Click, coffins get bigger. Numbers keep getting bigger.
Constitution
of the
United States
Article I
Section 8: The Congress shall have power
* To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water;
adopted 17 September 1787
law of the land since 4 March 1789
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a comment to Chicago Sun-Times opinion e-column
"Iraq, Year Six"
(reprinted below):
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Posted by: Bob Merkin | March 22, 2009 12:59 pm
When the political sphere gets whipped into a froth, it often screams for a Constitutional amendment -- e.g. flag-burning.
The pathetic thing about Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam is that we already have, in the original Constitution, the clearest, simplest language stating whose responsibility declaring war is: Congress.
The last American war that commenced and was waged with a Congressional declaration was World War Two.
Since Korea, Congress has simply ducked, dodged and weaseled out of its Constitutional responsibility to declare and authorize war.
It has become Congress' new culture and habit to let the president bear all the political heat for war, and when the war goes south and inflames and outrages the electorate, Congress can say: Don't blame us, this is the president's doing, he started it, his signature is on the paperwork, not ours.
So we get these never-ending Blunder Wars, and the corpses of our neighbors' sons and daughters flown back to Dover Air Force Base.
The only modern president to take responsibility for ending one of these disasters was Gerald Ford. Johnson and Nixon did not have the guts to end Vietnam. They understood clearly that ordering an end to an American war would be political suicide.
Obama doesn't have the clarity or political nerve to end these two Asian wars, and is ratcheting up our military commitment in Afghanistan.
The last foreign army to conquer and control all of Afghanistan was Alexander the Great. The British couldn't, the Soviet Union couldn't.
Declaring or avoiding Blunder Wars that kill and cripple our neighbors' children is Congress' clear responsibility. When Congress shirks it, and won't face it, Congress is begging to become The Irrelevant, Symbolic, Useless branch of the federal government -- exactly like the Roman Senate under the emperors: a great temple of florid, patriotic, televised speeches, of waving flags, of declations of National Sofa Week.
Until Congress grabs back its Constitutional duty for declaring war, it's just a silly bunch of useless cowards, accumulating benefits and pensions, flying to sun and ski junkets on free rides on corporate jets.
While our neighbors' daughters and sons keep getting maimed, committing suicide, and dying in (as Congressman Lincoln called Polk's Mexican War) Liars' and Scoundrels' Wars.
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The Swamp (political blog)
The Chicago Sun-Times (Chicago, Illinois USA)
Sunday 22 March 2009
Iraq, year six
by Frank James
[photo:] A soldier mans his 50 caliber machine gun as his scout unit heads to Nasiriyah, Iraq, March 22, 2003. (Chicago Tribune photo by Nuccio DiNuzzo).
This weekend marked the sixth anniversary of the Iraq War. At six years, it isn't America's longest war -- Vietnam still holds that honor with some scholars calculating U.S. involvement there as lasting 25 years since they count back to 1950 as the start of U.S. efforts there.
It's also not the bloodiest or most divisive. The Civil War holds both those records. It also wasn't the only war the U.S. entered based on less than accurate information. The Spanish-American War can also lay claim to that.
But it may be the first war in U.S. history in which there was so much suspicion at the war's start that personal reasons conflated with national security concerns to cause an American president to launch the war in the first place.
Before the war started, there were questions about why President George Bush decided to take the nation to war. Yes, there was the "intelligence" that suggested that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
But there was also the suspicion that there was something of a president's personal vendetta against another head of state, concerns that were only raised when Bush, speaking at a Houston event, reminded the audience that Hussein was "the guy who tried to kill my dad," referring to a bomb plot attributed to Hussein against the first President Bush.
Looking back on the beginning of the war, we see that the nation's founders had prepared the nation for such concerns about the motives of the head of state by giving only Congress the ability to authorize war.
The founders had seen first hand the disastrous consequences that arise when a head of state can plunge his nation into ill-considered wars. The actions of King George III who waged a costly war against the American colonies and lost was an object lesson to them, which is why they made Congress a check on the commander-in-chief's power.
For a number of reasons, Congress decided to defer to the president although if ever there were a situation in which it shouldn't have, it was during the months leading to the Iraq War when a president with an obvious conflict of interest was pressing for military action.
It was a conflict so self-evident that in any other scenario, the president would have had to recuse himself.
For instance, could one imagine a prosecutor in an American court being allowed to try a case against a defendant who had targeted the prosecutor's father in a bomb plot? That never would have been allowed to happen in a court of law.
Yet, that was the situation the country found itself in a matter no less grave than war and peace, with a president-prosecutor who had a conflict.
As the founders intended, only Congress was left to act as a counterweight. But for several reasons, it was unable to do so.
Obviously, there was the 9/11 factor which, if it didn't change everything, changed much. It reduced Congress's desire to act as a check on the president since few lawmakers wanted to appear unpatriotic in the wake of the dreadful attacks.
Of course, members of the Bush Administration did their best to link Hussein to 9/11 in voters' minds which made it harder for Congress to say no to the war.
It's beyond dispute that the administration also used the attacks and war on terror, and Americans' desire to be protected and tendency to rally around the president in a time of existential peril to the president's and Republican Party's political advantage.
So with congressional elections in 2002 and 2004 on their minds, many Democrats found it difficult to oppose the Iraq War in the 2002 run up. They didn't want to have that vote used against them in congressional and presidential races.
There were also the memories of 1991 when many congressional Democrats and even some Republicans, (then-Republican Jim Webb, now a Democratic senator, comes to mind) had doubts about the Persian Gulf War, a conflict which turned out to be a huge victory for the U.S.
So the pressures were enormous on some lawmakers like Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) who had voted against the 1991 war but voted in 2002 to authorize the second Iraq War.
And so the war happened. And we all know how that went. The initial "mission accomplished" phase turned into the insurgency, terrorism and sectarian violence phase which after much reluctance by one-time Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the White House turned into the surge phase with reduced violence.
Nearly 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the war, according to the Iraq Body Count website. Meanwhile, the death toll of U.S. servicemembers has surpassed 4,200 according to the icasualties.org website. And Americans continue to die in Iraq, although in fewer numbers than before the surge.
But there were other events often ignored by the war's opponents. One of the worst tyrants of modern times was toppled and later captured and executed. Iraq is now a democracy with broad-based free and fair voting in a region of the world where that can't be said for many other countries.
Those were the invasion's intended consequences that came along with all the unintended ones.
Now President Barack Obama has vowed to remove U.S. combat troops from Iraq by 2011 as a new administration's attention shifts to Afghanistan.
In important ways, Afghanistan is a much tougher war than Iraq even though the U.S. has allies there in a way it never did in Iraq. Iraq had a governmental, commercial, physical and societal infrastructure that Afghanistan lacks. Afghanistan's tribal and ethnic differences make Iraq's Sunni-Shia-Kurdish cleavages seem simple.
Afghanistan is so daunting, that six years from now, we may look back on Iraq and think of it as, if not the good war, certainly the easier one, when compared with Afghanistan.
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I
more comments:
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What a crock of rubbish. I was drawn to this article by the headline "Iraq,year six." This article had nothing to say about Iraq year six. It had little to say about Iraq period. Instead, a person with press credentials uses this article as a soapbox for his own personal agenda. This is yellow journalism at it's finest. The author, Frank James needs a change in venue. He would do well with Pravda.
Posted by: John Ward | March 22, 2009 12:32 PM
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John Ward,
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I guess you have never read a Frank James article before?
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If Frank had bothered to do a little research he would have seen the joint resolution to authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against Iraq had backing by the major democratic senators.
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http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=107&vote=00237&session=2
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If as he states that the Senators were also afraid to vote against this because of upcoming 2002 & 2004 election, then this says a lot about democratic leadership.
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One other not about this vote - for all of you flatliners that said President Bush rushed into war with Saddam - US troops didn't go into Iraq until 6 months after this vote.
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As far the WMDs, the democratic leadership from the Clinton administration and also the Senate leaderhship during the Bush administration sur thought those WMDs existed.
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http://www.davidstuff.com/political/wmdquotes.htm
Posted by: Terry | March 22, 2009 2:36 PM
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[RE: Post by: Bob Merkin | March 22, 2009 12:59 PM]
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Bob,
.
I have no reason to disagree with the points you make about irresponsibility and blame shifting in Washington. However, I must disagree with you on some of the things you’ve said, and with particular regard to your statement that we haven’t had a constitutionally declared war since World War II.
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Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the Constitution grants to Congress the power “[t]o declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water . . .” Beyond this provision, the Constitution prescribes no particular form of words regarding the content of a declaration of war. In contrast, the Constitution mentions other forms of belligerency, such as invasion and insurrection, and requires no particular declaration of war to authorize the President to repel an invasion or suppress an insurrection. Rather than declaring a state of invasion or insurrection, the duty of Congress is limited to providing “for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions . . .” (U.S. Const., Art. I, § 8, Cl. 15.) The President requires no congressional authorization to repel an invasion from a foreign nation. (See The Prize Cases, 67 U.S. 635, 668 (1862).) The constitutional distinction is drawn at the point that the President seeks authority to “set on foot a military expedition against a nation with whom the United States are at peace.” (United States v. Smith, 27 Fed. Cas. p. 1192, 1229-30 (C.C.D.N.Y. 1806), cited in Holmes v. United States, 391 U.S. 936, fn. 10 (1968) (Douglas, J. Dissenting.).) It takes an act of Congress to authorize the latter because “it is the exclusive province of congress to change a state of peace into a state of war.” (Smith, at pp. 1230-31.)
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But if a declaration of war doesn’t require any particular form, then why isn’t it the case that a congressional act authorizing the use of military force against another nation constitutes a declaration of war? If an act of Congress does everything to authorize war against another nation with which the United States are at peace, is it any less of a declaration of war simply because it isn’t captioned or entitled “declaration of war”? I don’t think so. If a bill appropriates money, it is an appropriation bill regardless of whether it is denominated one. If it authorizes war, it is a declaration of war even if not called such. Laws are reckoned by their substance rather than their form or title.
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This being the case, I must part company with your suggestion that we haven’t had a declared war since the World War II. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution clearly authorized the President to employ the Armed Forces of the United States in hostile activities in Vietnam. The fact that it was a congressional authorization for a hostile military expedition against a nation with whom we were at peace made it a declaration of war even though it wasn’t called one. No one appears to be able to explain what was missing from it to deprive it of its character as a declaration of war. Congress has likewise authorized the use of force in Iraq (twice) and in Afghanistan. Nobody in Congress has suggested that they haven’t authorized these incursions. Their excuse has been to say they were duped into granting such authorization. That, again, doesn’t change the nature of what they have authorized.
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So yes, I must agree with you that politicians have engaged in the deplorable practice of blaming the executive for wars of their causing. However, it is even more deplorable because those expeditions were produced by constitutional authorization, making their denials a pack of lies.
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I must also part company with your statement that it was Gerald Ford rather than Nixon who “had the guts” to end the Vietnam War. Our ground forces, with the exception of a few advisors and embassy guards, had already been withdrawn pursuant to the Paris Peace Accords in 1973 before Gerald Ford ever took office. In fact, when North Vietnam reneged on the Paris Accords in 1974, Ford sought authorization from Congress to resume military support for South Vietnam. He was rebuffed by Congress, and North Vietnam went on to successfully complete its invasion.
Posted by: John W. | March 22, 2009 5:30 PM
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[quote]
If as he states that the Senators were also afraid to vote against this because of upcoming 2002 & 2004 election, then this says a lot about democratic leadership.
Posted by: Terry | March 22, 2009 2:36 PM
[/quote]
So what do you say about the quality of Republic Party leadership that has gone on record saying that they won't vote for the stimulus bill because, if it works, it can be used against them in the 2010 elections?
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Hey John W --
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Stop confusing me with Legal and Historical Citations and Thoughtful Insights! I hate that!
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You're systematically on point, but I think you're slightly missing The Big Overview:
How can Americans insulate and protect themselves from a rogue president's tsunami of jingoism, and how can Congress -- with its near-universal terror of not being re-elected every 2 years -- be willing to stand up and analyze fraudulent intelligence and downright lies pushing us into war.
Your citation of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution hits the nail on the head: Legal, Constitutional -- and triggered by an enemy attack which never actually happened. The Tonkin Gulf attacks spookily mimic the motorized Zodiac boat incidents Bush & Co. were pointing to to rattle jingo sabers against Iran.
But I still blame the 2-Asian-War mess on the systemic cowardice of Congress. There were members clearly calling for the wars to end: the most marginalized and villified "loonies" Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich.
And Special Mention to Senator Byrd of WV and his amazing speech "Sleepwalking Through History" -- delivered to an empty Senate chamber.
If a war's worth fighting, for bona fide national security reasons, let Congress step up to the plate and declare it. What we have now is idiots like Hillary Clinton and her "If I knew then what I know now ..."
The moment to vote, to approve or oppose, is always Then, dummy.
Thanks, muy sincerely, for your very thoughtful and informed reply.
Bob
Posted by: Bob Merkin | March 23, 2009 1:15 PM
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