Executive exuberance

Executive’s tendency to ignore laws curb misplaced exuberance is not peculiar to one country, as we see in Pakistan.

That US President Barack Obama has been a disappointment to many of his admirers, both in the US and outside, is now widely acknowledged. Those who had been taken in by his soaring rhetoric, promising a fundamental departure from the neocon policies of his predecessor, stand deeply disillusioned.

Events in the Middle East, in particular, have shown Obama to be both weak and vacillating, giving in to powerful lobbies and compromising on principles. In the process, he has ended up displeasing both the conservative Arab regimes as well as the democracy-hungry youth. Libya is, however, a different story, with Obama determined to refurbish his hawkish credentials. While the Libyan leader has more than a fair share of faults associated with authoritarian rulers, he had managed to claw his way back into the West’s favours. However, at the first sign of popular unrest, the US joined those very European powers primarily responsible for many of the ills afflicting the region in an armed attack on Libya. Worse, it drew legitimacy from an interpretation of UN Security Council Resolution 1973, which can at best be described as dubious, pretending that it is not engaged in combat operations, while providing complete military support to Nato’s military operations.

Congress is not too thrilled with the executive’s disdain for the legislature. This has brought together an unlikely coalition of Democratic liberals and Republican conservatives, who are upset at Obama ignoring Congress’s War Powers Resolution, approved in 1973 to press the Nixon administration to wind up the Vietnam conflict. It calls upon US presidents to terminate any military mission 60 days (with a 30-day extension) after notifying Congress that the troops have been deployed into hostilities, unless Congress authorises the operations to continue. House Speaker, Republican John Boehner, too, has warned Obama that he risks being in violation of this law.

What has deeply disturbed even Obama’s friends is that even though Pentagon lawyers had warned the president that his action was not in accordance with the law, White House lawyers, while acknowledging that the president cannot take the country into a war on his own, have argued that the limited nature of the mission is not the kind of hostilities envisioned by Congress. The White House has also defended support for Nato operations on the somewhat flimsy ground that “US operations do not involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they involve US ground troops”, even though it has already cost over $200 million dollars and is likely to cost over a billion dollars by the end of the fiscal year. Administration officials have also argued privately that if Washington were to end its support now, the Nato campaign would collapse and this would be a severe blow to the unity of the military alliance, affecting its operations the world over.

Ten US lawmakers have also filed a lawsuit asking a judge to order the president to pull out of the Libyan operation because Congress had not authorised it. This lawsuit is, however, unlikely to make much progress, as the courts have in the past refrained from taking up such cases on technical grounds. As The New York Times stated in its editorial last week, “the White House’s argument for the president’s refusal to seek Congressional approval to continue the Libya operation borders ‘on sophistry’, pointing out that the Pentagon has continued to provide refuelling and surveillance aircraft that have hit air defences and has also sent in armed drones”.

The executive’s continuing tendency to ignore laws that place curbs on its misplaced exuberance is not peculiar to any one country, as we have known to our cost in Pakistan. But it is particularly sad when it happens in the US, especially as the expectation was that President Obama would hold himself to a higher standard of ethics than his predecessor. Another example of realpolitik trumping morality!

Published in The Express Tribune, June 23^rd, 2011.