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Can't Obama just send Congress a postcard? Oh wait, he already did.
The President does not have power under the Cons ution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.
As Commander-in-Chief, the President does have a duty to protect and defend the United States. In instances of self-defense, the President would be within his cons utional authority to act before advising Congress or seeking its consent. History has shown us time and again, however, that military action is most successful when it is authorized and supported by the Legislative branch. It is always preferable to have the informed consent of Congress prior to any military action.
Can't Obama just send Congress a postcard? Oh wait, he already did.
Reread Article II.
(should have blued it)
If you are going to be a staunch isolationist then there is really no point in us having a discussion.
Once you agree that there is a time to act militarily in foreign policy then the becomes at what point do you act militarily.
Again, the Arab league asked for our help. Our NATO allies asked for help. Public sentiment in the region is HUGELY in favor of our assistance with al-Jazeera leading the charge.
You keep mentioning history but i seems you are willfully ignoring what is going on in the middle east. the culture is changing rapidly and the the most important sociopolitical event in the last decade has easily been the deposition of Hussein 8 years ago.
With the Sunni Awakening a few years back, the country is stable and the political process does move forward.
Are you going to argue that we should not have invaded Afghanistan? Should we have not intervened in Kuwait? These are the historical references you have.
In the last two years we have seen popular uprisings in more than a half dozen middle eastern states with the central theme of rejection of autocratic rule.
Do you realize how much political pressure from their populace the Arab League states must be feeling to actually have signed off on this? Sure they are ing now but I guarantee you that their generals explained to them what a no fly zone means.
Given the Arab League nations as well as multiple allies being involved, the only way we could have declined is if we essentially are going to say that we are never going to involve ourselves in middle eastern politics ever again.
Like i said, if you want to be a staunch isolationist then I respect that but failing that, this was a situation where we had to act. Gnash your teeth about costs if you must.
i would like a clearer idea of what the rebels stand for, i wish our intelligence could provide that information. in my mind though you can't just sit back and wait for these people to be slaughtered. they want freedom and i believe we should help them acheive that. how can you not watch what's on t.v. and not sympathize w/ these people? bomb the living out of this bizzare dictator. i don't think we should send in ground troops because we're already overextended, but why not air attacks? becuase it costs a lot of money? so the what, people are getting blown the up over there for a cause that unites all Americans.
Tell that to the commander in chief. Those are his words not mine.
http://politics4all.com/users/mikeda...ilitary-attack
Sounds like he changed his mind.
Also, where in Article II is this "imminent attack" business?
Ask the cons utional lawyer who is now commander in chief. As I said, his words, not mine.
White House officials and Democratic insiders are pushing back. Officials have released dates and times that President Obama met with a bipartisan group of lawmakers in recent weeks, including one widely reported discussion in the Situation Room last Friday attended by more than 15 congressional leaders. (Speaker John Boehner has responded that those sessions were designed mostly as courtesy briefings rather than actual requests for input.) “It’s not exactly valid criticism,” says Democratic strategist Steve McMahon. “Lots of people have been calling on the president to [set up a no-fly zone], and when the U.N. did it, the White House said America’s in as part of a coalition. It’s the most responsible walk-up to military action that I’ve seen from a president in a long time.”
So its not in the Cons ution. Thx.
I never said it was. You're great at making straw men. The point had nothing to do with what was in the cons ution and everything to do with Obama's weakness.
Democratic insider believes Obama to be better than Bush. Stop the presses. The main problem with that is the campaign Obama made to get elected.
lol using campaign promises
lol backtracking
Authority about as persuasive as using a campaign speech from 2007 tbh
That wasn't a campaign promise. It was a statement made when questioned about how the President can use force without congressional authorization - in other words this very situation.
That was his answer and he has now done something completely contrary to that answer. You can view that as irrelevant if you want simply because it coincides with what you happen to want here. I see it as extremely relevant.
It wasn't a campaign speech. But in other words, we're not allowed to hold presidents accountable to what they say. Interesting viewpoint.
Ok. It wasn't a campaign promise. It still was posturing used to criticize the Bush administration. It was also incorrect.
He's made a complete 180. What's your point?
Ok, he's not allowed to change his stance.
Go hold him accountable.
An excellent write up.Have you heard a persuasive case that Mr Qaddafi's ouster is necessary to achieve our humanitarian aim? I haven't. In order to make this case, one would have to take seriously the goals of reducing death and suffering, and it is by no means clear that these goals would be better met by deposing Mr Qaddafi than by, say, achieving and enforcing an immediate ceasefire that leaves Mr Qaddafi in power.
That none of us can peer through a magical window and witness the counterfactual world in which there is no attempt to topple Qaddafi, or in which there is no allied intervention in Libya, is to the decided advantage of those arguing the humanitarian necessity of our present course of action. Had we done nothing, we would have seen carnage and we would have been told that we could have prevented it. If we see carnage now and in the near future, we will be told that had we done nothing, it would have been even worse. Our cognitive clumsiness with counterfactual scenarios combined with our patriotic wish to see our state as a force for good leaves us ready to believe that yes, surely it would have been even worse had we not acted, or had we acted differently. And this buys interventionists a good deal of time to catch and capitalise on a break that creates the perception of success. The force of the "it would have been even worse" argument will dissipate only if Libya's civil war drags on and the public comes to see our intervention as having helped it drag on. But if the peace is restored before that day, and it probably will, most of us will judge our involvement a humanitarian success, even if, as a matter of perception-independent fact, it turns out not to have been. In that unhappy event, we'll be glad not to know that had we pursued a different policy, fewer people would have needlessly died.
Nevertheless, despite our natural biases, it remains both possible and necessary to intelligently estimate how much suffering and death we can expect intervention to avoid. When opponents of intervention ask us to consider, for example, how many lives could be saved were we to spend the cost of a military mission on anti-malarial bed nets, I understand them to be insisting that we take the stated humanitarian justification for this intervention seriously. If our foreign policy aims to prevent suffering and death with finite resources, it makes sense to ask whether this war makes sense on those grounds. I grasp the tiresome point that the choice on the table was not a choice between taking out Libya's air defences and buying bed nets. The choice was between taking out Libya's air defences or not. But the question nagging some of us is why this was the choice on the table. Why did this come up as a matter requiring urgent attention and immediate decision? Why is it that the choice to express our humanitarian benevolence through the use of missiles and jets gets on the table—to the top of the agenda, even—again and again, but the choice to express it less truculently so rarely does? If our humanitarian values really set the agenda, how likely is that that the prospect of urgent military intervention would come up so often?
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democ...rvention_libya
Decision, an ethical or political responsibility, is absolutely heterogenous to knowledge. Nevertheless, we have to know as much as possible in order to ground our decision. But even if it is grounded in knowledge, the moment I take a decision it is a leap. I enter a heterogenous space and that is the condition of responsibility. This is not only a problem but the aporia we have to face constantly. For me, however, the aporia is not simply paralysis, but the aporia or the non-way is the condition of walking: if there was no aporia we wouldn't walk, we wouldn't find our way; path breaking implies aporia. This impossibility to find one's way is the condition of ethics.
http://pewresearch.org/databank/dail...?NumberID=1218On the eve of the start of military intervention in Libya by the U.S. and its allies, the American public by a wide margin expressed the view that the United States did not have a responsibility to do something about the fighting between government forces and anti-government groups in Libya. A survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted March 10-13, found that 63% said the U.S. had no responsibility to act in Libya; fewer than half as many (27%) said the U.S. had this responsibility. Reflecting the public's reluctance about U.S. involvement in Libya, barely half (51%) favored increasing economic and diplomatic sanctions against Libya. The public was divided over the possibility of enforcing a no-fly zone -- 44% favored this action while 45% were opposed. Yet just 16% favored bombing Libyan air defenses, while 77% opposed such bombing. And large majorities rejected providing arms to anti-government groups (69%) and sending troops into Libya (82%). Thinking about the Middle East more generally, Americans see regional stability as more important than increasing democracy. In a separate survey conducted March 8-13, 52% say it is more important to have stable governments in the Middle East even if there is less democracy; 38% say it is more important to have democratic governments in the region, even if there is less stability. Read more
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