Is It Too Much to Hope that Congress Will Now Finally Stop Issuing Blank Checks for War?
On October 10, 2002, the U.S. Congress passed a joint resolution that authorized the use of military force against Iraq. Specifically, the President could send in the troops to "defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq" and "enforce all relevant United Nations Security resolutions regarding Iraq." On March 19, 2003, President George W. Bush cashed this blank check and ordered an invasion of Iraq.
For the fifth time since the end of World War II, Congress had thus abdicated its constitutional responsibility to declare a war. The Founding Fathers had reserved that power for the elected legislators rather than allow chief executives to decide whether to deploy the armed forces. Five occasions, the War of 1812, the Mexican War of 1845, the Spanish American War of 1898, World Wars I and II, followed the mandates of the Constitution. Prior to 1950, there were a number of minor military interventions that skirted the letter if not the spirit of the Constitution but the first major challenge came after North Korean troops poured across the border of South Korea. President Harry Truman responded with American might. His peremptory action was justified on the grounds that there was not enough time to wait for deliberation by Congress. Truman never asked for approval by Congress after the fact, although his decision received bipartisan support.
Decades later, Ronald Reagan directed an invasion of tiny Grenada. Bill Clinton resorted to air strikes against al Queda then in Afghanistan and Sudan as retaliation for terrorist attacks on the U.S. He also ordered the Air Force to bomb the Serbs in Yugoslavia to halt genocide. None of these small wars received a congressional imprimatur. But there was no blowback, unforeseen consequences and the legislators remained mute. There are other instances, before and after World War II in which presidents engaged the U.S. military in gunfire with no prior nod from the legislators. Some, but not all of these affairs, might pass muster under the heading of self defense. While the outcomes may have been desirable, the precedents have enhanced White House prerogatives at the expense of Capitol Hill.
Under the amended rubric, the Kennedy administration debated how to deal with the threat while providing members of Congress with only minimal information and access to the deliberations. However, JFK invited a spectrum of foreign policy experts to present diverse ideas. The Missile Crisis ended through diplomacy rather than military action but at the time no one noticed that the process legitimized and promoted the use of the Congressional Resolution as a means of handling real and perceived threats.
In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson, beset by accusations of timidity in his resolve to preserve a non-Communist South Vietnam, complained to Richard Russell, "All the senators are all saying, ‘Let’s move. Let’s go into the North.’ They’d impeach a president who’d run out. Run and let the dominoes start falling over. God Almighty, what they said about us leaving China would just be warming up."
An inconsequential skirmish -- if not altogether phantom exchange of gun fire -- between U.S. destroyers and North Vietnamese torpedo boats off the coast of North Vietnam in August 1964, brought forth the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Its text enabled Lyndon Johnson to flex his anti-Communist muscles, to bomb the north, and with his successor, Richard Nixon, to massively expand the use of American military power in Southeast Asia, carrying the war into Laos and Cambodia with disastrous results. Revelation that the State Department had drafted a resolution that would allow expansion of American military operations in Indochina, more than two months before the alleged incidents off the coast of North Vietnam fueled accusations that the administration faked the reports. In any event, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, unlike that of the Missile Crisis, failed to stimulate a diplomatic detente.
After Saddam Hussein occupied Kuwait in 1990, President George H. W. Bush pondered whether to ask approval from Congress for a military response. Dick Cheney, then Secretary of Defense, told the Senate Armed Services Committee the president did not need authorization from legislators to use armed force. While Brent Scowcroft, Bush’s national security adviser, believed it unnecessary to obtain a congressional imprimatur, his president recalled an LBJ maxim, "Don’t undertake an activity without the support of Congress." Bush I sought and received approval to use the troops., but only if a diplomatic solution could not be reached.
The fires still smoldered at the World Trade Center on September 14, 2001 when a joint resolution authorized the president to use "all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations or person he determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001 or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States." Actually, the Constitution permits a president to respond to an attack upon the U.S. and, although he called for a declaration of war after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, technically, Franklin D. Roosevelt did not need one. But whereas a declaration of war would need to spell out a country or at least an identifiable entity, the resolution of September 14 conferred upon George W. Bush the sole power to determine who was involved in 9/11 and who could be identified to "prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States.
This vague language has been cited by the administration as enabling it to lawfully conduct warrantless electronic surveillance, lock-up individuals it identifies as terrorists, apply interrogation tactics some classify as torture and suspend habeas corpus for suspects. Meanwhile, Congress abjectly failed to exercise its oversight role on responsibility for the botched campaign in Afghanistan which left al Qaeda and Osama bin Ladin intact.
When Bush II subsequently focused on Iraq as an imminent threat with weapons of mass destruction, the administration initially asked Congress for the right to use force to restore international peace and security in the Mideast. That went beyond what even the most bellicose members could stomach. The authorization of October 2002 spoke only of Iraq. The statement that empowered Bush I and a UN coalition to evict Iraq from Kuwait required him to notify Congress that diplomacy had failed. The permission slip tendered to Bush II made no such requirement. He now had the discretion to go to war when and how he decided.
In the run up to the resolution, a few in Congress echoed their 1964 counterparts. Representative Ron Paul of Texas warned, "This resolution transfers the responsibility, the authority and the power of the Congress to the President so he can declare war. When and if he wants to...he will make the final decision, not the Congress, not the people through the Congress of this country." In January, some 119 members of the House of Representatives seemed to suffer buyer’s remorse and they petitioned the president not to take any military action until he exhausted diplomacy. He ignored their plea, and two months later the war began.
Through the power of the purse, Congress retains the ability to control the use of the military but in today’s climate what elected official would chance charges of not supporting the troops? Congress, the media and indeed the public participated in the rush to judgment on the presence of WMDs in Iraq, acceptance of Saddam’s alleged connections with al Qaeda and 9/11. The enabling legislation to invade Iraq was passed by a Congress fed selective information, without thorough investigation and in a quick sound-bite strewn debate. Missing still is the oversight that might discover the roots of the intelligence failures, why the war has gone so poorly and despite huge expenditures so little has been achieved in restoration of the Iraqi infrastructure.
While removal of Saddam and his henchmen may be laudable, whether Americans would have supported a decision to go to war if they had known the costs is dubious. It is vital to re-examine the process, the vehicle of the broadly worded Congressional Resolution which cedes to one individual a blank check, the power to use the military at his discretion. Return to the obligation of Congress to declare war would might force legislators to think through their responsibilities for use of military force and the consequences.
For the fifth time since the end of World War II, Congress had thus abdicated its constitutional responsibility to declare a war. The Founding Fathers had reserved that power for the elected legislators rather than allow chief executives to decide whether to deploy the armed forces. Five occasions, the War of 1812, the Mexican War of 1845, the Spanish American War of 1898, World Wars I and II, followed the mandates of the Constitution. Prior to 1950, there were a number of minor military interventions that skirted the letter if not the spirit of the Constitution but the first major challenge came after North Korean troops poured across the border of South Korea. President Harry Truman responded with American might. His peremptory action was justified on the grounds that there was not enough time to wait for deliberation by Congress. Truman never asked for approval by Congress after the fact, although his decision received bipartisan support.
Decades later, Ronald Reagan directed an invasion of tiny Grenada. Bill Clinton resorted to air strikes against al Queda then in Afghanistan and Sudan as retaliation for terrorist attacks on the U.S. He also ordered the Air Force to bomb the Serbs in Yugoslavia to halt genocide. None of these small wars received a congressional imprimatur. But there was no blowback, unforeseen consequences and the legislators remained mute. There are other instances, before and after World War II in which presidents engaged the U.S. military in gunfire with no prior nod from the legislators. Some, but not all of these affairs, might pass muster under the heading of self defense. While the outcomes may have been desirable, the precedents have enhanced White House prerogatives at the expense of Capitol Hill.
Under the amended rubric, the Kennedy administration debated how to deal with the threat while providing members of Congress with only minimal information and access to the deliberations. However, JFK invited a spectrum of foreign policy experts to present diverse ideas. The Missile Crisis ended through diplomacy rather than military action but at the time no one noticed that the process legitimized and promoted the use of the Congressional Resolution as a means of handling real and perceived threats.
In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson, beset by accusations of timidity in his resolve to preserve a non-Communist South Vietnam, complained to Richard Russell, "All the senators are all saying, ‘Let’s move. Let’s go into the North.’ They’d impeach a president who’d run out. Run and let the dominoes start falling over. God Almighty, what they said about us leaving China would just be warming up."
An inconsequential skirmish -- if not altogether phantom exchange of gun fire -- between U.S. destroyers and North Vietnamese torpedo boats off the coast of North Vietnam in August 1964, brought forth the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Its text enabled Lyndon Johnson to flex his anti-Communist muscles, to bomb the north, and with his successor, Richard Nixon, to massively expand the use of American military power in Southeast Asia, carrying the war into Laos and Cambodia with disastrous results. Revelation that the State Department had drafted a resolution that would allow expansion of American military operations in Indochina, more than two months before the alleged incidents off the coast of North Vietnam fueled accusations that the administration faked the reports. In any event, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, unlike that of the Missile Crisis, failed to stimulate a diplomatic detente.
After Saddam Hussein occupied Kuwait in 1990, President George H. W. Bush pondered whether to ask approval from Congress for a military response. Dick Cheney, then Secretary of Defense, told the Senate Armed Services Committee the president did not need authorization from legislators to use armed force. While Brent Scowcroft, Bush’s national security adviser, believed it unnecessary to obtain a congressional imprimatur, his president recalled an LBJ maxim, "Don’t undertake an activity without the support of Congress." Bush I sought and received approval to use the troops., but only if a diplomatic solution could not be reached.
The fires still smoldered at the World Trade Center on September 14, 2001 when a joint resolution authorized the president to use "all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations or person he determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001 or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States." Actually, the Constitution permits a president to respond to an attack upon the U.S. and, although he called for a declaration of war after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, technically, Franklin D. Roosevelt did not need one. But whereas a declaration of war would need to spell out a country or at least an identifiable entity, the resolution of September 14 conferred upon George W. Bush the sole power to determine who was involved in 9/11 and who could be identified to "prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States.
This vague language has been cited by the administration as enabling it to lawfully conduct warrantless electronic surveillance, lock-up individuals it identifies as terrorists, apply interrogation tactics some classify as torture and suspend habeas corpus for suspects. Meanwhile, Congress abjectly failed to exercise its oversight role on responsibility for the botched campaign in Afghanistan which left al Qaeda and Osama bin Ladin intact.
When Bush II subsequently focused on Iraq as an imminent threat with weapons of mass destruction, the administration initially asked Congress for the right to use force to restore international peace and security in the Mideast. That went beyond what even the most bellicose members could stomach. The authorization of October 2002 spoke only of Iraq. The statement that empowered Bush I and a UN coalition to evict Iraq from Kuwait required him to notify Congress that diplomacy had failed. The permission slip tendered to Bush II made no such requirement. He now had the discretion to go to war when and how he decided.
In the run up to the resolution, a few in Congress echoed their 1964 counterparts. Representative Ron Paul of Texas warned, "This resolution transfers the responsibility, the authority and the power of the Congress to the President so he can declare war. When and if he wants to...he will make the final decision, not the Congress, not the people through the Congress of this country." In January, some 119 members of the House of Representatives seemed to suffer buyer’s remorse and they petitioned the president not to take any military action until he exhausted diplomacy. He ignored their plea, and two months later the war began.
Through the power of the purse, Congress retains the ability to control the use of the military but in today’s climate what elected official would chance charges of not supporting the troops? Congress, the media and indeed the public participated in the rush to judgment on the presence of WMDs in Iraq, acceptance of Saddam’s alleged connections with al Qaeda and 9/11. The enabling legislation to invade Iraq was passed by a Congress fed selective information, without thorough investigation and in a quick sound-bite strewn debate. Missing still is the oversight that might discover the roots of the intelligence failures, why the war has gone so poorly and despite huge expenditures so little has been achieved in restoration of the Iraqi infrastructure.
While removal of Saddam and his henchmen may be laudable, whether Americans would have supported a decision to go to war if they had known the costs is dubious. It is vital to re-examine the process, the vehicle of the broadly worded Congressional Resolution which cedes to one individual a blank check, the power to use the military at his discretion. Return to the obligation of Congress to declare war would might force legislators to think through their responsibilities for use of military force and the consequences.