"President Bush committed the nation to open-ended war on a global scale."

[dajoki]

NYT
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/31/opinion/31bacevich.html?th&emc=th

War Powers in the Age of Terror

By ANDREW J. BACEVICH
Published: October 31, 2005


WHEN senators this month asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice about possible military action against Syria or Iran, she recited the administration's standard response: all options remain "on the table." Pressed on whether any such action might require congressional authorization, Ms. Rice demurred. "I don't want to try and circumscribe presidential war powers," she said, adding that "the president retains those powers in the war on terrorism and in the war in Iraq." Although Ms. Rice's evasion exhausted the committee's attention span, the war powers issue cries out for attention. In a post-9/11 world, what limits - if any - exist on the president's authority to use force?

The Constitution addresses the matter with apparent clarity. Article I, Section 8 assigns to Congress the authority "to declare war." After 1945, however, the perceived imperatives of waging the cold war all but nullified this provision. When it came to using force, presidents exercised wide discretion, ordering American troops into action and notifying Congress after the fact. The legislative branch no longer "declared" war; at most, it issued blank checks that the White House cashed at its convenience. Occasional efforts to constrain presidential freedom of action, like the Vietnam-inspired War Powers Resolution of 1973, accomplished little.

After 9/11, the Bush administration wasted little time in expanding executive prerogatives even further. Acting in his capacity as commander in chief, President Bush committed the nation to open-ended war on a global scale. Concluding that eradicating terrorism meant going permanently on the offensive, he promulgated a doctrine of preventive war. Finding that Saddam Hussein posed a clear and present danger, he moved to put this Bush Doctrine into effect in Iraq.

On Capitol Hill, the response to this sweeping assertion of presidential authority fell somewhere between somnolent and supine. With the administration gearing up to invade Iraq, the Congress roused itself just long enough to instruct the president in October 2002 to "defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq." As Lyndon Johnson did with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964, Mr. Bush interpreted this as a mandate to wage war however he saw fit, an interpretation that Secretary Rice has now reaffirmed.

[Erika]

1. Yeah, let W and Condi come up with the troops for their

next invasion. The Bush Doctrine is a POS.

[4democracy]

2. the shrub twins can be first in line! n/t

[dajoki]

3. yeah, right n/t

[FloridaPat]

4. Actually it was all before 9-11. Nice of the NYT to figure this out now.

I can remember sending them letters about the invasion before it happened. In stead they listened to Judith Miller.

[DBoon]

5. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia...

nt

[dajoki]

6. explain n/t

[DBoon]

7. "no text"

I actually wanted to post a relevant Orwell quote on permanent warfare, but couldn't find one, so I just let the suject line stand on its own

[dajoki]

9. thank you, i get it n/t

[gratuitous]

8. A line from a book

It's called "1984," and was written by an Englishman under the name George Orwell (the man's true name was Eric Blore). In the book, written in 1948, the government controls all operations of daily life, including the media. The fictional country led by a shadowy figure known as Big Brother is locked in a perpetual war against fictional enemies. Sometimes the enemy is Eastasia, other times it's Eurasia. But regardless of who the enemy of the month is, the government line is that the war has always been against the current enemy. Remembering otherwise is a thoughtcrime, punishable by re-education or imprisonment.

The protagonist of the story, Winston Smith, works in the Ministry of Truth, and his job is to go back over government-controlled periodicals and rewrite them to conform with the current truth. If six months ago, government leaders were denouncing Eastasia as the mortal enemy of the government, but now the frame of war had shifted, and Eurasia was now the enemy, it was Smith's job to change the news story to fit and destroy all copies of what had been before.

It's really quite a good book, though a bit tedious in places.