Libya Bombing- American President
From The American President (1995)
Categories:
Run time: 2:04
Clip Description:In the movie The American President, United States technology was attacked by Libya. This foreign policy-based clip shows how, in response, Andrew Shepard authorizes a strike on a Libyan intelligence facility, weighing the cost of possible Libyan civilian lives lost with US foreign policy priorities.
American Politics Concepts Discussed/Connected To: This clip highlights how the decision is challenging on both a professional and personal level.
Possible Uses in Classroom: This clip is useful in discussions on the intricacies of foreign policy decisions and Presidential power.
Discussion Questions
- The decision in this scene is a building, a target list, and an estimate of who will be inside it. That calculation has a name in the law of armed conflict — anticipated civilian harm must not be excessive relative to the concrete military advantage expected — and no formula attached to it. Who in the American system is actually equipped to make that judgment? Does it matter that the person making it is an elected politician rather than the officers who will carry it out, and which way does that cut?
- This is retaliation rather than war, and no one asks Congress. The War Powers Resolution of 1973 requires the president to report to Congress within 48 hours and to stop within 60 days absent authorization; every president since has treated it as advisory at best, and Congress has rarely forced the issue. Is the honest explanation that Congress does not want to take the vote? What would have to change — electorally, not legally — for it to want one?
- Retaliatory strikes are popular, and presidential approval usually ticks up right after one. List what you would need to know before deciding whether to support such a strike: the target, the intelligence behind it, the civilian estimate, what happens the week after. Now ask how much of that list you have ever actually known about a real strike before you formed a view about it.
Assignment
Pick one American military action of the last thirty years that was ordered without prior congressional authorization, and find the administration’s own legal explanation for it — the report sent to Congress under the War Powers Resolution, the public statements, and, where one exists, the Office of Legal Counsel opinion. In two pages, reconstruct the argument on its own terms: commander-in-chief authority, self-defense, protection of Americans abroad, or an authorization passed years earlier for something else. Then argue against it. The discipline of the assignment is that you must keep two questions apart — whether the strike was a good idea, and whether the president was entitled to order it alone — and you will probably find your instincts on the two do not line up.
Clip hosted on Critical Commons.