Nobody questions America’s involvement in the last World War. The justification is capsulized in two words: Pearl Harbor. However, since that war, the prerequisites for American military interventions or wars have been quite nuanced. Now we are faced with another ambiguous challenge in ISIL. The questions this challenge raises begin with the nature of ISIL’s threat and the Constitutional limitations of the President to engage Americans in a warlike intervention of any kind. The latter has historical precedent that is indeed prologue to contemporary times.
When Thomas Jefferson received a copy of the proposed constitutional articles concerning Presidential power, he cautioned James Madison, his trans-Atlantic interlocutor and fellow Virginian, with his concern that the President would have more power to wage war than the King of England. Since his communication with Madison was long distance (he was the American Ambassador in France at the time), it did not presume a timely response. Anticipating a fit accompli, he somewhat mollified his reply by supporting George Washington as the first American President, a man universally trusted. Perhaps, if he had been in Philadelphia that summer, he would have limited the President’s war powers. But if he had done so, he would never have been able to wage war against the Ivory Coast during his own Presidency years later. He ordered that attack without conferring with Congress. In fact, when he finally divulged his decision thirty days after the war, he explained that he had acted to protect American ships in oceans around the world from Ivory Coast pirates. American warships had rained shells on coastal cities in North Africa just like our drones today rain rockets on potential terrorists in Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, Iraq and Syria.
A key factor for Jefferson’s support of our first Commander-in-Chief’s power was trust. It must be noted that a President is not elected by a single partisan district or state, but by the entire country. His or her exercise of military power must have the trust and support of a majority of Americans. In order to check the use of American power against this trust barometer, the Constitution bequeaths to the Senate the sole authority to wage war. But, as in Jefferson’s time, there is a vague line of ambiguity between the formal declaration of war and various kinds of possible military interventions. For example, in recent times America has been militarily involved in various campaigns such as Iran (1980, 1987-88), Libya (1981, 1986, 1989, 2011), Lebanon (1983), Kuwait (1991), Iraq (1991-2011, 2014-present), Somalia (1992-93, 2007-present), Bosnia (1995), Saudi Arabia (1991, 1996), Afghanistan (1998, 2001-present), Sudan (1998), Kosovo (1999), Yemen (2000, 2002-present), Pakistan (2004-present), Syria (2014-present) and many more military interventions within our own hemisphere. Ask yourself how many of these interventions have been sanctioned by the American people and its elected Congress. For the most part, most Americans are oblivious and Congress, obsequious in its funding support.
Our current President has not preemptively invaded another country, though he has engaged our military in various forms of interventions with his use of air power, drones, limited Special Forces’ rescue or assassination/capture missions. While these interventions have been targeted against non-existential threats, he has used diplomacy and economic sanctions against more serious threats to global security. In other words, his foreign policy seems to distinguish between nuclear or potential nuclear powers such as North Korea, Russia, and Iran and terrorists cults or criminally induced fanatics such as ISIL or Al Qaeda. Given America’s recent war history, this President’s foreign policy, especially as it concerns the use of our military, deserves to be debated in Congress and properly vetted. He has asked as much and, I believe, wants to gain not just bipartisan support but the trust of the American people.
As Jefferson acknowledged, the American President has enormous power as Commander-in-Chief. So any debate must not be afraid to speak truth to power. What we Americans do not want is opposing arguments invoked to gain power at the expense of truth. There are sane, reasonable Senators in Washington who need to speak their mind instead of the dictates of Party leadership. When America opts to kill people in its own interest, there needs to be a clear definition of the threat and of the measured use of appropriate force. ISIL, for example, has no air force and no means to threaten the American homeland except through the instigation of criminal and marginalized individuals. This form of terrorism is not a homeland insurgency and is very unlikely to match the criminal incidents already incurred daily in our major cities. Surely we need to stop its incursion at our borders, to work in concert with other nations to prevent its spread, and to protect our citizens in jeopardy around the world. The threat is real and clearly falls within the scope of response undertaken by past Presidents.
If you are a regular reader of this blog, you already suspect how much I dislike war. Both those who are conscripted to fight and those caught in the crossfire suffer. In addition, war’s impact persists long after the bullets stop flying not only for the survivors but also for the nation states affected. War has unintended consequences. Iraq is a prime example: our occupation policies alienated a third of Iraq and gave birth to ISIL; the weapons we supplied to an inept and disloyal army are now being used against the factions we support; and the Western style democracy we attempted to infuse in Iraq is now the staggering prop of a failing state. The question we never asked ourselves before attempting to democratize Iraq was how to relate to a nation and a people whose history and context we so little understood. As a fictional character from the Vietnam War explained to an American soldier, “Eventually you will learn that you cannot fight ideologies with weapons and that you can only promote democracy in the world by supporting democratic institutions and the right of people to find their own path to freedom” (reference “The Vung Tau Trip,” in A Culpable Innocence). In the end, war is the detritus of our failure to relate to each other.
(For the context of the above quote, click here.)