Bickering in Washington as war in Libya drags on

As the conflict in Libya drags into its fourth month, Washington faces the latest in a series of tests of its political will in the effort to depict American involvement in the struggle as a limited humanitarian action.

The dispute in Washington revolves chiefly around Congress's role in sanctioning an extended U.S. commitment in Libya, which began as a NATO-led effort to prevent the country's authoritarian leader Muammr Gadhafi from massacring Libyan citizens. The Obama White House says it has the authority to pursue what it calls limited military action in Libya without any formal consultation with Congress--while lawmakers on both sides of the partisan aisle argue that Obama needs formal congressional approval to pursue hostilities beyond 90 days.

Administration lawyers themselves have offered different legal opinions on the matter, the New York Times' Charlie Savage reports: Pentagon and Justice Department attorneys have advised the White House that it needs congressional approval, while White House and State Department attorneys say that any such consultation is unnecessary because the Libya action does not reflect formal "hostilities" between the United States and Libya.

The semantic war over the Libyan war (or sub-hostile action, depending on one's view) has made for strange bedfellows. Lawmakers from the right and left, including House Speaker John Boehner (R-Oh.) and Dennis Kunicich (D-Oh.), have warned the White House that Congress could cut off funding for the Libya action. The squabbling surely echoes as well growing frustration with the 10-year-and-counting conflict in Afghanistan, which Obama is expected to address in a speech tomorrow night.

Two congressional backers of the NATO action in Libya have lately sought to defuse the brewing controversy on Capitol Hill. Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.) today introduced a bipartisan resolution that if passed would grant Obama retroactive approval for the U.S. role in the NATO action.

The resolution, co-sponsored by Senators Carl Levin (D-Mich.), Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Ca.), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), and Ben Cardin (D-Md.), would authorize Pres. Obama "to continue the limited use of the U.S. armed forces in Libya, in support of U.S. national security policy interests, as part of the NATO mission to enforce UN Security Council resoultion 1973," for up to one year, a statement from Kerry's office said.

And in the rest of the NATO alliance, partners are doing plenty of their own squabbling over the Libya military action.

Outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates last week rapped Washington's European allies for spending too little on their militaries and leaving the United States to in effect subsidize their defense.

"The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress -- and in the American body politic writ large--to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense," Gates told NATO allies in Brussels June 10.

As the air-based NATO military action provokes growing dissension in the West, meanwhile, Libya's beleaguered rebels are resorting to primitive measures to try to advance against Muammar Gadhafi's forces on the ground. As Al Jazeera English reports in the video below, Libyan rebels are forging their own weapons out of scrap metal in order to try to break the stalemate:

(Al Jazeera English.)