Legal,Shmegal--It's Not About Us-More Libya

I know people want to strip Barack Obama of the Nobel Prize because they miss the days when they could strip Muhammed Ali of his championship. Our own national problem is how to come to grip with a $1.2 trillion military/intelligence/terrorist complex and why we want to build Indian war style frontier forts throughout the Middle East. But,it should not be whether we assist those under threat of genocide. Even though we are scarred by the cowboy antics of the last administration,we should realize that the Libyan situation like the other Middle Eastern Revolutions are not about us.

A Spaniard chided his countrymen that he expected a lack of solidarity from the conservatives but not from his leftist friends. on the issue of Libya. He mentioned how life would have been different if the great democracies had sided with the Spanish Republic.

Despite my own misgivings about the situation, I am humbled by a piece written by someone who knows about Western responses to genocide--Lt. General Romeo Dallaire,the force commander of the UN Peacekeeping Mission for Rwanda in 1994. Now a Senator in the Canadian Parliament and associated with the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights, he writes in Foreign Policy that when Qaddafi threatened to cleanse Libya "dar,dar" (house by house), "zenga, zenga" (street by street), he forced the international community's hand. General Dallaire wonders whether the intervention is too late.

He argues that the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) requires the UN Security Council to take action when a country fails to protect its citizens. This doctrine was unanimously adopted by all countries of the UN general Assembly in 2005. Dallaire asserts that this should have been invoked earlier when Qaddafi threatened the democratic demonstrators with mass atrocities. He notes this would have been appropriate when the UN adopted an arms embrago on Libya and targeted sanctions against Qaddafi and his cornies in late February.

But he says that the referral of Libya to the International Criminal Court and its approval of the No Fly Zone demonstrated the UN Security Council's attention and resolve in a timely manner that was thoroughly absent during Rwanda and Darfur.

Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch,adds that the Security Council at last lived up to its duty to prevent mass atrocities. He notes that it accomplished the politically impossible when it referred Libya to the Court and approved force. He did say that the international community finally found the ideal villain, who allowed them to finally act in the proper manner.

And yes, all our international treaties, with the rights and obligations thereto,are the law of our land. I know we all forgot that during the last Administration.

I think we should take General Dallare seriously and reconsider why President Obama insisted that others eventually direct the operations and why it wasn't appropriate for the President of the United States announce the commencement of military operations. It was an international duty, not just a national one.

Whether this will work out practically is another thing but you have to get the over-arching issue correct to begin with. I think President Obama did that. It's a shame that we can't openly invoke international law and obligations for fear of a nativist backlash against all things United Nations.