Libya, NATO and Obama

At a press conference Wednesday, President Barack Obama insisted that U.S. involvement in Libya does not violate the War Powers Resolution of 1973.

Some in Congress think otherwise, and are endeavoring to convince their colleagues and the public that the president has overstepped his authority. The War Powers Resolution, after all, pretty clearly establishes that the president cannot commit armed forces to military action for more than 60 days without congressional approval.

The president responded Wednesday that “a lot of this fuss is politics.” He also said, as he has before, that U.S. involvement in Libya does not constitute military action because the U.S. is “engaged in a limited operation” in support of NATO forces. He implied that because there are “no troops on the ground” and because Moammar Gadhafi is a tyrant, there should be no question of the War Powers Resolution coming into play, and mocked those in Congress who want him to pull our forces home.

Well, the president is right on one point: Gadhafi is a bad man. But that doesn’t necessarily justify military action against him. There are plenty of bad men running plenty of countries, and the U.S. president cannot send our jets after all of them.

Which brings us to what is really the central question — is the U.S. engaged in a military operation in Libya? The president says no because we do not have foot soldiers on the ground, but such logic is tortured at best. Is the president really prepared to say that the U.S. bombing of Hanoi during the Vietnam War was not a military action?

Nor is there any indication in the War Powers Resolution that presidents don’t need congressional authorization if they declare that a military engagement is limited in scope. This frankly is the “politics as usual” that we have come to expect from American presidents. The top U.S. commander in the Libya operation has declared that NATO air strikes are intended to kill Gadhafi. If that isn’t war, then it is assassination. Take your pick.

But even if the president were right, and this is not a military action, but just a necessary use of force to honor our NATO treaty commitments, then perhaps we should consult another president, Thomas Jefferson, who warned in his first inaugural address that America should engage in “honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”

It appears we are entangled. No better proof of that exists than the words of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who said at the beginning of this mission that the United States does not have a “vital interest” in the outcome of the Libyan civil war.

No vital interest, yet we have dropped bombs. What an entangling web we have woven.