The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama's War on the Republic (35 page)

BOOK: The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama's War on the Republic

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Shockingly, the administration later admitted this is, in fact, its guiding philosophy. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, in a March 2012 hearing before the Armed Services Committee about possible U.S. military action in Syria, declared, “Our goal would be to seek international permission, and we would come to the Congress and inform you, and determine how best to approach this, determine whether or not we would want to get permission from the Congress.”
⁹

Obama’s unauthorized Libyan action was all the more outrageous considering Vice President Joe Biden had threatened in 2007 that if President Bush “takes this nation to war in Iran without congressional approval, I will make it my business to impeach him.”
¹⁰Obama himself, in a 2007 interview with the
Boston Globe
, declared, “The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.” Around the same time, his future secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, proclaimed, “I do not believe that the President can take military action—including any kind of strategic bombing—against Iran without congressional authorization.”
¹¹

GADDAFI NEVER THREATENED CIVILIAN MASSACRE

Concerning Libya, the White House couldn’t seem to decide when, to what extent, or on whose behalf we should intervene. Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton described Obama’s Libya policy as “incoherent” and illustrative of “the failed approach to national security issues characterizing his administration from the outset.” His objectives, said Bolton, “have been unclear and contradictory, and they have shifted over time. He started by declaring that the use of force was to protect Libyan civilians—not to topple Col. Gadhafi. Today, however, the obvious military objective is the removal of the Libyan leader but, apparently not to admit it publicly, and to accomplish it slowly and ineffectively.”
¹²

As Obama’s unspecified action in or above Libya got underway, people began to ask whether we were engaged in a war there. The question elicited a laughably evasive answer from the White House, as national security advisor Ben Rhodes declared, “I think what we are doing is enforcing a resolution that has a very clear set of goals, which is protecting the Libyan people, averting a humanitarian crisis, and setting up a no-fly zone. Obviously that involves kinetic military action, particularly on the front end.”
¹³

Obama claimed intervention in Libya was necessary to prevent a bloodbath in Benghazi and to forestall genocide. Curiously, those factors didn’t guide his policy in Iraq; in response to concerns that his efforts to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq could result in genocide and ethnic cleansing, he retorted, “If that’s the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now—where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife—which we haven’t done. We would be deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven’t done. Those of us who care about Darfur don’t think it would be a good idea.”
¹⁴

Some argued Obama was grossly exaggerating the humanitarian threat in Libya to justify military action. “Despite ubiquitous cellphones equipped with cameras and video, there is no graphic evidence of deliberate massacre,” noted Alan J. Kuperman, professor of public affairs at the University of Texas. “Nor did Khadafy ever threaten civilian massacre in Benghazi, as Obama alleged.” His “no mercy” warning of March 17 applied only to rebels, said Kuperman, who pointed to a
New York Times
report that Gaddafi promised amnesty for those “who throw their weapons away.” Even Human Rights Watch proclaimed that Gaddafi was “not deliberately massacring civilians, but rather narrowly targeting the armed rebels who fight against his government.”
¹⁵

Reports later emerged that Obama had been so determined to intervene in Libya that he rejected his top lawyers’ legal advice on the operation. The
New York Times
‘ Charlie Savage found that Obama ignored the warnings of Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, and Caroline D. Krass, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, that U.S. military participation in the ostensibly NATO-LED air war would amount to “hostilities,” thus giving Congress a role in the affair via the War Powers Resolution. Incorrigibly, Obama searched for someone to provide legal validation for his action, eventually hearing what he wanted from White House counsel Robert Bauer and State Department legal adviser Harold H. Koh—famous for his advocacy of transnationalism—that the operation fell short of “hostilities.”
¹⁶

“A RADICAL REFORMULATION OF 70 YEARS OF AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY”

Obama was hellbent on intervening in Libya, and for reasons that didn’t immediately meet the eye. In a March 2011 interview with CNN, Doug Feith, under secretary of defense for policy for President George W. Bush, theorized about Obama’s motives:

The only way to make the President’s behavior comprehensible is to recognize that he has a larger strategic goal than just the outcome of Libya. While the rest of the country is focused on Libya’s future, the President is focused on fundamentally changing America’s role and standing in the world. Libya, for him, is simply an occasion for undertaking a radical reformulation of 70 years of American foreign policy.
At least since the U.S. entered World War II, there has been a view of the United States as a leading power, a democratic power, a country that acts boldly in its own interests. I think President Obama does not believe that’s the role America should play in the world.
¹⁷

Indeed, a senior administration official told a group of outside experts at a White House meeting that in Obama’s view, attacking Libya was “the greatest opportunity to realign our interests and our values.” Investors. com editors noted that the United States appeared to be doing the UN’s bidding in Libya, and that the entire operation perhaps had less to do with Libya than with transforming America’s role in the world. They noted remarks by National Review Online’s Stanley Kurtz that Obama’s national security adviser, Samantha Power, had been looking for a way “‘to solidify the principle of
responsibility to protect
[R2P] in international law,’ which ‘requires a
pure
case of intervention on humanitarian grounds.’ Libya may fit perfectly.” This, Kurtz said, could partially explain why Obama didn’t consult Congress: “he cannot afford to specify broader ideological motivations he knows the public won’t buy.”
¹⁸

That same week, I had come to a similar conclusion in my syndicated column:

Obama’s animating foreign policy passion is that America has been an international bully that needs to be brought down to size. He couldn’t wait to confess America’s “arrogance” and “dismissiveness” to foreign nations on their soil. He gleefully told the Muslim world in his Cairo speech how wonderful and peaceful Islam is and how much it has contributed to America. He made clear that he doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism when he said it is no different from Greek or British exceptionalism.
Though he couldn’t have planned for the unforeseen events in Libya, when they happened, a light bulb eventually went off in his head, signaling that this was his moment to practice what he’d been preaching and to demonstrate how America has changed under his leadership. His primary goals are neither to oust Gadhafi nor to rescue the Libyan rebels for humanitarian reasons, for if ousting an evil dictator or protecting his victims were the motivation, he would have intervened in any number of other places.
His apparent vacillation and indecisiveness must be viewed in the context of his overarching goal: to change America’s approach from “unilateralism,” which it never was, to radical, deferential multilateralism replete with ceding our sovereign decisions to international bodies—and to change our image.
¹⁹

Others discerned the same agenda. In
The National Interest
, David Rieff argued, essentially, that Obama undertook the Libyan mission to further the R2P concept. The philosophy of R2P is that national governments have a duty to prevent large-scale killing and ethnic cleansing within their own borders, but if they are either unable or unwilling to do so, the international community, through the UN, must intervene with or without the consent of the nations involved. Dismissing R2P as a revival of “the old utopian project of abolishing war,” Rieff warned that “as Libya shows, war and utopia should not be mixed up. War is too serious, utopia too unserious, for that.”
²⁰

THE KINETIC PIECES ARE INTERMITTENT

On May 17, 2011, the
Washington Post
featured an editorial by Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman and Yale political science professor Oona Hathaway observing that almost sixty days had passed since President Obama informed Congress of his Libya campaign, and that the War Powers Resolution would soon require him either to obtain congressional approval or cease U.S. involvement within thirty days. The authors noted that Obama hadn’t even tried to get congressional approval, nor had the Democratic leadership shown any interest.

Interestingly, in his March 21 letter advising Congress of the Libya campaign, Obama cavalierly insisted his action was consistent with the War Powers Resolution. Ackerman and Hathaway expected Obama at least to assert a legal concoction to get around the act’s requirements, pretending that we’d ended our involvement under the act because NATO had nominally taken the lead on April 1. But, as they said, “it is sheer fiction to suggest that we are no longer a vital player in NATO’s ‘Operation Unified Protector,’” especially because “an active-duty American officer remains at the top of NATO’s chain of command.” The authors concluded, “If nothing happens, history will say that the War Powers Act was condemned to a quiet death by a president who had solemnly pledged, on the campaign trail, to put an end to indiscriminate warmaking.”
²¹

Sure enough, a few days later Obama sent a letter to congressional leaders telling them the U.S. role in Libya was now so “limited” that it didn’t require congressional approval. Yet despite his obvious attempt to downplay the level of U.S. involvement, his explanation of U.S. actions since April 4 didn’t sound so limited. These, Obama said, included “non-kinetic support” such as “intelligence, logistical support, and search and rescue assistance”; aerial assistance in suppressing and destroying air defenses; and since April 23, strikes by unmanned aerial vehicles against “a limited set of clearly defined targets.”
²²

Ultimately, the administration claimed its Libya actions were “consistent with the War Powers Resolution” because U.S. operations did “not involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces.” Despite its expressed support for the Libya operation, the
Wall Street Journal
editorial board commented, “That evasion has been ridiculed in Congress, and rightly so.”
²³In addition, indications arose that the U.S. role was significantly greater than the administration was admitting. For example, the
Air Force Times
reported on June 30 that “Air Force and Navy aircraft are still flying hundreds of strike missions over Libya despite the administration’s claim that American forces are playing only a limited support role in the NATO operation.”
²⁴

Congress, by an almost three-quarters majority, approved a nonbinding resolution to notify Obama that unless he explained his unauthorized action in Libya, he would face consequences. “He has a chance to get this right,” said House Speaker John Boehner. “If he doesn’t, Congress will exercise its constitutional authority and make it right.” Obama speciously argued that he had complied with the War Powers Resolution because he had supposedly consulted with Congress—never mind that the act requires congressional
approval
.
²⁵John Bolton marveled at Obama’s disinterest in explaining or defending his actions, a failure by which Obama “risked a self-inflicted political wound that could have undermined our national security policy in many other international arenas.”
²⁶

Senator John McCain, who had supported Obama’s Libya policy, strongly criticized his high-handed refusal to seek congressional approval. “I think what the president did was he brought this whole issue to a head now because of this, really, incredible interpretation that we are not necessarily—that the War Powers Act does not apply to our activities in Libya,” said McCain, adding unequivocally: “We are engaged in a conflict.”
²⁷

A “MASSIVE HUMILIATION FOR THE WESTERN ALLIANCE”

The administration continued its hapless, uncertain approach to the Libyan intervention as the conflict was winding down. After joining China in abstaining from the vote on the UN resolution authorizing action in Libya, Russia denounced the operation from the sidelines. And when the Kremlin attempted to insinuate itself as mediator of the conflict, Obama, never encountering an insult to American prestige he hasn’t welcomed, accepted the overture.

BOOK: The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama's War on the Republic

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