Reasonable people may differ on the worthiness of this goal, but the Obama administration pursued it by both abusing a UN mandate to protect Libyan civilians and by completely bypassing the U.S. Congress, ostensibly the only body empowered by the U.S. constitution to declare war. Although such formal declarations of war long ago became quaint in Washington, the president demurred even on the nominal step of seeking the congressional authorization required by the 1973 War Powers Act -- insisting bizarrely that the country was not "at war" with the government it was seeking to remove by force but was rather engaging in "kinetic military action." It was as though the government had swept aside one of the last remaining legislative checks on the use of force with the argument that "it's not purple; it's really more of a mauve."
For Libyans the result has been a country where Gaddafi is gone but in which militias run rampant and human rights abuses are as commonplace as ever -- a situation that some administration supporters like the progressive blogger Juan Cole, who once wrote scathingly about the disintegration of Iraq, have found themselves in the unfortunate position of defending.
Meanwhile in Mali, to Libya's southwest, ethnic Toureg separatists launched a powerful new assault on the Malian army with an array of heavy weapons smuggled out of the chaos in Libya, leading indirectly to a military coup in what had been a paragon of democracy in northwest Africa. As secular Tuareg leaders have found themselves increasingly sidelined by Islamist militants in Mali's vast Saharan expanse, some commentators have even wondered whether the previously democratic Mali could become "the next Afghanistan," a new haven for globally minded Islamist militants.
Perhaps
the holy warriors there will prove fitting rivals for the president and his
flock.
What the Obama administration's approach to Libya shares with the drone war, ultimately, is the lack of transparency the White House has brought to each. While singing high-minded paeans to human rights and the national interest, the administration has actually sidelined the mechanisms intended to preserve both. Each case has set dangerous precedents that are likely to be abused by future governments, and neither seems to have made the world safer.
Of
course, you wouldn't necessarily know this from the behavior of Washington's
usual partisans. Although a small
number of congressional progressives have begun to grumble about the
administration's targeted killing program, mainstream Democratic groups like
the Center for American Progress have all but endorsed
the drone war, and the Libya fiasco has been reduced to a talking
point about taking out Gaddafi. Republicans, meanwhile, have worried less
about the proprieties of the drone war and more
about whether Mitt Romney would have killed Osama bin Laden. Outside the
neoconservative fringe (which wholeheartedly
supported the mission in Libya, and then some), the Republican Party's feeble response
to the war in Libya was largely muddled, disingenuous, and occasionally
self-contradictory.
Indeed, writes
the Atlantic 's
Conor Friedersdorf, instead of taking stock of the Obama administration's
actual record on foreign policy this election year, Washington's partisans have
mostly "decided to argue about whether the president went on an apology tour,
whether he thinks America is exceptional, and whether he leads from in front or
behind. It's depressing."
With an ongoing and ever-expanding drone war -- as well as looming standoffs in Iran, Syria, and the South China Sea -- much remains at stake in the foreign policy decisions of coming years. And yet the Obama administration seems loathe to acknowledge any authority but its own in making them, a problem that the American political classes have devoted little to no energy to addressing.
"If angels were to govern men," James Madison famously mused in Federalist No. 51 , "neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary." But even "priests" are men, as are even the most dutiful students of Aquinas. And when it comes to those decisions that take lives on behalf of the American people, "moral rectitude" is no substitute for transparency.
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