The March Madness of Libya War: the barbarism of buffoons

Calling it a "Coalition of the Confused," Spiked's Brendan O'Neill is sharp in his critique:

The almost overnight formation of a Western ‘coalition’ against Libya does not spring from lingering colonialist instincts in Washington, London or Paris. Rather it speaks to a new and extremely dangerous reality. It reveals the incoherence and self-doubt at the heart of the West, to the extent that Western governments will go to quite extraordinary lengths to give the impression that their attack is not a Western initiative. It shows that foreign offices across the West are now staffed by people with little or no grasp of geopolitical reality. It has exposed the inability of the Western powers to drum up serious support or international consensus even for a relatively small-scale military operation: the Arab League, so keenly held up by Cameron as a moral fig leaf for the attack, expressed its concerns after just one night of bombings, while much of the Western media is warning about the possibility of ‘mission creep’ and getting bogged down, once again, in the unpredictable terrains of Africa.
Most of all, it speaks to the now almost complete rupture between Western political interests and Western political behaviour.

O'Neill is one of the many commentators pointing fingers at Samantha Power, who was/is a key Obama foreign policy adviser.  She, along with Hillary Clinton and the UN Ambassador, Susan Rice, have become the female and liberal versions of the warmongering Neo-Cons.  "liberal inteventionists are just ‘kinder, gentler' neocons, and neocons are just liberal interventionsts on steroids" as Stephen Walt notes.


Power's role in this is not difficult to imagine--she has powerfully argued about the West's inaction in various systematic killings by authoritarian and dictatorial regimes and exposed the hollowness of the slogan "never again."  But, if she were actively involved in this decision to go to war against Gaddafi, well, she was applying the correct lessons in a wrong context. 

So, why do these buffoons keep leading us into wars, presidency after presidency?

Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama are all presidents that seem incapable of conducting a serious yet desperately needed discussion about foreign policy and America's place in a post-Cold War world. Until something like that happens, the result will be a fully ad hoc set of actions that make little sense and accomplish even less in the long-term. These guys are politicians first and foremost and they know that however non-interventionist the American people may be at any given moment, all will be forgiven if you can even vaguely claim success in kicking some Third World dictatorship's ass.

But then, we might ask ourselves, whatever happened to the checks and balances of the American system?  How come the President has so much power to take us into wars?  What about the House of Representatives?  What about the Senate?

Well, the framers of the Constitution did their best.  But, we have been goofing around a lot lately.

Matt Yglesias says that the wars are not examples of presidential power grabs as much as they are about Congress abdicating its responsibilities, and it does so because:

The main reason congress tends, in practice, not to use this authority is that congress rarely wants to. Congressional Democrats didn’t block the “surge” in Iraq, congressional Republicans didn’t block the air war in Kosovo, etc. And for congress, it’s quite convenient to be able to duck these issues. Handling Libya this way means that those members of congress who want to go on cable and complain about the president’s conduct are free to do so, but those who don’t want to talk about Libya can say nothing or stay vague. Nobody’s forced to take a vote that may look bad in retrospect, and nobody in congress needs to take responsibility for the success or failure of the mission. If things work out well in Libya, John McCain will say he presciently urged the White House to act. If things work out poorly in Libya, McCain will say he consistently criticized the White House’s fecklessness. Nobody needs to face a binary “I endorse what Obama’s doing / I oppose what Obama’s doing” choice.
Which is all just to say that presidents will go back to accepting congressional authorization for the use of force as a binding constraint when congress starts actually wanting that authority.

... But the trend is toward all postwar presidents asserting broad “commander in chief” powers and Obama’s no exception.

Well, we get the government we deserve!