Ok, let me see if I have this right:
1. The President has sent the CIA to arm the rebels in Libya. Which means CIA agents are also training the rebels on how to use these arms. But the CIA agents are still civilians, wearing no uniform, on the battlefield, taking part in a war which is someone else's internal armed conflict that has no bearing on our own national security. Ergo, our CIA agents are now illegal belligerants/unlawful combatants/NOT COOL.
2. Arming the rebels violates the arms embargo the UN Council imposed.
3. We have a stellar history of the CIA arming folks. Worked out for us last time!
4. We have kinda determined that the rebels in Libya have been/are terrorists, maybe? We have just given material support to terrorists? Our government essentially just violated its own laws. We are well beyond Humanitarian Law Project here.
5. We didn't wait for/depend on the UN Security Council resolution to go do this CIA secret stuff, so we also violated international laws on the legal right to use force.
6. Once we arm the rebels, they're not civilians anymore, so we aren't actually charged with protecting them under the Security Council resolution. Thus . . . we have just made our own mandate obsolete?
7. Funny how this CIA plan didn't come up in Obama's speech the other night, although I guess it's not an authentic use of American force unless our president is fucking shady about it.
8. Domestically, this was an illegal act - the War Powers Resolution and the Constition, not ambiguous on these points.
9. I appreciate how this started out originally as a no-fly zone but in like less than 24 hours we started shooting at things on the ground, because the tanks got in the way of our planes, I guess?
10. When something genocidal breaks out in Cote d'Ivoire, everyone's gonna look AWESOME.
I was just wondering yesterday how you were doing, and here you have posted!
ReplyDeleteThere are so many things about this whole situation not to like. Someone told me that part of the justification for our response was that the regime in power had started killing women and children and that assistance was requested on that score, but I've not been able to substantiate that in between the manydisasters of my life at present. Doubts, I has them.