In this space Wednesday, Byron York quoted an Obama administration official, deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes, who refused to say that bombing Libya constituted “war,” but allowed that it “involves kinetic military action.”
And just like that, my Twitter feed lit up with extra snark, as folks had fun with the Obama team’s ungainly euphemism. My favorites so far:
Near as I can figure, “kinetic action” is redundant–like “wet water.” But Harvard Law professor and former head of the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel Jack Goldsmith thinks there’s a reason the Obama administration is at, er, “kinetic military action” with the English language here:
As I noted in a 2000 paper for the Cato Institute [.pdf], the Clinton administration played similar rhetorical games during the Kosovo air war in 1999. Here’s then-White House press secretary Joe Lockhart, explaining that, to borrow a phrase from his boss, it depends on what the definition of ‘war’ is:
Lockhart: No. Next question.
Q: Why not?
Lockhart: Because we view it as a conflict.
Q: How can you say that it’s not war?
Lockhart: Because it doesn’t meet the definition as we define it.
Rep. Tom Campbell, R-Calif., explained how frustrating it was to get a straight answer from Clinton administration officials about the legal status of U.S. operations in Serbia and Kosovo.
Why did the Clinton team decide to take a page from Lewis Carroll in describing the Kosovo War? Maybe they were up to the same tricks the Obama team is up to now — trying to shoehorn Kosovo into the “limited conflict” distinction that Dellinger used to justify Haiti and Bosnia. But that’s a dubious distinction, nowhere to be found in the Constitution.
In any event, as Goldsmith notes, Libya doesn’t fit into the “consensual and limited” rationale used to argue for the constitutionality of the Haiti and Bosnia interventions: “those troops were being sent there as part of consensual peacekeeping or stability missions, not as a coercive force,” whereas “extreme use of force and preparatory bombardment are what Libya is about.” Thus, Goldsmith writes, “it seems to me that characterizing the Libya intervention as not ‘war’ requires an expansion, possibly significant, of the Dellinger rationale for unilateral presidential power.”
Speaking plainly about the legal rationale for what they’re up to would make it plain that the president is willfully violating his oath of office. No wonder his administration’s so tongue-tied.
