Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm happy to welcome Matt Rothschild back to the show.
He's the editor of The Progressive at progressive.org.
And he's got a new piece we're running on antiwar.com today as well called, well, link him to it in the viewpoint section there.
It's called Stop the Bombing of Libya.
Welcome back.
Matt, how are you?
I'm doing fine, Scott.
Thanks for having me back.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us on the show today.
And I really like the way you start this article out.
The article's very brief and to the point.
And you start out by describing the extent of the war going on over there, whatever the president wants to call it.
And, you know, I think, jeez, there's so many wars for people to keep up with.
It can be hard.
I was amazed when I saw your assertion here that NATO has conducted 11,500 sorties in Libya thus far.
Isn't that amazing?
I mean, here we have a campaign that was started ostensibly to protect civilians and impose a no-fly zone.
Well, it didn't take, you know, 11,500 sorties to impose a no-fly zone and to protect civilians in Libya from an imminent massacre.
That was what we were sold.
Now, this is a campaign that's entirely different in its intentions right now.
It may have been entirely different from the intentions that were sold to us at the very beginning.
Because, look, there's no reason why these bombing raids should have continued after the no-fly zone was imposed, because at that point, Muammar Qaddafi could not have sent in his pitiful little Air Force to bomb those people who were supposed to be in such peril.
So the no-fly zone in protection of civilians in Libya was accomplished really within 48 hours.
And everything else since then has been something designed to do something quite a great deal more than what the U.N. signed off on.
And that was to protect civilians.
Now what's going on now is a campaign to get rid of Qaddafi and seize the oil in Libya for U.S. control of the oil supplies in the Middle East, which is, of course, what the Iraq War was largely about, too.
And what our connivance with Saudi Arabia is all about for the last many decades.
Well, now, there's so much there.
I guess, first of all, it's, I think, probably worthy of note that no-fly zone, it's been months since we even heard anybody talk about that.
I kind of almost forgot it was supposed to be a no-fly zone.
Yeah, and it's certainly not applying to NATO.
I mean, NATO's flying all over the place.
And the amazing thing about Obama's doctrine here is that the War Powers Act doesn't apply.
And the reason he's saying the War Powers Act doesn't apply, and if Bush had said that, I think the peace movement in the United States would have been in the streets in the tens and hundreds of thousands.
Obama's reasoning just gives a justification for the next president to go in and attack any other country that doesn't have a decent Air Force or surface-to-air missiles, because what he is saying and what his lawyers are saying is that the War Powers Act doesn't apply right now because our military is not at risk of being killed, because essentially we've so wiped out the Libyan Air Force and surface-to-air missiles that there's no chance that our bombers are going to be shot down, or almost no chance.
And so they're not really in a zone of hostilities, which is what the War Powers Act was dealing with.
Well, this is a crazy doctrine now, because the United States then has carte blanche to go attack any weaker country as soon as its Air Force has been obliterated.
Well, and funny about that, the lawyer for the Pentagon and the lawyers at the Justice Department, they didn't buy that argument for a minute.
They were overruled by the president.
Yeah, it's extraordinary when the Pentagon's own lawyers want to follow the law and the president of the United States doesn't.
That gives you an idea just how far out there Obama has gone in expanding presidential war powers.
This from a presidential candidate who played footsie with the progressive peace movement, said he would never unilaterally engage the U.S. military overseas unless there was an imminent threat against the United States, which there wasn't.
Qaddafi didn't attack the United States.
He didn't represent a threat to the United States.
Secretary of Defense Gates even admitted that on TV.
I saw him when he said it, and my jaw kind of dropped because, you know, why are we there if he's not a threat to us?
And yet Obama has expanded this idea that he, the president of the United States, and, of course, future presidents can go start a war or at least a bombing crusade anywhere they want without asking Congress's permission, without getting congressional authorization.
After all, the Congress has the sole power to declare war under Article I, Section A of the Constitution, and now he wants to completely violate the War Powers Act, which he's violated three times now.
He violated it at the beginning because the War Powers Act says a president can go in without congressional permission at first if there's an imminent threat against the United States.
There wasn't an imminent threat.
And then within 60 days of that, the president has got to get approval from Congress.
Obama didn't get approval from Congress.
And then 30 days after that, the president is supposed to withdraw all those troops if he hasn't gotten congressional approval.
And, of course, Obama hasn't gotten congressional approval and hasn't withdrawn the bombers.
So he's really in illegal territory here, and he's kind of gloating about it.
Well, yeah, I mean, that's kind of the funny thing here, right, is he's not saying, you know, like David Addington or those guys would have said in the Bush years that, hey, I'm the commander in chief and I can do whatever I want.
He's basically, he's not saying that the War Powers Act is unconstitutional.
He's basically just using, you know, declaring war on the Webster's Dictionary in order to wage this thing.
That's quite a precedent set, it seems like.
Yeah, he's kind of acting like Clinton here in his legal parsing of the language, which is just making a joke of the War Powers Act.
I always opposed the War Powers Act because I thought it was taking away power from Congress.
I didn't think Congress should let the president go for 60 days, go attack some country without approval from Congress.
But far from adhering to the Constitution and the real requirements that our founders set up, Obama's going 180 degrees in the other direction, and it's appalling.
Well, you know, even the most libertarian, most strict constructionist-type constitutionalists, I'm thinking of Thomas E. Woods, for example, which he's not a constitutionalist, but very strict libertarian, very strict construction of the Constitution, you know, where it applies.
And he said that no one would refute the idea that if the French, you know, sent their navy over here to start bombing our coast and the Congress couldn't get back to D.C. in time, that the president would have the authority to repel an attack, to fight a defensive war until Congress could get there to authorize it.
But there's just no question, when it comes to starting a war, that he must have a declaration of war from both houses of Congress.
And it's been so long since we had a declaration of war.
It's been since World War II, and the United States has been engaged in a lot of wars since then.
And for people who took this requirement that the Constitution lays out in Article I, Section 8, that Congress has the sole power to declare war, people would take that seriously.
You know, this is a huge illegal departure for presidents to be going on, you know, whenever they feel like it, essentially.
I mean, obviously, Bush did it several times.
And, you know, where does this leave us as a democracy?
We don't have a democracy.
There was a good reason why the founders put in Congress as the one to have the power to declare war, because they understood that giving the president that power would be giving too much power, too much temptation to one person.
That was the language out of Madison, too much temptation for one man.
And clearly, it's been too much temptation for Obama.
And now, well, let me pretend to play devil's advocate here for a minute.
What about if he'd done nothing and Muammar Gaddafi had won that civil war in a very brutal fashion?
And wouldn't he be criticizing him for not doing something about it to save those people?
Well, he may have been criticized for it, but why not ask Congress for a declaration of war then?
And then if Congress doesn't approve, then that's the policy of the U.S. government.
He can't unilaterally make the policy.
And then it would be on Congress' hands that there was a brutal massacre that happened.
It wouldn't be on his hands.
I mean, we have to stand up at some point for democratic governance here in this country.
And we also have to recognize that this is a civil war type situation, and is it the policy of the U.S. government that we're just going to go in and, you know, interfere in civil wars all over the world?
And also, I'm not naive enough to think that there's a reason why or not to think that there isn't a secret reason why we're there, and it may be that Libya has oil, and a lot of these other countries who've had civil wars don't have it, and the United States isn't intervening there.
And then there's this whole question of placating Saudi Arabia, which was so upset that the United States let Mubarak get toppled democratically, and Obama was way behind the curve on that.
But he didn't want to tick off the Saudis anymore, and the Saudis hate the Libyans.
And so this was a way to distract international attention from this and placate the Saudis.
Yeah, very good point there, and we'll have to leave it there as we go out to this break.
But we'll be right back, everybody, with Matthew Rothschild, editor of The Progressive magazine.
The website is progressive.org.
The new piece is called Stop the Bombing of Libya.
We're linking to it in the viewpoint section today at antiwar.com.
And we'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm on the line with Matthew Rothschild, editor of The Progressive magazine.
The website is progressive.org, and we're talking about this outrageous war in Libya.
Matthew asked the question before the break that, are we going to intervene in every civil war anywhere in the world?
I got one.
How about if China invades Mongolia?
That's not a civil war, but even worse, right, across an international border.
Are we going to go save the Mongolians from the Chinese, or is there a limit on the ability of American power to do the right thing for people, all ulterior motives aside?
I mean, what do you think, Matthew?
Do you think anybody in D.C. is finally getting their head around the idea that there are limitations on the Pentagon's ability to create reality?
Yeah, well, I think the Pentagon's getting its head around that idea.
Robert Gates, the defense secretary, has been talking about these wars of choice, and maybe they're not such a good idea as he's just about to walk out the door.
He's a little more free to speak his mind, I guess.
But the point I want to make is on those ulterior motives, because I think when the United States invades or attacks another country under the rubric of a humanitarian intervention, nine out of ten times, the ulterior motives are the real reason we're there.
You know, Iraq, we were supposed to free the suffering people of Iraq.
We were there to get the oil.
We were there because Bush wanted to say he was, you know, a more macho guy than his dad was who didn't topple Saddam Hussein, and Bush was junior who was going to show senior what a tough guy he was.
And then, you know, this Libya thing.
You know, Libya was an ally of the United States the last couple years, and then all of a sudden the United States turned on Qaddafi.
A civil war had begun.
There's a question Dennis Kucinich has raised as to whether the CIA and some of the intelligence agencies from France and England and Saudi Arabia were behind the rebels who were attacking Qaddafi.
And there was also certainly a part of a democratic uprising going on, so it's an amalgam of things.
On the other hand, there are also reports that there was some al Qaeda involved in rebelling against Qaddafi, so it's a real mishmash.
And yet all of a sudden, you know, Qaddafi turned out not to be our ally anymore.
He wasn't our ally at the beginning, and so it was easy to propagandize the United States population citizenry and say, look at this crazy guy in Libya.
We've got to get rid of him now once and for all.
But the reasons for getting rid of him, and actually Obama's been, you know, kind of dancing around that.
He did say he wanted a regime change, but the reason for getting rid of him hasn't been real clear.
It wasn't that they want democracy to rule Libya.
That's not exactly what's going on.
Just as the United States doesn't want democracy to rule Egypt, the United States wants to be able to control who governs Egypt and wants to control who governs Libya.
And so that's the dance that's going on right now, and the American people aren't really clued into these ulterior motives enough, and I think that's what we need to discuss.
The United States is not a force for good around the world, and this idea that the United States rides on a white horse or has a badge on and is going to go intervene to bring the forces of good to prevail against the forces of evil in these civil wars around the world, that's not what happens if you study U.S. foreign policy.
Right.
Well, and you know, this is one of the things I was going to follow up on after your first statement there that I forgot about, but it's something that you brought up there again about the policy being changed from no-fly zone to protect civilians to regime change.
Correct me if I'm wrong, and I could have missed something here, but the best I understand about that, Obama actually made that official policy change in a joint op-ed in the U.K. Telegraph, right, with Sarkozy and David Cameron.
They wrote this essay saying, okay, we want regime change.
They didn't say that in a speech to the Congress or to the American people.
Or to the U.N., which authorized the no-fly zone.
No, this has been a total bait-and-switch, and then that leaves Obama with the ridiculous position when the Pentagon's bombers are bombing Qaddafi's tent, you have Obama or his administration people saying, no, we're not trying to assassinate Qaddafi.
Well, that's a joke.
He said he wants regime change.
He's bombing the guy's tent.
Of course he's trying to assassinate him, but it's illegal for the U.S. to try to assassinate a foreign leader, and it's not justified by the U.N. resolution.
So you have all these kind of rhetorical, verbal games that are being played that Orwell would be kind of astonished at.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, it seems like to me if we just, and I guess this is what we do for a living, right?
Is sit here and try to think a couple of steps ahead.
Well, what does it mean when you take sides in a civil war like this?
When you say, okay, our mission is to protect civilians, well, what that means in practice is Qaddafi cannot win.
It means we're going to keep bombing until one of them finally gets him, or until it gets so bad they have to go ahead and send in the Marines to Tripoli and sack Tripoli, and then purple-fingered elections, and then training up a new army to, you know, we'll stand down when they stand up, and the rest of this madness.
How else are they going to get out of this without it just being another Bay of Pigs disaster?
Well, I think they're hoping that, yeah, one of these bombing raids on, you know, his tent or one of the buildings he's been in in Tripoli is going to succeed.
I mean, they have bombed his residence or the place where they think he's staying, you know, it must be five or six times by now.
Yeah, killed his grandchildren and his son.
It's just, you know, it's amazing, and that people really don't care because Qaddafi's been so demonized, you know, they tried, they missed him again, they got one of his kids or they got one of the grandkids.
You know, the number of civilians that the bombing effort has killed is beginning to rise rapidly.
I mean, just over the last couple of days there's been 15 or 19 in one place, nine or ten in another, babies killed.
You know, this is just totally immoral, and after you've flown these, you know, 11,500 bombing missions, of course the targets are going to become a little less obvious.
You know, it's not like they're knocking out planes anymore that they needed to ground to establish the no-fly zone.
You know, they've hit everything several times and over, and now they're just taking ridiculous risks with civilian lives.
Yeah, I don't know if anybody's done a body count yet, but the war's certainly gone on for months, and I guess, you know, they probably made the same mistake I did at the very beginning in thinking that this revolution was going to be successful.
The protests started out, as you said, the Democratic ones, not the CIA-backed whatever, but just the people in the streets who really meant it and tried to overthrow them.
They were looking good there for a couple of days until he started bombing them, and then that was pretty much the end of that, but I guess the Obama team thought if they could get in there that they could make pretty short work of the thing.
You know, like Kosovo in 1999, oh, we'll bomb them for a couple of days and then everything will be fine, and then it goes on for months.
Yeah, I think presidents, even more so than the Pentagon, presidents tend to exaggerate the extent that a couple nights of bombing will do, and I think the Pentagon was more prudent.
They were resisting this, and yet Obama pushed it.
I mean, we've got to count the number of wars he's in right now.
I mean, he's in Iraq still, he's in Afghanistan still, no matter how many troops he's going to announce he's pulling out, and I'm very skeptical about how fast those troops are going to come out.
You know, he's in Libya.
The United States is bombing Yemen, you know, freely with these drones.
It's bombing Pakistan with drones.
I mean, that's five countries.
Yeah, well, and don't forget Somalia, where we still, he's sent, what, 80 tons of weapons to back the so-called transitional federal government that Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice created there, and I guess that's a proxy war.
I don't know exactly how well that counts, but people are suffering terribly in Somalia because of the U.S. and continuing under Obama.
And a lot of this, you know, goes back to Jimmy Carter saying that, you know, the Persian Gulf is in the vital interest of the United States and essentially, you know, our 51st state.
So that was the Carter doctrine, and in a way Obama is continuing that.
There's just tremendous continuity in U.S. foreign and military policy, no matter who is president.
And when Obama was running, he saluted the foreign policy of George H.W. Bush, George I, and that should have been a signal to a lot of us that there wasn't going to be that much change in foreign policy.
All right, now I know you've got to go, and we're already over time, but I wanted to give you a chance to address this.
You bring it up in your essay here at progressive.org.
Again, it's running on antiwar.com today.
And you indicated earlier in the show you're a student of the Federalist Papers.
There's one thing to do in a situation like this, and that is impeach and remove the president from office, right?
Yeah, if we really believe in the rule of law and really believe in the Constitution, we should do what Denis Kucinich has suggested on this Libya issue, and that is to file articles of impeachment against Obama because he's just flat out violating the law, and that's our recourse.
Right on.
Well, we'll have to leave it there.
I'm sorry because I've got a lot more to ask you about, but it's been a great interview, and it's a great essay, and I really appreciate your time on the show today, Matthew.
My pleasure, Scott, anytime.
Everybody, that's Matt Rothschild.
He's the editor of The Progressive Magazine at progressive.org.
And we'll be right back.
