Libya War: "a bloody, dreadful civil war, and the future is very unclear"

This report from Lourdes Garcia-Navarro on the PBS Newshour 05/24/2011 is a reminder of what an amazingly ill-conceived decision it was the the US, Britain and France to intervene in the Libyan civil war on the side of a very uncertain rebellion.



From the transcript:

... what became so compelling was the story of people who had never shot a weapon before, people who were architects, people who were students, and, all of a sudden, they were fighting for their very lives.

And they weren't doing it very well. You know, their incompetence, unfortunately, showed very, very quickly, and they were outmanned and outgunned. But the story of the Libyan rebels is really one of hope. They feel that they have something that they want to say to the world. They feel that they have something that they want to achieve.

Unfortunately, it's turned into a bloody, dreadful civil war, and the future is very unclear.

While France and Britain were eager to go to war against Qaddafi, France's President Nicolas Sarkozy attitude toward the refugees heading for Europe generated in no small part by his Libya War is use them to stoke xenophobia for his own electoral demagoguery. (See Ioanna Papadimitropoulou, Regulating Dublin II Athens News 05/02/2011)

The Obama Administration technically complied with the notification to Congress required under the War Powers Act. But the Congressional war powers enshrined in the Constitution - the real Constitution, not the Tea Party's version that says only that everybody should have a gun anytime and anywhere they want - are in practice in abeyance. There is a truly grim bipartisan consensus right now on a militarized foreign policy based on Presidential war powers that are radically different from those in the official Constitutional structure of the US government.

Remember back in March when the advocates of war in Libya made it sound like a brief intervention to protect the rebels from Libyan government airpower that would probably be over in a matter of weeks? At least the American President and the British Prime Minister are now beginning to hint at the open-ended slog and nasty, prolonged war that it's turning into (Obama, Cameron Pledge to 'Turn Up the Heat' on Gadhafi PBS Newshour 02/25/2011):

In a joint news conference Wednesday in London, President Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron said they would maintain pressure on Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi to step down, despite an ongoing military stalemate between government forces and rebels on the ground and a more than two-month old NATO air campaign.

Mr. Cameron told reporters the allies would "turn up the heat" on Gadhafi, and Mr. Obama pointed to the "enormous progress" already demonstrated in the Libya campaign but cautioned that the process would not happen quickly, and urged a long-term view. [my emphasis]

If we had a Congress willing to act responsible on war, they would specify exactly how long the US military authorized to fight there, what US forces and US-sponsored mercenaries would be allowed to operate on the ground and how, and lay out very specific, hopefully ludicrously impossible, conditions that would have to be met to keep US forces operating there beyond a specific date. Preferably one not far away.

But we don't have a Congress, a President or a Party system that acts responsibly on issues like the Libya War at the moment. Even though the Obama Administration did push for UN sanction that at least prevented the intervention from being a criminal aggressive war in the international legal sense. Although its obvious that the actual NATO war aims go much beyond the limited goal of providing for a no-fly zone authorized by the UN Security Council.



Tags: libya war