You wouldn’t know it from the presidential campaign, but the US is preparing to start military action in Libya... again. And given that Hillary Clinton was the leading proponent inside the Obama administration for bombing Libya and regime change the first time around, this should have a direct bearing on the presidential debate. Should, but hasn’t.
Libya has devolved into chaos since the US decided to launch airstrikes and overthrow dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 and has increasingly become a base for Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) operations in recent months thanks to infighting within the new government and its inability to control its own territory — a result that the advocates of the first Libyan intervention who hailed the move four years ago are conspicuously silent on now. And instead of discussing the havoc military campaigns can wreak and the blowback they often engender, Republicans and Clinton have all been arguing about who is going to increase military action in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere.
Candidates have been acting like the major failures the last 14 years of war has wrought on the country and the region are virtually non-existent.
Clinton made this statement about Daesh at the CNN Democratic Forum last week: “Every situation is different. So I want to make sure I stay as close... as possible to the non-intervention. That’s why I say no American... ground troops in Syria or Iraq. Special Forces, trainers, yes. Planes to... bomb, yes. No ground forces.”
That is a curious concept of “non-intervention” — as long as the entire US battalions aren’t sweeping across the country, you’re “not intervening”.
Special forces fighting on the ground, bombs being dropped from the sky and weapons pouring into the region are fine though. And as the New York Times reported last week, the US and allies are preparing for possible airstrikes and special forces raids in Libya. More “non-intervention” is on the way!
Instead of discussing expanding the still-undeclared Daesh war to a third country in Congress, where the debate belongs, it’s being leaked to newspapers by anonymous officials and treated as an inevitability. And no one is giving a second thought to the fact that constitutional scholars across the political spectrum consider such a move illegal.
Cut and dried issue
It continues to be amazing that this legal aspect receives almost zero attention: the US government apparently thinks it can expand the Daesh war to a third country without the Congressional authorisation required by the Constitution (they didn’t get Congressional authorisation for the first Libya war either — they actually went ahead with their bombing campaign after the House explicitly rejected the idea).
“The president has made clear that we have the authority to use military force,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff said the other day, pretending it’s a cut and dried issue. (All the leading presidential candidates, including Clinton, recently refused to respond to the New York Times’s questions about constitutional limits on the president’s war powers.)
Unfortunately, Clinton’s idea of “ground troops” is consistent with the bizarre new definition President Barack Obama gave back in December when the Pentagon announced it would have a of roving Special Forces operating on the ground in Iraq and Syria using the Orwellian-sounding name “specialised expeditionary targeting force”: “You know, when I said no boots on the ground, I think the American people understood generally that we’re not going to do an Iraq-style invasion of Iraq or Syria with battalions that are moving across the desert.”
Obama had previously stated 16 times that there would be “no ground troops” in Syria. It turns out, all you have to do to make a 180 on your promises is redefine the relevant phrases to the point where it doesn’t have any meaning.
If the US is really planning on going to war against Daesh in a third country (or actually a fourth, since the Afghanistan War is now expanding too), it sure would be nice if this was debated in front of the American people and decided by their representatives, instead of in complete secrecy.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Trevor Timm is executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
