Congress, Obama at the Brink on Libya War
“We have seen who is attacking civilians. They are targeting houses and flats. Tomorrow they will target schools and hospitals.”
-- Khalid Kaim, Libyan deputy foreign minister, taking foreign journalists on a tour of civilian casualties in Tripoli after NATO airstrikes.
It has now been 90 days since the U.S. entered the Libyan civil war and a growing, bipartisan coalition in Congress maintains that the Obama administration is now in violation of the law that has governed U.S. military deployments for the past 38 years.
Speaker John Boehner may have gotten a round of golf in with President Obama but he doesn’t seem to have had any success in convincing the president to help him tame a revolt in Congress over the conflict.
Republican leaders, looking to avoid a constitutional crisis, have been asking the White House for at least an acknowledgement of congressional authority over American involvement in the five-month-old stalemated civil war. The U.S. has been involved in the war since March 20 and now even the most ardent interventionists in Congress want the administration to make some nod to congressional authority.
The administration, meanwhile, continues to hold that the president doesn’t need congressional authorization because the U.S. role in the conflict – air raids on Libyan government positions, logistical support for the under-armed European members of NATO and aid for the coalition of eastern tribesmen and Islamists which American forces are backing – is not significant enough.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, who along with Sen. John McCain is part of a shrinking group of GOP supporters of the war, said Sunday on NBC that it’s time for Obama to “step up” and explain his strategy, but that it was also time for Congress to “shut up” and stop raising doubts about the war that would empower Libyan strongman Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi.
That is the harshest argument yet to come out of the interventionist wing in Congress: that those demanding Obama submit to Congress on the subject are aiding Qaddafi and risking a region-wide conflagration if Qaddafi and his fellow secularist, western tribesmen are allowed to remain in power.
As members of Congress drift back in to Washington today, there is a sense of anxiety as members confront the fact that addressing (or not addressing) Obama’s unauthorized use of force means not only setting new precedents for the separation of powers in Washington, but possibly the end of NATO.
The NATO-led coalition has failed to deliver the swift victory Obama once promised and over the weekend managed not only to accidentally blow up a column of rebel troops but also killed an unknown number of Tripolitan civilians in an errant bombing run. The Europeans lack the precision munitions and firepower to knock over Qaddafi or avoid errors like the ones of the past several days, but because Obama has adopted the legal stance that the conflict is too small for him to seek permission the administration is loathe to provide the firepower needed to bring the war to a swifter resolution.
Another constraint is in the fact that the rebel coalition lacks the broad-based support to form a national unity government. Even ardent interventionists worry about Islamists experiencing similar success in Libya as they have in the political vacuum in Egypt.
If Obama is forced to disengage from Libya, it could very well mean the end of the increasingly weak NATO alliance, which, by extension, would mean the end of European support for Obama’s nation-building effort in Afghanistan, which is bogging down over administrative and diplomatic conflicts, despite the success of U.S. war fighters in the field.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/06/20/congress-obama-at-brink-on-libya-war/#ixzz1PpcaIHje
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