Back when I was a kid my brother and sister and I would cook up something we wanted to do and I would volunteer to go ask the parent for permission, because I was the only one that was stupid enough to merely pretend to do so, knowing that the parent would say no, and then return and claim that permission had been given. The grits always hit the fan, but I continued to figure that if they were going to say no it was better to not ask. It did not really make me particularly popular with anyone.
It wasn’t really stupidity so much as it was rebellion, and my therapist is having something of a field day with that issue, but this is about politics.
Obama, I guess, figured that Congress is going to say no to anything he asks for so he didn’t bother to ask about going to war in another Arab country. Bush didn’t get a declaration of war, but at least got an “Authorization for Use of Military Force,” but Obama disdained even that formality. He has begun referring to himself as “your Commander in Chief” and it is his military so if he wants to employ it in Libya he don’t need no steenkin’ Congressional approval.
The “coalition of the willing broad coalition” excludes most of the world’s major powers, of course, and the Arab part of that coalition is already bailing on the effort, claiming that we are going beyond the “no fly zone” which was all that they supported.
And their concern is not without some validity considering that we have bombed tanks and Gaddafi’s headquarters in downtown Tripoli. Apparently we are concerned that the tanks can shoot down airplanes, which would be news to the soldiers killed in those tanks who did not know that they could do that and undoubtedly were not trying to do so. Bombing the headquarters was certainly not an attempt to kill Gaddafi himself, because we would not do that. We were just concerned that his administrative headquarters might “administrate” some of our airplanes down, and certainly we did not expect any noncombatants to be in downtown Tripoli.
But we have to protect civilians and prevent a “bloodbath,” except in Sudan, or Rwanda, or Yemen, or Bahrain, or one which is certainly ongoing as we speak in the Ivory Coast. Libya is different because…
I was going to say that Bush DID ask for most of what he wanted and got permission, which is similarly bad because he should not have gotten a lot of what was asking for and the permission givers ducked out instead of saying no.
ReplyDeleteAnd Libya and Iraq had leaders that were noisy and pontificated and made a big splash. The other ones don't make the news so much.