Tag: libya

#rsrh Let me tell you what the President SHOULD say today.

He won’t, but he should.  I assume that Obama will be able to adequately praise the at least four Americans (including our Ambassador) murdered yesterday, but something like the following will almost certainly not appear in his statement:

I am told that the murder of our Ambassador and others was carried out by organized Libyan terrorist groups dedicated to eliminating freedom and democracy in that country.  I will be consulting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff – particularly the Joint Chief of the Air Force and the Commandant of the Marine Corps – over the precise details of our response.  Until then: I recommend that anyone who has gotten into the habit of standing next to Libyan terrorists get out of that habit.  Very quickly.

Which is a problem, because before this is over we’re all going to miss that lack of forthright, righteous menace.  Of course, I’m a Republican: we’re kind of spoiled, when it comes to this sort of thing.

Barack Obama’s cowardly statement on the Libyan embassy assault.

See if you can figure out what is missing from Obama’s statement on the Libya embassy attacks.

I strongly condemn the outrageous attack on our diplomatic facility in Benghazi, which took the lives of four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. Right now, the American people have the families of those we lost in our thoughts and prayers. They exemplified America’s commitment to freedom, justice, and partnership with nations and people around the globe, and stand in stark contrast to those who callously took their lives.

I have directed my Administration to provide all necessary resources to support the security of our personnel in Libya, and to increase security at our diplomatic posts around the globe. While the United States rejects efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others, we must all unequivocally oppose the kind of senseless violence that took the lives of these public servants.

On a personal note, Chris was a courageous and exemplary representative of the United States. Throughout the Libyan revolution, he selflessly served our country and the Libyan people at our mission in Benghazi. As Ambassador in Tripoli, he has supported Libya’s transition to democracy. His legacy will endure wherever human beings reach for liberty and justice. I am profoundly grateful for his service to my Administration, and deeply saddened by this loss.

The brave Americans we lost represent the extraordinary service and sacrifices that our civilians make every day around the globe. As we stand united with their families, let us now redouble our own efforts to carry their work forward. 

Continue reading Barack Obama’s cowardly statement on the Libyan embassy assault.

#rsrh Least surprising headline today.

“Gadhafi’s autopsy reveals he was shot in head.”

I’m also going to go out on a limb here and note that the fact that they’re not going to say whether or not that bullet was fired at zero range is a pretty good indication that it was.  In other words, targeted killing.

You can’t see it, but I have my I am so very upset that a dictator who had American civilians killed – and who I had to accept getting away with it, for the sake of geopolitical stability – ended his life terrified, on his knees, and with a cold revolver muzzle shoved against the base of his neck expression on my face.  ‘Course, I also have no idea whether things are going to be better in Libya, once they finish tossing Gadhafi into the same unmarked grave that we dumped the War Powers Act into – but I guess that we’re going to find out, huh?

#rsrh Fighting now in Tripoli?

That looks like the start of an endgame, there.  Looks like the easy part of the Fourth Barbary War* is going to be over soon for us.  Next part?  Figuring out which least-bad faction to prop up, of the seven or so that will sprout up and start fighting each other once Qaddafi’s decorating a balcony somewhere.

Hey, what’s the over-under on how soon we hear the phrase ‘nation-building’ from the White House?  – Not that I get all panicky over the phrase, being an unreconstructed neocon and all that, but watching the Activist Left either freak out, or decide that they were at war with Eastasia all along after all, should entertain.

Moe Lane

*There were the Two Barbary Wars; and then there was the bombing campaign in the 1980s, which probably should have gotten the monicker of the Third Barbary War, if only we lived in a more honest world.  However, we live in the world where you have to call the most terrifyingly effective instrument of power projection killing people and breaking stuff in all of human history “the Department of Defense,” so there you go.

#rsrh QotD, Not Quite What She Meant edition.

Ruth Marcus, on her largely-unhappy reaction at the way that Barack Obama has gutted the War Powers Act like a trout* – and in a fashion that demonstrates that Congressional Democrats have been casually lying to their liberal constituents for, well, apparently forever**:

The White House is the client. It can choose whether to ask its lawyers for advice — or which lawyers to ask. But sometimes even the smartest clients can behave like fools.

Yeah, and if even smart clients can be idiots then imagine how dumb the Obama administration could end up being.

Moe Lane

*Thanks, Barry!  Much obliged!

**The backstory on this is that Obama’s decision to simply ignore the Office of Legal Counsel’s opinion on the War Powers Act has so infuriated Ruth Marcus that she’s comparing it to Bush’s… picking one side in the OLC’s internal dispute on warrantless wiretapping***.  Which is apparently the same thing to Ruth Marcus.

***Interestingly, I haven’t been able to find any actual second-person confirmation of James B Comey’s statement that multiple members of the Department of Justice from the top down were prepared to resign over this issue (even Comey’s Senate testimony doesn’t actually confirm that FBI Director Mueller and then Attorney General Ashcroft were planning to resign).  Maybe Mueller (one of the people who allegedly threatened to resign) will say more about this after he leaves the FBI?

Barack Obama on US Military: available for “being volunteered by others.”

The technical term for this is ‘mercenary free company.’

I believe that this qualifies as a “Kinsley gaffe:” which is to say, a politician accidentally telling the truth. Background: this was from a press conference where the President was trying to explain why his foreign policy was such an improvement over georgewbushgeorgewbushgeorgewbush’s, despite the fact that it lacks a coherent conceptual framework, an overall philosophy, a clear set of objectives, and any sort of domestic input and/or oversight. But it has the French on-board, so that’s good! We’re much better when we permit other countries to get to move our soldiers around on the geopolitical board.

NO. REALLY. That’s what he said.

…that’s why building this international coalition has been so important because it means that the United States is not bearing all the cost. It means that we have confidence that we are not going in alone, and it is our military that is being volunteered by others to carry out missions that are important not only to us, but are important internationally.

Bolding mine, and screencap here. See Ed Driscoll and Ed Morrissey for more; it is only by their good example that I am restraining myself from lapsing into some fairly vile profanity over this.

Continue reading Barack Obama on US Military: available for “being volunteered by others.”

Mickey Kaus, Barack Obama, and ‘Humanitarian Imperialism.’

Or, the President embraces his inner Victorian British Imperialist.

“Humanitarian imperialism” is the phrase Mickey’s come up with to describe Whatever The Heck It Is We’re Doing These Days In Eurasia, and it’s a good one.  It’s also one that implies a constant, low-level state of war that goes a good deal beyond the one that we’re in now; and I should make a distinction here between the Bush and the (unstated) Obama Doctrines.  The Bush Doctrine assumed that, under the right conditions, a long-term war could be over: “as they stand up we will stand down,” and all that.  The Obama Doctrine – as described by Mickey – assumes that war will be what he called ‘routinized’ – and accepted, as part of the cost of doing what is pretty explicitly Imperial business.  And by Imperial Mickey explicitly means something very, very Victorian, which is ironic on a variety of levels.

Mickey is practically unique among Democratic pundits for being willing to actually give his honest opinion about things like this:

I’m not sure whether humanitarian imperialism is a good or bad thing. The world might be a distinctly better place overall if the U.N. could overthrow every dictatorship the Security Council could muster a majority to overthrow. But the accompanying  routinization of war is at least troubling, no?

My major (practical) problem with Humanitarian Imperialism?  I trust only about half of our political class to not utterly mess up such a thing from the get-go, and unfortunately it’s not the half that’s currently in charge of the executive branch.  But since my opinion on that is apparently irrelevant for the next two to six years, we might as do it properly.  Now, I know that my readers are mostly conservative and/or Republicans, which means that they can be expected to have at least a nodding familiarity with the classics of Western literature. For those who are neither, well: allow me to acquaint them with who is apparently the true author of Obama’s current “foreign policy.” Take it away, Rudyard Kipling:

Take up the White Man’s burden–
Send forth the best ye breed–
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild–
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child. Continue reading Mickey Kaus, Barack Obama, and ‘Humanitarian Imperialism.’

President Obama defended by John Yoo.

May the knowledge of this burn the antiwar movement’s soul like battery acid.

In some ways, John Yoo’s argument (“Antiwar Senator, War-Powers President“) is almost… superfluous.  The basic point is straightforward enough: President Obama, just like every other President since 1973, has come to the conclusion that the War Powers Act is in fact an unconstitutional and onerous restriction on the executive branch’s constitutionally mandated oversight of military affairs.  This conclusion follows the usual evolutionary arc: as Yoo helpfully points out, Senator Obama and Candidate Obama had a fairly different view of unilateral action than does the (theoretically) better-educated and (theoretically) more experienced President Obama.  Couple that with the further detail that the usual Democratic suspects will not be trying to repeat with Libya their largely ineffectual push against the liberation of Iraq (Kuchinich and Dean, to give just two examples, have already been effectively whipped back into place), and one is left to conclude that there was a lot of deliberate lying about motivations being made over the last decade by the Democratic party.

Again, this is almost superfluous.  John Yoo is arguing on Barack Obama’s behalf.  His major complaint is that Obama’s doing a worse job than George W Bush did*.

John Yoo. The guy who did the waterboarding memos. Continue reading President Obama defended by John Yoo.

#rsrh QotD, *WHO* Said That, Again? Edition.

The topic is Libya, and the snark is epic:

So what the hell are we doing? I realize that President Obama and his advisers have answered this question many times, but I feel it’s necessary to keep asking until the answers begin to make sense.

So sayeth… Eugene [Robinson], of the Washington Post.

Eugene?  Eugene [Robinson]?  Eugene’s writing things like that?

Barry…  Barry, you have a problem.

Moe Lane

PS: I was shell-shocked from the sheer insanity of it all and wrote Washington when I meant Robinson.  That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.  Good catch by reader Phil Smith.

QotD, Not Quite Safe For RedState Edition.

My bolding at the end: it’s from The American Interest’s (via Jim Geraghty) unhappy assessment of the mess in Libya that we seem to have stumbled into.

As I have said, a Qaddafi left armed and dangerous when the dust settles is an unacceptable outcome. Civilian planes will likely start failing out the sky, as did the one over Lockerbie; assassination attempts will multiply, like the attempted Libyan-backed murder of the Saudi king in 2003; al-Qaeda and affiliates might be aided and abetted to do Lord-knows-what to the Italians, the French, the British and, of course, to us. With nothing to lose, and way beyond the threshold of worrying about sanctions and such, Qaddafi could well become more dangerous than ever. If I were Silvio Berlusconi, in particular, I’d pick my future whorehouses with extreme care.

President Obama, by the way, should be thanking God every night that the Right is still largely willing to say “we seem to have stumbled into,” and not “he seems.”  But fair warning: we’re not the Activist Left.  If the Democrats try to use the belt on us in the same way that the Democrats routinely use the belt on them… well, they won’t try that trick twice.

Moe Lane