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CounterPunch
September
20, 2002
War Talk &
the Constitution
Americans
used to discuss going to war--at least they did in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries.
by
JOAN HOFF
This time honored tradition goes back to the lengthy
discussions leading to the War for Independence, before the war
of 1812, before the Mexican War in 1845, before the 1898 Spanish-American
War, and between 1914 and 1917 when the United States entered
the First World War.
Then the attack on Pearl Harbor and the
North Korean invasion of South Korea prevented discussion before
presidents committed the nation to war. At least FDR, unlike
his successor Harry Truman, felt obliged to obtain a declaration
of war from Congress. From the Korean War to the Gulf War the
United States went to war on the orders of various Cold War presidents
without any congressional resolutions.
Except for the ill-informed debate over
the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, there was no discussion of going
to war in Vietnam. Only after George Bush, the elder, had committed
500,000 troops did Congress finally debate and approve by a narrow
margin the Gulf War--in part because the Bush administration
could not disguise that oil and oil alone was the reason for
fighting. None of the myriad U.S. military invasions during the
Cold War were discussed and approved by Congress except implicitly
through passage of CIA and military appropriations.
Little wonder some are wondering why
there need be a discussion of whether to attack Iraq. U.S. presidents
for most of the Cold War did not have to be bothered with obtaining
public or congressional approval before committing American troops.
So why bother now? Aside from the obvious answer that leaders
of a functioning democracy are supposed to obtain legislative
and popular support before going to war, it is not so obvious
that discussing the pros and cons of going to war produce authentic
reasons for justifying military action. I say this because the
official reasons given at the time for taking any nation into
war are almost always untrue. They represent myth rather than
reality, regardless of whether the government is democratic or
authoritarian. People need to be convinced they are fighting
and dying for a noble, and usually mythical cause--not crass
economic or narrow nationalist motivations.
Consider the less than truthful official
words used by past leaders when taking the nation into war in
contrast to their real reasons. "No taxation without representation"
really meant no taxation "PERIOD" as self-determination
won out over loyalty to England in 1776.
President Madison declared in 1812 that
violation of trade and territorial water rights, impressment
of American seamen, and English incitement of Native Americans
required going to war. In fact, desire for land on the part of
Anglo Americans living in the south and west, and a grandiose
belief in national honor on the part of Republicans who controlled
the government but were in a vicious partisan fight with Federalists,
actually accounted as much or more for the declaration of war
against England.
While President Polk told the country
in 1846 that Mexico had shed "American blood upon American
soil," he neglected to mention that he had ordered American
troops into disputed territory and was responding to the regional
racist desire for territory that was sparsely populated with
Indians or Mexicans. The underlying economic and socio-cultural
differences between the North and South and the breakdown of
the party system in the 1850s contributed as much to the outbreak
of the Civil war as the more publicized one about the moral evil
of slavery.
President McKinley's remarks in 1898
about going to war to "free" Cuba and to protect American
property and trade, belied the role played by the "yellow
press" in promoting war, the expansionists views of prominent
Republicans, and the fear of the business community that unstable
conditions in Cuba were adversely affecting the stock market
and retarding economic from the lingering 1894 depression. Woodrow
Wilson, probably wins the contest for concocting high-sounding
mythical reasons when he took the country into World War I, saying
it was because of the violation of U.S. neutral rights (when
the country had not in fact been acting neutrally between the
belligerents) and, of course, "to end all wars, " and
"to make the world safe for democracy."
Even though the attack on Pearl Harbor
logically prompted U.S. entrance into World War II, it took historians
decades to find out how economic pressure on Japan contributed
to this attack. The Korean war was also precipitated by a foreign
attack, allowing Truman to undertake the first "limited"
war of the Cold War in the name of an ostensible multilateral
operation and collective security. Both the Korean War and the
Gulf War had UN approval, but in truth they represented, at best,
the ruse of multilateralism by the United States to conduct unilateral
wars, and neither has yet been ended with a peace treaty.
Since the Second World War, Congress
(and the public) have been systematically ignored by Cold War
presidents--even after passage of the 1973 War Powers Act--when
presidents wanted to commit American combat troops to far-flung
areas of the world. In all, according to a list compiled by the
Federation of American Scientists, the United States has undertaken
around 200 largely unilateral military actions since 1945. Long
before such a number could have been anticipated, historian Charles
Beard presciently coined the phrase "perpetual war for perpetual
peace" to describe U.S. foreign policy.
Therefore, whether wars are discussed
before being declared by American presidents, their official
reasons should be carefully scrutinized because if the past is
any indication equally suspicious or fallacious arguments will
prevail if and when war is declared on Iraq. As historian Charles
G. Sellers said about Polk: "The sobering fact is that .
. . our representative institutions seem incapable of restraining
a determined President from an unwisely aggressive foreign policy."
Joan Hoff
is a Research Professor of History at Montana State University,
in Bozeman. She is the author of Nixon Reconsidered (Basic Books,
1994). She can be reached at: joanhoff1@aol.com
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September
18, 2002
Rep. Cynthia
McKinney
Goodbye
to All That
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Cancerous
Air
Born Under a Bad Sky
Ben Tripp
Smoking
Gun
of a Hatchet Job
Peggy Thomson
20 Years
After:
Sabra and Shatila
Thomas Mountain
September
1982
Sabra and Chatila (Poem)
William Cook
Yet Another
Bush Doctrine
Kathleen Christison
Israel's Other Voices
September
17, 2002
Adam Federman
All
That Matters is Oil
Linda S.
Heard
Paranoid
Americans
Hussein Ibish
The Incident
at Shoney's
Francis Boyle
Is Bush's
War Illegal?
Let Us Count the Ways
Heidi Lypps
Bush's
Crackdown on
Medical Marijuana
Riad Z. Abdelkarim,
MD
Why
Do They Hate Us?
September
16, 2002
Wayne Madsen
The Shoney's
Snoop
America's Horst Wessel
Tariq Ali
Debating
Daniel Pipes
on Bush's Wars
Ahmad Faruqui
American
Primacy at Bay
Kurt Leege
Voices
for Peace
M. Shahid
Alam
A New Theology
of Power
Robert Fisk
Bush's War
Dossier:
Blindness, Hypocrisy & Lies
Dave Randall
Mad, Mad World:
J. Edgar Hoover's Obsession with Mad Magazine
Resources:
100s of Links
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Whiteout:
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by Alexander
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and Jeffrey St. Clair
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