Unqualified Offerings

By Mona

Heartening, that’s what it is, to learn that President Bush pats Congress on the head and permits the poor dears to believe they have some actual authority on the issue of whether and when the United States will go to war. No doubt the citizenry also takes comfort in the illusion.

You may recall that Authorization to Use Military Force that Congress passed with regard to Iraq in 2002? Theatre, the whole thing, but such reassuring fare (my emphasis):

“People think Congress has to say OK to everything,” said John Yoo, a former Justice Department official who helped Bush write the 2002 resolution authorizing the Iraq invasion. But if that were true “that means every war we’ve fought since World War II is illegal.”

Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California in Berkeley, said Bush’s request that Congress pass a resolution authorizing force in Iraq was purely a political one. The resolution passed by a 296-133 vote in the GOP-run House and 77-23 in the Democratic-led Senate, but was not considered a declaration of war.

According to Yoo, the resolution was seen solely as a way of bringing Democrats onboard.

One must understand, as Yoo so clearly does, that the Constitution is merely a piece of paper that must keep up with Bush the times. Hamilton’s words in Federalist Number 69 must send Yoo a-giggling, and indeed they now resonate so quaint, cute even (bold emphasis mine):

The President is to be commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the United States. In this respect his authority would be nominally the same with that of the king of Great Britain, but in substance much inferior to it. It would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces, as first General and admiral of the Confederacy; while that of the British king extends to the declaring of war and to the raising and regulating of fleets and armies — all which, by the Constitution under consideration, would appertain to the legislature…

The President of the United States would be an officer elected by the people for four years; the king of Great Britain is a perpetual and hereditary prince. The one would be amenable to personal punishment and disgrace; the person of the other is sacred and inviolable. The one would have a qualified negative upon the acts of the legislative body; the other has an absolute negative. The one would have a right to command the military and naval forces of the nation; the other [a king - ed. Mona], in addition to this right, possesses that of declaring war, and of raising and regulating fleets and armies by his own authority.

Silly Alexander Hamilton believed he and the other Founders were establishing an Executive who could not, as could the British monarch, declare war. The foolish fellows thought they were vesting that power in Congress, and said so in Article I, Section 8 of some document or other — thus placing them dangerously close to “people [who] think Congress has to say OK to everything.”

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And speaking of foolish, Chuck Hagel should just calm down, already. In his recent GQ interview Hagel is upset with the Bush Administration’s seeing a huge chunk of the globe as a target rich environment, and also seems to suffer the delusion that his and other Senators work to limit Bush’s war-making options actually matters:

[GQ] But there was a decision whether to grant the president that authority [to use military force in Iraq] or not.
Exactly right. And if you recall, the White House had announced that they didn’t need that authority from Congress.

[GQ] Which they seem to say about a lot of things.
[Hagel] That’s right. Mr. [Alberto] Gonzales was the president’s counsel at that time, and he wrote a memo to the president saying, “You have all the powers that you need.” So I called Andy Card, who was then the chief of staff, and said, “Andy, I don’t think you have a shred of ground to stand on, but more to the point, why would a president seriously consider taking a nation to war without Congress being with him?” So a few of us—Joe Biden, Dick Lugar, and I—were invited into discussions with the White House.

[GQ] It wasn’t specific to Iraq?
[Hagel] Oh no. It said the whole region! They could go into Greece or anywhere. I mean, is Central Asia in the region? I suppose! Sure as hell it was clear they meant the whole Middle East. It was anything they wanted. It was literally anything. No boundaries. No restrictions.

[GQ]] They expected Congress to let them start a war anywhere they wanted in the Middle East?
[Hagel]Yes. Yes. Wide open. We had to rewrite it. Joe Biden, Dick Lugar, and I stripped the language that the White House had set up, and put our language in it.

[GQ] But that should also have triggered alarm bells about what they really wanted to do.
[Hagel] Well, it did. I’m not defending our votes; I’m just giving a little history of how this happened. You have to remember the context of when that resolution was passed. This was about a year after September 11. The country was still truly off balance. So the president comes out talking about “weapons of mass destruction” that this “madman dictator” Saddam Hussein has, and “our intelligence shows he’s got it,” and “he’s capable of weaponizing,” and so on.

[GQ] And producing a National Intelligence Estimate that turned out to be doctored.
[Hagel] Oh yeah. All this stuff was doctored. Absolutely. But that’s what we were presented with. And I’m not dismissing our responsibility to look into the thing, because there were senators who said, “I don’t believe them.” But I was told by the president—we all were—that he would exhaust every diplomatic effort.

[GQ] You were told that personally?
[Hagel] remember specifically bringing it up with the president. I said, “This has to be like your father did it in 1991. We had every Middle East nation except one with us in 1991. The United Nations was with us.”

[GQ] Did he give you that assurance, that he would do the same thing as his father?
[Hagel] Yep. He said, “That’s what we’re going to do.” But the more I look back on this, the more I think that the administration knew there was some real hard question whether he really had any WMD. In January of 2003, if you recall, the inspectors at the IAEA, who knew more about what Saddam had than anybody, said, “Give us two more months before you go to war, because we don’t think there’s anything in there.” They were the only ones in Iraq. We hadn’t been in there. We didn’t know what the hell was in there. And the president wouldn’t do it! So to answer your question—Do I regret that vote? Yes, I do regret that vote.