Odyssey Dawn Is An Attack On America’s Constitution

Can any honest person claim that Odyssey Dawn, the program of U.S. military attacks against one side in the Libyan civil war, is not an act of war? What name would we give to a barrage of 112 cruise missiles coming across our borders, killing our countrymen? Would we call it an “operation”?

We would call it war.

It is war.

This Libyan war, which Barack Obama has rushed us into with just 24 hours of warning, has been approved by the United Nations Security Council. By international standards, the American attack is legal.

The Libyan war has not, however, been approved by the United States Congress. By the highest law of the United States of America, therefore, this war is illegal. It is plainly unconstitutional, as the Constitution of the United States of America gives to Congress, and to Congress alone, the power to declare war.

It has been said that President Obama met with a small group of congressional leaders earlier this week and told them that he planned to bring the United States into the Libyan civil war. Exactly what happened during that meeting, what was said and what was done, is a secret. That secrecy bodes poorly for what we can expect in the conduct of this new war.

More troubling is that President Obama would presume to conclude that a consultation with a small minority of the members of Congress is all he needs to do before entangling the United States in a new war. Perhaps all of those few congressional leaders who met with President Obama approved of the war. Perhaps some of them did not. Whatever happened during that meeting, many members of Congress were not invited. They were deprived of their constitutional power to declare war… or to deny a declaration of war.

The American people, too, have been deprived of the opportunity to be part of the decision, through their elected representatives, about whether to go to war. On Friday, Barack Obama announced his intention to go to war, and on Saturday, Obama began the attack. There was no chance for Americans to contact their representatives and senators to voice any objection. We The People were not consulted. In so short a time as the new Libyan war has been considered, there are many factors that have not had the chance to explore and debate, and that national ignorance makes us vulnerable.

This new war constitutes not just an attack on the government of Moammar Qaddafi, but an attack against the Constitution of our own nation as well. In starting this war in defiance of the limited powers of the Presidency, Barack Obama is declaring for himself, as George W. Bush did before him, the right to ignore the Constitution when he finds it to be inconvenient to his plans.

Ought we, the American people, protest this seizure of power? There is, I admit, a temptation to silently accept this new Libyan war. There is a temptation to focus on the purpose of the war: To drive Moammar Qaddafi from power, and to free the Libyan people from his oppression.

How can we turn a blind eye to the cry of the Libyan people for freedom and for salvation from torture and murder?

The answer is that we must not turn a blind eye to injustice – whether it comes from Moammar Qaddafi or from our own government. In our zeal to punish Moammar Qaddafi, and to cast ourselves as the heroes of the day, we ought not to forget that our own government has tortured, and has murdered. As we begin a new war today, we ought to be especially mindful of the fact that that torture and murder has been committed in the name of righteous war. Of course the crimes of our own government are not anywhere close to the same level as those of the Libyan government, but it ought to give us pause that, as we grant more power to our government through this new war, our government has proved to be an untrustworthy steward of power in the past.

Even if we put aside such concerns of hypocrisy, we should beware of the seductive belief that the end justifies the means. The purpose the American entry into the Libyan civil war is motivated by the desire to do the right thing, to help other people, but in the way that it is being down, this rush to war endangers far more people than it helps. In the long run, an American government that is no longer limited by a Constitution is a much greater threat to the world than Moammar Qaddafi could ever be.

If we accept the right of the President of the United States to launch an attack against any nation that offends his personal sense of morality, then we expose ourselves to great danger. Even if we trust Barack Obama as an individual, we set a precedent for future presidents to use American weapons and American wealth at their whims, without control from any other branch of the federal government.

We ought to remember that, as terrible as Moammar Qaddafi has been in his slaughter of Libyan protesters and rebels, the violence Qaddafi has unleashed has been accomplished with a relatively small military using a limited set of aging weapons. The United States military is the largest armed force ever to exist, and it possesses terrible weapons. Qaddafi has no nuclear weapons. The United States has thousands of them, and the ability to produce tens of thousands more in a very short amount of time.

With such power, our nation has a special responsibility: We must remain a nation that restrains its leaders under a tight constitutional framework. When we allow our leaders to violate the Constitution, even in the pursuit of what seems like a noble cause.

In spite of the easy conclusion of just cause for violence that we have been asked to accept, there is much that is not noble in Odyssey Dawn. We must not forget that there has not been any direct provocation by the Libyan government against the United States of America. Our nation has not been attacked. Yet, we have now attacked the nation of Libya. Moammar Qaddafi may well die before this war is through, but he will not be the only one to die. Many other Libyans have already been killed by our Tomahawk missiles. These human beings were soldiers and technicians for Qaddafi, but we can be sure that they were not all tyrannical monsters.

Who are the Libyans we are fighting for? It is easy to call someone a “freedom fighter” when they are fighting against a tyrant, but it is equally as easy for today’s freedom fighter to become tomorrow’s tyrant. Do we know enough about the leaders of the anti-Quaddafi rebellion to be able to trust them not to repeat the barbarity of Qaddafi? Qaddafi himself was once portrayed as a freedom fighter, just as Osama Bin Laden was once among those referred to by Ronald Reagan as the equivalent of America’s founding fathers.

America’s founders were great not because they won military battles against King George, but because they established a nation with a Constitution designed to protect its people from the accumulation of excessive power by any one portion of the government. When we undermine that Constitution by allowing our President to evade it, we may support greater freedom in Libya in the short term, but we place our own freedom in great peril to do so.