Well Obama has his very own war now…

I commented on the Facebook site of a NATO reserve officer I correspond with sometimes.

“Hooray! Now another bloody-handed Middle Eastern tyrant will fall. The United States will of course be blamed for everything that goes wrong during and afterward, and another bloody-handed tyrant will replace Quadaffi in the fullness of time.”

Now I don’t think it’s wrong to hunt down and imprison/kill mass murdering tyrants. It’s the costs I worry about. How much does it cost us in men and money? What are the costs to the people you are “liberating”? Are they going to thank you afterwards and say it was worth it to be free of the tyrant?

And what are you replacing the tyranny with? Realistically speaking, do you think the Libyan (or Yemen, Bahrain, etc) resistance is full of budding Sam Adamses?

Since imperialism became unfashionable we can’t march in, shoot the bad guys and present the next regime with a bill.

Nor can we stick around for a couple generations building a decent civil service, court structure, and imposing a reasonbaly just code of laws, while collecting taxes to fund the project.

No, no, no, mustn’t do it.

But since I’m in a sour mood anyway, I have to say I have no patience for those libertarians who talk about “invading someone else’s country,” or worse, “a sovereign state.”

In what way is a state wherein you can be arbitrarily arrested, imprisoned, tortured and killed – or in the case of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, have your pretty wife or daughter snatched for the Top Guy’s sons’ pleasure, “your country” in any meaningful sense?

As for the issues of “sovereignty,” in my brand of libertarianism (the sane one) the sovereignty of the individual has to be recognized for me to take the sovereignty of the state seriously.

And of course there is the question of how the Obamandroids are going to react to their “peace candidate” waging war? They going to twist themselves into pretzels explaining how Iraq was George Bush’s unjust and unconstitutional war, but Libya is Obama’s Noble War of Liberation?

(Hat tip Maureen Dowd: “Candidate Obama said about a possible strike on Iran, “The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.””)

Just asking.

As to the constitutionality of Obama committing to military operations without an OK from Congress, opinions differ.

I did however come across this very perceptive observation by Andrew McCarthy, who falls on the unconstitutional side but notes:

“Agree or disagree with my reasoning, how can it be, given the Constitution’s manifest vesting in Congress of powers over the decision to go to war and the compulsion of means for fighting war, that a president can think he needs approval from the U.N. or the Arab League but not from the representatives of the American people?”