Obomination: Hiding War Behind an Obamism

Add another ridiculous euphemism to the list.  Obama gave “acts of terrorism” the label “man-caused disasters.”  He coined the term “outliers” for the formerly “rogue” countries of North Korea and Iran.   Now Obama declared in a 32-page report to Congress that the hostilities in Libya are “limited military operations.” This report follows Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes’ reference to the deployment in Libya as “kinetic military action.” 

According to Politico, the Obama administration is engaging in nothing short of “verbal gymnastics”  to avoid admitting that we are at war.  Instead of stating the obvious, Obama hopes that the American public will not figure out what he’s really up to – exercising war powers without Congressional approval.

The War Powers Act authorizes deployment of forces by the President for 60 days without consulting Congress when there is “a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.” Obama justifies the unilateral action in Libya by claiming that “U.S. operations do not involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they involve the presence of U.S. ground troops, U.S. casualties or a serious threat thereof, or any significant chance of escalation into a conflict characterized by those factors.”  State Department legal adviser Harold Koh appeared at the Foreign Relations Committee on June 28 to defend this position.  Koh argued that “The legal trigger for the automatic pullout clock — ‘hostilities’ — is an ambiguous term of art.”

Of this “justification,” Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Oh.) has said, “It just doesn’t pass the straight-face test in my view that we’re not in the midst of hostilities.”  Jonathan Schell points out in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times that according to the Obama approach:

War is only war, it seems, when Americans are dying — when we die. When only they — the Libyans — die, it is something else for which there is as yet apparently no name…

Some strange conclusions follow from this strange thinking and these strange facts. In the old scheme of things, an attack on a country was an act of war, no matter what. Now the Obama administration claims that if the adversary cannot fight back, there is no war.

It follows that adversaries of the United States have a new motive for — if not equaling us — then at least doing us some damage. Only then will they be accorded the legal protections (such as they are) of authorized war. Without that, they are at the mercy of the whim of the president.

As an academic, Obama should have taught linguistics, not constitutional law.  As president, Obama should spend more time grounding his decisions in reasonable interpretations of the law, rather than developing new euphemisms.