Here is a question I would like pollsters to ask American voters about the Libya War:
Is sending Gaddafi to the International Criminal Court a military objective worth having American troops "fight and possibly die" for?
I haven't seen any pollster ask this question. Indeed, the fact that sending Gaddafi to the Hague is a de facto military goal of the United States in Libya isn't even being clearly acknowledged yet in the U.S. media.
However, we can make an educated guess what the response might be, because a Quinnipiac University poll recently asked some questions that are closely related.
Voters say, 61-30 percent, that removing Gaddafi from power is not worth having American troops "fight and possibly die" for, the poll reports. They say, 48-41 percent, that the U.S. should not use military force to remove Gaddafi from power. Furthermore, 74 percent of voters are "very concerned" or "somewhat concerned" that the U.S. will get embroiled in a long-term military conflict in Libya.
This strongly suggests that if American voters were asked, is sending Gaddafi to the International Criminal Court a military objective worth having American troops "fight and possibly die" for, more than 61% would say no and fewer than 30 percent would say yes. Because sending Gaddafi to the Hague is a military objective that includes removing Gaddafi and more.
Yet, with a super-majority of Americans opposed and without Congressional authorization, that is what we are doing: fighting a war to remove Gaddafi from power and send him to the Hague.
It's very likely that you wouldn't know this if your only source of information were the U.S. press, which hasn't been reporting on the divisions among US allies on what an acceptable agreement to end the war would be. But the British press is reporting it.
The Independent reported Wednesday:
But there were signs of divisions over a plan - put forward by the Italian Foreign Minister, Franco Frattini, to provide a safe-haven for Gaddafi if he were to go into exile. This is supported by Turkey but is less enthusiastically backed by Britain and the US who would prefer him to face an investigation by the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
The Independent notes that exile could be accomplished even without the U.S. and Britain formally dropping their insistence that Gaddafi face the ICC, because a number of African countries are outside the ICC's jurisdiction (the ICC is widely reviled in Africa, where many see it as a Western tool that targets African leaders.)
So, Italy and Turkey want to end the war by making it possible for the Libyan leader to go into exile. But the U.S. and Britain do not agree, because they want Gaddafi in the Hague. Thus, the U.S. and Britain are setting a higher bar for ending the conflict than Italy and Turkey. It is quite likely that a consequence of the U.S. and British position is that the war will go on longer, kill more people, and cost more to the U.S. taxpayers than it would if the U.S. were not intransigent on this point.
But Congress and the American people have never signed off on this U.S. diplomatic intransigence, which could cost many lives. Isn't that deeply wrong?
Recall that, according to a New York Times report earlier this week, the true military/political strategy of the Obama administration was to destroy the Libyan military -- i.e., kill Libyan soldiers -- until the Libyan military forces Gaddafi to leave. The Times reported:
The strategy for White House officials nervous that the Libya operation could drag on for weeks or months, even under a NATO banner, is to hit Libyan forces hard enough to force them to oust Colonel Qaddafi, a result that Mr. Obama has openly encouraged.
Now, if the strategy is to get the military to force Gaddafi to leave, it would seem obvious that insisting that Gaddafi has to go to the Hague would make the strategy much harder to accomplish. Because for Libyan military leaders to tell Gaddafi, "Game's up, you must go to the Hague," is obviously a much heavier lift than "Game's up, you must go into exile." This is not only because Gaddafi is much less likely to agree to going to the Hague than going to exile, but also because military leaders are less likely to agree to something that they could well see as a personal and national humiliation.
Remember: at least three-fifths of Americans are against this, because they don't support having American troops "fight and possibly die" to remove Gaddafi, let alone to achieve the further demand that he go to the Hague.
And this is, of course, ignoring all other costs of the present policy, such as the cost to American taxpayers, or the likelihood of Libyan civilian casualties as a result of U.S. bombing.
It also ignores a question that is even less likely to be asked by pollsters in the U.S.: How many Libyan soldiers should we be prepared to kill in order to send Gaddafi to the Hague?
I realize that the lives of soldiers in enemy countries are not something that we prize highly. But surely we can all agree that the value of those lives is not zero. After all, these soldiers have mothers, wives, sisters, children. Presumably, that should count for something, even if that is not much.
But it is a basic mathematical fact that if two numbers are positive and finite, then there is some number you can multiply by the first to get something bigger than the second. So as long as the value of getting Gaddafi to the Hague is not infinite, then there is some number of Libyan soldiers whose killing would not be worth sending Gaddafi to the Hague.
How many Libyan soldiers should we be prepared to kill to send Gaddafi to the Hague?
Don't you think Congress and the American people should have some say in what the U.S. conditions are for a negotiated settlement that would end the war, if the current US conditions are intransigent and could block an agreement that would end the war?
You can urge Congress to debate the Libya War here.
Follow Robert Naiman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/naiman
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US should stop intervening in other counties' internal affairs, period.
Yet again the United States is fighting a 3rd world country. Defeated in Vietnam she remains in Iraq and Afghanistan without victory after a decade.
Inconclusive wars of Drones and Tomahawk missiles I fear have inured our nation to the reality of blood and gore.
Since the conclusion of WWII the United States has been incessantly at War. This apparent blood lust has deteriorated from the fear of communist expansion to intervening in the sovereign nation of Libya which has never attacked America or its neighbors based upon what its dictator "might" due.
This hollow explanation for yet another preemptive war calls to mind the explanation given by Bill Clinton for the Monica Lewinsky affair saying that he did it for: "just about the most morally indefensible reason that anybody could have for doing anything. When you do something just because you could."
Little wonder wise Elizabeth I would emphatically claim: "I have no desire to make windows into men's souls."
Also, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had large amounts of support for the other side from other countries. The Talliban had Pakistan and Iraq Iran and Syria. North Vietnam's war was funded and supported by the Soviet Union and Communist China.
Gaddafi has Mali. Big difference.