Obama's Core Values

When a president begins his speech by paying tribute to the army that is fighting a war in a foreign country and sponsored by the taxpayer’s money, the American people have reasons to be suspicious of the president’s core values. The same skepticism applies when one hears Obama asserting that “when our interests and values are at stake, we have a responsibility to act” and this statement ultimately rises up a question: what interests and values is the president talking about? Once you begin wondering about this sort of ideologies, you are ultimately promoting a thoughtful discussion. The extract 9 illustrates Obama’s appealing to force rather than reason to legitimize the use of U.S. military in Libya. Obama’s argument is trying to gain the
consent of the American people with an argument which advocates for use of coercion rather than reason to incite an agreement towards the American people. Appealing to force is almost never an admirable substitute for sound reasoning when a president of one the most powerful country in the world attempts to legitimizes his actions by threatening and demanding a government of a sovereign country to step down from power, which goes clearly against the international law for it is a violation of the national sovereignty of Libya. Even the threat of such force should raise serious doubts about the legitimacy of the president’s position since one of the chief moral attractions of the rule of law, whether internal or international, is that the rule of law expresses a strong public commitment to not settling conflicts of interests and preferences by recourse to sheer power, and in international relations, where disparities of power are great, the moral case for intervening is correspondingly strong. However, such a commitment does not rule out the resolution of conflicts by force, of course, but it does require that force must not the first resort and that when it is employed it is legitimized by publicly available reasons of the right sort, what might be called principled reasons, as distinct from mere threats or appeals to the interests of those who happen to be the stronger.