Libya: Obama botches the legality; GOP botches the morality

There’s an old saying that a person who acts as his own lawyer has a fool for a client. Alas, President Obama seems to fit the bill in the case of the legality of the American involvement in Libya.

The president decided not to consult his own lawyers — his Justice Dept.’s Office of Legal Counsel — on whether the US needed Congressional approval to continue its involvement in Libya past 90 days. The president was only too happy to take the advice of the Office of Legal Counsel before the US entered Libya, when the OLC told him that he did not need Congressional approval to get into the war. The War Powers Resolution of Congress did not require it. However, the same resolution requires Congressional approval to stay in a war beyond 90 days. Conveniently, President Obama shunts the OLC aside, a very dangerous precedent, given that the White House typically consults the OLC to determine the legality of its own actions.

Instead of seeking the opinion of the OLC, which would tell the president that the plain sense of the War Powers Resolution requires that he seek Congress’ approval for continued military action in Libya, Obama tells the American people that the US is not involved in “hostilities” in Libya. This, of course, is an absurd claim, a blatant violation of the War Powers Resolution. The president does have the right to overrule the OLC, but not the right to ignore the law.

What strikes us as odd about the president’s behavior is that had he consulted Congress early on, before the US involvement in Libya, he would have received Congress’ approval. Obama was right to intervene in Libya, and Congress was, then, happy to keep what seemed liked an “Arab spring” going. Obama’s refusal to adhere to the War Powers Resolution, which, notwithstanding Democratic and Republican presidents’ dissatisfaction with it, is a statute that has never been repealed or ruled unconstitutional, says a lot about Obama’s view of his own powers. Talk about an imperial presidency!

That said, the GOP’s reaction to Obama’s acting like a fool is misguided. The GOP now says that US involvement in Libya is wrong,  raising the specter of 1940s Republican isolationism. Besides the irony here — it was, we hardly need to remind ourselves, Republicans who took us to war in Iraq and Afghanistan — the GOP approach to Libya is wrong. The world, not to mention the Libyan people, will be much better off without the brutal dictator Moammar Qadaffi. Obama’s intervention in Libya to stop the beginning of a genocide was exactly the right moral choice. It is exactly what President Bill Clinton failed to do in Rwanda.

There’s a lot of talk about military and other decisions being made today with extraneous, electoral considerations in mind. Such as: Obama’s hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan. This is Obama looking to 2012, pundits tell us. Well, the same may be said of the GOP’s sudden aversion to the use of American military force to do the right thing in Libya. Rather than objecting to Obama’s shameful shunning of his own Justice Dept.’s Office of Legal Council, and absurd claim that the US is not involved in “hostilities” in Libya, the GOP goes much further — with its own eye on 2012. Rather than doing the moral thing in Libya by supporting American action there, the GOP acts with its own, extraneous, electoral considerations in mind.

To be sure, our military involvement in Libya has not gone well; but this is for two reasons not intrinsic to the difficulties there. First, because Obama did not seek Congressional approval under the War Powers Resolution, Obama denied himself the authority to wage a larger, faster, more decisive hit against Qadaffi. Second, because the GOP is now pretending — in the midst of two larger wars it initiated! — that isolationism is right, it hampers American success by threatening to cut off funding for US military intervention in Libya.

In fact, the war needs to be funded and the US needs to recognize Libya’s alternative government  (it’s not a “government-in-exile” because it’s based in Benghazi). It is not too long ago that the Democrats tried to defund the war in Iraq at just the time that insurgents were gaining ground. The failure to defund — and then President Bush’s surge — advanced American interests in Iraq considerably. Now, Congressional Republicans need to fund the war on Qadaffi, and Obama needs to asks Congress’ permission to wage it decisively.

Copyright © 2011 by the Intermountain Jewish News