.gif) |
President doesn't hold power to start a war
By William Raspberry
WASHINGTON — A lot of
us who have voiced bafflement and frustration over President
Bush's success in selling his logic for a war against
Iraq have been strangely silent over the constitutionality of such
an undertaking.
We've behaved as though the question
of war is
entirely a matter of presidential discretion.
Well,
it isn't — or at any rate, it shouldn't be. It's right there in the
Constitution — Article I, Section 8, that Congress, not the president,
has the power to declare war. Nor do I
find anything to suggest that Congress may delegate its war-making
authority to the president.
And yet
the assumption is that the war on Iraq will begin when
the president wants it to begin —
perhaps with a heads-up to Congress that it has happened. Virtually
everyone I know assumes that it's the president's call. The "Let's roll!"
warhawks assume it, the latter-day peaceniks assume it, the Congress
itself assumes it. Which probably means that it is, at least in practical
terms, a fact.
Not a particularly reassuring fact,
however. Leaders of Congress are old enough to recall the Gulf of Tonkin
Resolution that laid the (phony) rationale for President
Johnson's escalation of the conflict in Vietnam — another war Congress
never got around to declaring. There are, I suspect, a few Americans who
wish Congress hadn't been so quick to roll over for LBJ. Are there no
similar misgivings today?
But it isn't Bush's
rationale for war that concerns me here (although it
seems no less phony than Johnson's). It is the constitutional legitimacy
of it.
One might argue that given the evolvement of
war since
Article I was written — the ability of nations to strike very
quickly, over great distances and with devastating power — the
American president needs the authority to respond
instantaneously, without congressional debate.
But
the seemingly inevitable war on Iraq is not an emergency of the
sort that got us into World War II, our last declared war. The
nearest thing to a Pearl Harbor-like sneak attack on the United States was
9/11, which, despite President Bush's efforts to have us believe
otherwise, had next to nothing to do with Iraq. Whatever military action
we take against Iraq and its hated leader, Saddam Hussein, will be the
result of sober calculation over a considerable period of time. In those
circumstances, why shouldn't Congress invoke its constitutional
prerogative?
One possible answer is that President
Bush, in response to his critics, took the matter out of congressional
hands when he brought it before the United Nations. Iraq's offenses, he
successfully argued there, were offenses against the United Nations, not
against the United States per se. He made a strong case that future
defiance on Saddam's part should prompt a military response from the U.N.
But President Bush didn't get everything he
sought at the United Nations. He wanted language that, in effect, made
military action automatic upon a finding of material breach of the
agreements Iraq had signed.
Some argue that America's
power to
make war
really resides in the White House — in what Vice President
Cheney has described as an "inherent presidential power" to
defend "vital national interests" — no matter what it says in the
Constitution. That's one possible explanation of why President
Bush won't seek a congressional declaration of war. Another
may be his recollection that the 1991 resolution to approve military
action by the elder Bush against Iraq — which, remember, had occupied
Kuwait and had been condemned as an international aggressor by the United
Nations — passed the U.S. Senate by only five
votes.
The rationale would be weaker this time —
essentially that Iraqi violation of the United Nations resolutions
will be ample ground for a United States assault on Baghdad. Maybe
the younger Bush is afraid the votes wouldn't be there — though I can't
imagine why. This has been such a rollover Congress — not, I suspect,
because members support the president's determination to go to war but
because opposing it is the more controversial
posture.
The trend of recent years has been for
politicians to avoid controversy wherever possible. Candidates would
rather attack an opponent's proposals than make any of their own. Most
controversial legislation passed at the state and local level seems to
have come by way of referendum — with no politician having to take a
strong public position.
So I don't imagine the men
and women of our national legislature will step forward and tell the president
that, under the separation of powers, declaring war is a
congressional responsibility. I just think they ought to.
William Raspberry's e-mail address is willrasp@washpost.com.
Words:
809
Section: Opinion
|
