ILYA SOMIN: The Growing Conflict Over the Legality of the Libya Intervention. “The Libya intervention has long since passed the point where it is large enough to be considered a war. . . . Legal questions aside, the growing willingness of Congress to challenge Obama over Libya illustrates the political dangers of waging war without congressional approval. If anything goes wrong, the president ends up taking all the political blame. That’s why most presidents have in fact sought congressional authorization for major military actions, whether or not they believed it to be legally necessary.”

Here’s more on the White House’s legal position.

UPDATE: It’s a war, but it isn’t a war-war.

So people who like to say that “if you aren’t part of the solution, you’re part of the problem” argue that blockading the enemy at sea, suppressing enemy air defenses, identifying targets to be bombed, refueling aircraft that drop the bombs, engaging in electronic warfare to aid the planes that drop the bombs, and supplying many of the actual bombs themselves don’t count as waging war because we are not actually dropping the bombs (well, other than from our unmanned drones) and because the enemy is unable to effectively shoot back?

Well, the last part at least that fits with the old anti-war slogan that “it takes two sides to make war.” Although I suspect what they had in mind was that if we–and only we–stop fighting an enemy there would be no war–not that our shooting alone does not count as war.

I find this fascinating.

I do believe that under this logic, we could nuke somebody and not fall under the administration’s definition of war.

Heh.