War Powers, Anyone?
It is time for Congress to exercise its constitutional role to rein in the runaway war machine.
When our country’s Founders were creating the Constitution, they had just won a war against King George III of England. They deliberately and unambiguously invested the power to wage war in the Congress, judging it to be more reticent about entering war than a head of state, who would see a war as an opportunity to increase his power.
Fast forward to today. America is embroiled in foreign wars that consume, with growing unease, our attention and resources. Yet the Senate on Thursday sunk legislation that would have required the White House to get congressional approval before attacking Venezuela. We should rely on the carefully designed constitutional structure our Founding Fathers provided to avoid further disasters and use those tools to extricate us from existing ones.
During the 2024 election campaign, we were all told the wars were a waste and would be ended swiftly if Donald Trump won. It looks like we were fooled again.
Ukraine was supposed to be settled quickly. However, after the 10 months since President Trump’s inauguration, the current debate is whether to provide nuclear-capable Tomahawk missiles to reach deep into Russia, which has the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. Doesn’t our governing elite think shooting nuclear-capable missiles into Russia could be risky?
Recently, and with fanfare, the Palestinians released their hostages to the Israelis, but Israel’s military, using U.S. supplied and funded weapons, has repeatedly and dramatically violated the ceasefire. It looks like all the lofty rhetoric about peace deals was just hot air.
In less than a year in office, the Trump administration has directly engaged in the bombings or has supported the bombings of Gaza, Yemen, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, and possibly Qatar. It has also been financing political turbulence in countries across Asia, the Western Hemisphere, and who knows how many in Africa. Alarmingly, Trump recently has started arguing for military intervention in Nigeria.
Over the past two months, the Trump administration has been illegally assassinating, without any due process, “suspected narco-terrorists” off the coasts of Latin America. The Washington elites are circulating stories sotto voce among themselves that there are Hezbollah terrorists in the Venezuelan jungles. Now, we are supposed to be really threatened. It won’t be long before they will be whispering about Hamas fighters training in Cuba to attack Key West, or even Miami!
These fairy tales are the latest additions to the long list of old discredited war propaganda gems such as: the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor, the German soldiers bayoneting and decapitating babies during World War I in France, the domino theory, the faked attack in the Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnam, Iraqi soldiers ripping babies out of incubators in Kuwait, Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, poison gas attacks in Syria, the fake Libyan mass rape claims, or of course the completely debunked claim of the many beheaded babies in Israel.
The U.S. is operating an empire spanning the globe with 800 military bases and overseeing numerous military actions in many countries. All these hostilities are acts of war without a constitutionally required declaration of war. The national debt stood at about 6 trillion dollars before the start of the Global War on Terror. It is now 38 trillion and counting while there seem to be more terrorists and wars than before. Much of this would stop if the money was stopped.
What’s worse, none of these wars have even remotely turned out as promised. Often the results are the opposite of the propaganda.
There was a ceasefire in the Korean War in 1953, yet we still have troops stationed in Korea seven decades later. We were told we had to protect Vietnam from Communism. We even destroyed villages to save South Vietnam from the Vietcong. In the end, we fled Vietnam, the North Vietnamese won, and Hanoi normalized relations with Washington a couple decades later. Afghanistan, after 20 years of war, crumbled to the Taliban in 11 days. Don’t forget the Carter administration supported Sunni fighters in Afghanistan before the 1979 Soviet invasion. Under President Ronald Reagan they became the vaunted U.S.-supported Mujahideen, whose post-Soviet civil war helped lead to the rise of the Taliban. (Author Scott Horton recounts the genesis of that sordid history in his book “Fool’s Errand.”) We still have troops in Iraq and Syria. Libya is a continuing wreck and embroiled in a devastating civil war. It is a safe bet that this new regime change adventure in Venezuela will end badly. As will Yemen, Ukraine, and Gaza.
During the Vietnam tragedy, Congress became increasingly alarmed about the excesses of presidential power amid the war’s horrifying human and economic costs, so they formulated and finally passed the 1973 War Powers Resolution. This Resolution was designed to limit the president’s power to wage war without the constitutionally required congressional approval.
It is time for Congress to exercise its constitutional duties and stop shirking its responsibility to restrain these destructive actions. Some courageous members of Congress have taken the initiative to introduce a bill entitled: “H.Con.Res.51 – To direct the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities that have not been authorized by Congress.”
Members of Congress who are concerned about America’s future should support this effort to constrain our illegal runaway militarism before we run out of borrowing power and credibility. It may be difficult for many members of Congress to resist the influence of the military industrial complex and various foreign interests, but those who can, must, before we become embroiled in more failed military fiascoes.
How many Americans would die or be maimed in a war in South America? What if we wreck Venezuela—how many people would flee and exacerbate the worldwide refugee crisis? How would this adversely affect our relations with other countries in our hemisphere? How would war against a country with one of the largest proven oil reserves in the world affect the price of oil for consumers?
The looming war against Venezuela is, like the others, clearly unlawful on many levels and should be stopped before things spin out of control with deadly and ruinous unanticipated consequences.
It is time for Congress to ignore the propaganda, vote the interests of the American people, and follow our Constitution to end this reckless destruction.
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