On Tuesday's episode of the Daily Show, Jon Stewart attempts to talk to his "senior Libya correspondent" Aasif Mandvi, about the war in Libya that the US is leading in an attempt to create regime change in.....except that Mandvi interrupts Stewart after literally every word. It's not a "war" its an "enforced no fly zone"...it's not "led by the US" its "enabled by the US"...it's not bombing, its "building-enrubblification"...it's not "regime change" its "encouraging leadership self-relocation." (The title of my blog post comes from Jon Stewart and his incredible writing team.) Finally, Mandvi explains why he can't call the Libya situation a war:
"We can't be at war. We never consulted Congress."
That got me thinking about the way the word for an action in a way defines it. We might be bombing Tripoli, but since "war" comes along with certain rules and expectations, let's just not call it a war.
So is it a war? NPR tackled this question in an article on its website, listing all the news publications (NY Times, CNN, etc etc) that are referring to "Operation Odyssey Dawn" (more on that ridiculous name later) a "war". But according to the professor of military history that NPR interviewed, the operation in Libya is at this point too limited in scope and intention to be considered a war. Right now, the US and its allies are officially only protecting civilians, not trying to overthrow the government or aid the rebels.
Officially, only Congress can declare war, and they haven't done that. But in the last fifty years, it's become increasingly uncommon for the US and many other countries to declare war at all. That's why wars like Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan and Iraq (both times) are not officially called wars at all.
Unofficially, though, it's considered to be a war when the US commits its official military forces against a clearly identified enemy political entity. (By this definition, Iraq and Afghanistan were over a long time ago.) Since that hasn't happened yet with Libya, we're technically not at war. Which is why the generals and government officials talking to the press have been using all these vague terms to describe the "military action" going on there.
However, NPR explains, if at some point the Ghaddafi forces hurt American interests and the goal of the action changes from just protecting the people to overthrowing Ghaddafi directly, what we are seeing now will retroactively have been considered a war from the very beginning.
Does that make everything clear and simple? No? Oh well...
That's so interesting and so odd at the same time. I looked up war in the dictionary and it said "War is an openly declared state of organized violent conflict,typified by extreme aggression, societal disruption, and high mortality." So the open declaration is a major factor even if it's the only factor that many recent conflicts lack.
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