Obama's unproclaimed war

I knew I was entering an economic war zone when I landed in Greece last month. That very day, Greeks besieged their Parliament to protest savage cutbacks in wages, pensions and social services. I wrote back about what I saw and heard, and then went to kick back on an Aegean island to find a little peace and quiet of my own.

I was doing that when, suddenly, four loud cracks sounded over my head.

You hear the occasional sonic boom in the Aegean when a Greek military jet makes a practice run. Turkey is nearby, after all. But never had I seen four fighter jets at once, and they weren't Greek. These were NATO planes returning from Libya. For the first time in my life, I was watching a hot war in progress.

A while later, when I visited a friend in the western Peloponnese, the planes were a daily feature as they went to bomb Tripoli, whose citizens' only offense was that they had failed to depose their country's leader, Muammar al-Qaddafi. After all, hadn't Barack Obama declared that Qaddafi had lost his "legitimacy" to rule?

I could see that getting away from Obama this summer was going to be more difficult than I thought.

Our president has been a puzzle to many: so prompt to confront a foreign dictator, so easily intimidated by any Republican. But watching the attack planes' daily run while reading about the agonized negotiations— really, the staged capitulations— over raising America's federal debt ceiling, I felt a sudden illumination about the way this president works.

Excess of caution, but….

When exasperated members of Obama's own party, including former President Clinton, suggested that he might break the debt impasse by invoking the Fourteenth Amendment injunction that the nation's credit be at all times maintained, Obama replied that his legal advisers had told him he could "probably" not invoke it as a matter of executive authority.

This excess of caution in dealing with the powers of Congress reminded me of how differently Obama had responded, only weeks earlier, to the challenge to his war-making powers in Libya. Having failed as required under the War Powers Act to report to Congress 60 days after attacking Libya, Obama declared that his actions didn't fall under the purview of the statute because he wasn't conducting a war.

It sure looked like a war from where I sat on my Aegean island. But, the president explained, no American ground forces were engaged in Libya, and the operation had been handed off to NATO in any case. Thus it was none of Congress's constitutional business. (Of course, Congress was still duty-bound to fund the exercise.)

Binding advice, rejected

Not surprisingly, Congress went into high dudgeon over the president's claim that he alone could decide when a military action constituted "hostilities." One member took the floor to say that Americans didn't live under a king. So Congress refused to sanction the war in Libya— and then duly voted to fund it. It's cost a billion dollars so far. No one's counted the casualties.

Of course, a president cannot merely opine on a legal question, even a president who edited the Harvard Law Review. He must solicit the advice of the Office of Legal Counsel, an elite unit of 25 attorneys in the Justice Department. The opinion of this office binds the president to the law in the exercise of his powers, subject of course to further court review.

In the case of Libya, the Office of Legal Counsel informed Obama that he was indeed bound by the War Powers Act, and that he was consequently obliged to seek a Congressional resolution to authorize further U.S. military involvement in Libya.

An obliging functionary

Obama immediately circumvented this finding. He instructed his White House counsel, Robert F. Bauer— a privately appointed functionary, not subject to Congressional approval and oversight— to come up with an opinion more to his liking. Bauer did so.

The contrast between the Libyan debate and that over the debt ceiling couldn't be more revealing. In the latter case, Obama cited informal legal opinion— he didn't say whose— that suggested he couldn't act unilaterally to protect the full faith and credit of the U.S., even though a default appeared imminent. In the former one, he rejected a formal opinion.

The conclusion seems clear. President Obama will circumvent or ignore the law when it suits his purposes.

War without casualties

In and of itself, the current war in Libya is a specimen of the particularly nasty kind of air war pioneered by Bill Clinton in the 78-day bombing of Serbia in 1999, tersely defined by Michael Ignatieff as "precision lethality from high altitudes." Boots never do touch the ground, but surrender is secured by relentless aerial bombardment. With the increasing replacement of manned aircraft by drones, no personnel are risked, and one side alone suffers the casualties.

America lost not a single soldier in the Serbian— popularly called the Kosovo— campaign, nor has the U.S. suffered any casualties in its nearly five-month assault on Libya. (I leave to one side the Special Forces operating in Libya; officially, they don't exist.)

It is a good question whether such one-sided punishment should be called war, which has traditionally implied a contest in which the lives of all belligerents are at risk, even if unequally. Diplomatic and economic sanctions against rogue states are one thing; the unilateral and (of necessity) indiscriminate application of force against a helpless adversary is another.

Whatever the rationale for the assault on Libya, each time I heard the planes overhead I felt a shudder of shame and revulsion. I never liked the schoolyard bully. I like him even less as the sanctimonious leader of my own country.