama said he consulted with the leaders in Congress, whatever that means. He said he had to act quickly and couldn’t wait for a vote, which sounds familiar. We have a long history of the executive branch taking power from the legislative branch with regards to declaring war. The Constitution explicitly empowers the legislative branch to declare war, but it implicitly empowers the executive branch to wage war. After all, waging war requires the agility and secrecy Congress generally lacks (only because all their bills and votes are made public, not the behind-closed-doors antics). Obama got NATO, UN, and even Arab League approval, which is all well and good for multilateralism, but the one approval Obama needs to go to war is the US Congress’, and that’s the one approval he didn’t get.

On a side note, I wonder if the right wing will try to impeach Obama. They do have a case, which I’ll detail in a future post.

Who’s in charge? It’s mostly the USA’s military, but it seems like NATO is calling the shots with limited input from us. Maybe this is Obama’s chance to experiment with multilaterialism so that he can differentiate himself further from Bush Jr.’s more unilateral orientation. This lends to my political implications theory.

Who wins and who loses? I don’t know yet, and we won’t know for a long time.

There are still many unanswered and unasked questions, but this is a start. I’m still not even sure what I think of this Libya situation, to be honest. I just know it’s very complicated.