So now the US (along with the UK and France) is at war with Libya.

I find it incredible that the US goes so casually into war, as if bombing a country was just another foreign policy option. Now the government does not even go through the bother of making up lies to justify its actions of the kind that we were regaled with in the run up to the Iraq invasion, such as weapons of mass destruction, mushroom clouds, haven of terrorists, etc.

The US has used its superior airpower so routinely and frequently that in one sense what is happening in Libya not new. The list of countries that have been bombed by the US is long and growing longer by the day. (This is an old list and does not include Pakistan.)

Korea and China 1950-53 (Korean War)
Guatemala 1954
Indonesia 1958
Cuba 1959-1961
Guatemala 1960
Congo 1964
Laos 1964-73
Vietnam 1961-73
Cambodia 1969-70
Guatemala 1967-69
Grenada 1983
Lebanon 1983, 1984 (both Lebanese and Syrian targets)
Libya 1986
El Salvador 1980s
Nicaragua 1980s
Iran 1987
Panama 1989
Iraq 1991 (Persian Gulf War)
Kuwait 1991
Somalia 1993
Bosnia 1994, 1995
Sudan 1998
Afghanistan 1998
Yugoslavia 1999
Yemen 2002
Iraq 1991-2003 (US/UK on regular basis)
Iraq 2003-05
Afghanistan 2001-05

Because the US can use its air power with little risk of casualties, aerial bombardment has become the preferred option when the cry goes up to ‘do something, anything’ when some conflict arises somewhere but it is not at all clear what needs to be done or indeed if the US should do anything at all. This kind of war is loved by some liberals and Democrats who resent being seen as wimps. So they love it when they get a chance to launch so-called ‘humanitarian wars’ that involve just bombing, such as in the Balkans when Bill Clinton was president and now in Libya with Obama. These bombing campaigns seem to make the War Party elites giddy with pleasure as they see so-called ‘smart bombs’ attacking their own chosen ‘bad guys’. NPR’s Tom Gjelten is already gleefully talking about the heavy damage inflicted, living up his reputation as the correspondent from National Pentagon Radio.

What is slightly new is that in Libya the US has decided to intervene in a civil war. It has now seemingly decided that it can intervene in a civil war in a country if it does not like the way that war is progressing. But civil wars are always messy and who is in the right and who has legitimacy is rarely clear. What is the current intervention meant to achieve? It seems to have as its purpose to prevent Gadhafi’s forces from retaking some of the cities held by the rebels, so the US has essentially sided with the rebels. But who are the rebels? What do they stand for other than being against Gadhafi? Or is that alone good enough to support them militarily? Suppose the air campaign does succeed in creating some sort of stalemate between the two sides. Then what? Surely the three western countries are now pretty much committed to removing Gadhafi from power and thus will be uncomfortable with a stalemate. There is an inexorable logic to these campaigns. They start out attacking military targets. Then when that fails to achieve the desired results, they target infrastructure such as power and water supplies. And when that fails they go for outright terror by hitting high visibility targets in urban areas. All these things ruin a country and produce huge numbers of deaths. (Josh Marshall shares some of my other concerns about the Libyan intervention.)

Let’s not forget that Libya is a relatively prosperous country and has the highest Human Development Index of all the countries on the African continent. This index is a composite measure of wellbeing, especially child welfare, and is based on life expectancy, literacy, education, and standards of living. Will a sustained bombing campaign throw it into poverty? Remember that Iraq used to be one of the most developed countries in the Middle East before the sanctions and war took effect, making it impoverished.

The US has already come under charges of hypocrisy in attacking Libya while not doing anything about the parallel situations in Yemen and Bahrain. While the US and other countries bomb Libya because of its harsh response to an actual rebellion seeking to militarily overthrow the government, it ignores the killing of non-violent demonstrators in the streets of Yemen and Bahrain by those governments. Normally the mainstream media is so deferential to the US government that they never ask these kinds of embarrassing questions about why there are such obvious contradictions in its policy. And they can avoid doing so because the uncomfortable parallel usually occurred in the past and thus can be dumped conveniently into the memory hole. But in this case it was unavoidable because the rebellions in those other countries are going on at the same time. It is interesting to watch people who support the Libyan attacks try to avoid answering the question of why the two situations are treated so differently, even though Bahrain is using foreign troops (most from Saudi Arabia) to attack its own people.

Meanwhile Saudi Arabia has banned all demonstrations but that country is immune from any repercussions from the US for anything. After all, fifteen of the nineteen people directly responsible for the attacks of 9/11/2001 were from Saudi Arabia. If the fifteen had been from (say) Syria, that country would have been bombed the next day.

The real problem is that the constitutional requirement that only Congress can declare war is now completely ignored. The framers of the US constitution (Remember that document? Kept in the national archives? Supposed to protect the people from authoritarian rulers?) recognized that war was a deadly serious business and that going to war was not a decision to be made lightly. They were well aware that the Executive branch and the president would use wars to further their narrow and selfish goals if they could, so they gave the power (Article 1, Section 8) to declare war to Congress so that an exhaustive debate by the people’s elected representatives would take place before such a momentous decision was made.

But the Executive branch has usurped that function on its way to creating an authoritarian state and the spineless Congress is only too willing to give up this prerogative since it enables them to avoid taking responsibility for making a decision and they can then waste their time on trivialities and carp from the sidelines about tactics.