President Obama, some six months ago, placed the United States in a state of war with Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya. He did so without the consent of Congress. Therefore, the war was and remains unconstitutional. On July 15, 2011, President Obama recognized the rebel government, a motley consortium of internally dissenting tribal clans
Today, Colonel Gaddafi’s regime has collapsed following a poorly conducted campaign by a weakly- led United States sheltering behind a NATO-sponsored seriously- defective military intervention. The NATO-U.S. campaign was conducted in the midst of serious internal dissension amongst the Libyan rebels supposedly led by a weak Transitional Council.
President Obama has now taken time out from his Cape Cod vacation to claim victory:
‘Tonight, the momentum against the Qadhaffi regime has reached a tipping point. Tripoli is slipping from the grasp of a tyrant.’
If President Obama is correct in this assertion, then he should be praying for an outcome favorable to America’s interests. For the President was not sworn into office to meddle in other people’s affairs, unless the direct interests of his own country were involved. Colonel Gaddafi was an ally of the United States seeking to make his own contribution to the War on Terror. If the situation now reverses, with Muslim fundamentalists using petro-dollars to finance anti-American terrorism, the American people will not easily forgive this President’s arrogance and lack of constitutionality in interfering with the politics of a sovereign nation.
The Libyan rebels lack any dominant single leader, so a fractious scramble for power is predictable. My own expectation is that the Muslim fundamentalists are better prepared than the rest for the blood bath that is likely to follow victory, and that a second civil war will break-out across Libya, followed by the emergence of a Muslim fundamentalist regime hostile to Western capitalism.
Such an outcome may sit well with President Obama. It will not sit well with a large majority of Americans. The President will not be able to shovel blame onto his predecessor if this new threat to Middle Eastern stability does indeed unfold.
Tags: Middle East instability, Obama's future responsibility, Obama's war, rise of Muslim fundamentalists, second civil war, threat to West, Transitional Council, Tripoli. Colonel Gaddafi
August 24, 2011 at 6:04 pm |
We had a joke in my country that went as follows: “Why is Obama bombing Libya?” “Oh, he just wants to get a second Nobel Prize for Peace.”
Some peaceful president he is turning out to be, eh?