‘America’s intervention in Libya’s civil war, the most protracted and least surreptitious assassination attempt in history, was supposed to last “days, not weeks,” but is in its fourth month and has revealed NATO to be an increasingly fictitious military organization. Although this war has no discernible connection with U.S. national security, it serves the national interest, in three ways. It is awakening some legislators to their responsibilities. It is refuting the pretense that the United Nations sets meaningful parameters to wars it authorizes — or endorses, which is quite different. And it is igniting a reassessment of NATO, a Potemkin alliance whose primary use these days is perverse: It provides a patina of multilateralism to U.S. military interventions on which Europe is essentially a free rider.’
Mr. George Will has lost his usual sang-froid, such as it is or could be, in his latest essay grandiloquently titled Libya and the Potemkin alliance. As this opening paragraph illustrates, although not very succinctly. What did Mr. Will expect after the Bush Restoration and its dull-witted intellectual minions John Yoo, Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz made all out war on the very notion and practice of constitutional governance and tripartite power sharing. Mr. Yoo and the utterly bogus idea of ‘The Unitary Presidency’ now is fully entrenched in our National Political Life. It is fully operative and completely useful to the abuse of executive power. Who can stop the President from actions he deems necessary, since he possesses superior knowledge? That was always the argument: so why the outrage from the prescient Mr. Will? As America’s foremost public intellectual could he not see the ramifications of the War on Terror, The Patriot Act and its readily ascertainable concentration of power into the practice of executive fiat? Where was the political indignation, then, about a constitutional affront to the very practice of republican governance and its implicit ethical imperatives? It was sacrificed to the cultivation of political hysteria realized through unrelenting fear mongering. The real question here is where were Mr. Will’s critical faculties, then, as opposed to a now? When a through critique of those policies and laws could have made a difference, in preventing exactly what is happening, today. But the political questions raised by Mr. Will results in a condemnation of Mr. Obama and his policy blunderings that are manifestly serviceable to the imperatives of the approaching campaign.
Political Observer
StephenKMackSD's Blog 