2) It also meant that President Obama waged war without permission from Congress, a violation of the United States Constitution.

3) As a candidate, Obama told the Boston Globe that "the president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation." His strategy in Libya required him to take actions that he'd publicly declared to be illegal, and to violate the trust of anti-war voters who took him at his word.

4) He has also made it more likely that future presidents will, without permission, launch military actions in situations that don't involve stopping imminent threats and wage wars without Congressional approval even beyond the 60-day window asserted by the War Powers Resolution, which Obama violated.

5) Finally, Obama has undermined the Office of Legal Counsel in much the same way that George W. Bush did, and in doing so, he has broken one of the central promises of his candidacy: that he understood why procedure matters.

So on one hand, Obama can modestly take credit for the role the U.S. played in Qaddafi's downfall. And yeah, it's great that he's out of power. On the other hand, Obama has violated the Constitution; he willfully broke a law that he believes to be constitutional; he undermined his own professed beliefs about executive power, and made it more likely that future presidents will undermine convictions that he purports to hold; in all this, he undermined the rule of law and the balance of powers as set forth by the framers; and he did it all needlessly, because had he gone to Congress at the beginning and asked for permission to wage war they almost certainly would've granted it.

So I don't think this a quiet victory for Obama.

I think it is a Pyrrhic victory for America.





Our Constitution, laws, and prudential norms are too valuable to be cast aside merely because doing so arguably proved advantageous in a single situation that didn't even impact our national security.



And nothing that happens in Libya can change that.



Image credit: Reuters

