NOTE: The Moderate Voice runs Guest Voice posts from time to time by readers who don’t have their own websites, or people who have websites but would like to post something for TMV’s diverse and thoughtful readership. Guest Voice posts do not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Moderate Voice or its writers. This is by the independent blog Walking Think Tank:
The Unity in Wartime Act of 2007
By Walking Think Tank
The one thing both war supporters and war opponents should be able to agree upon is that we should never again go to war the way we did in 2003.
There’s no question that when the nation goes to war, our chances of success are greatest when our political leaders are united. That unity of purpose is critical to maintaining the political support needed to carry out a long, difficult mission, and it is necessary to send a clear message to the enemy that America’s resolve is firm.
That unity can only come from broad political agreement over both the need to threaten force and the broad strategic means for carrying out such a threat. It is the latter that was woefully
lacking in our invasion of Iraq.
Because Congress never did its due diligence before voting to authorize force in October 2002, Democratic leaders who approved the war resolution were already beginning to voice
misgivings before the battle was joined. So we were left with the worst possible scenario: a bitterly divided Congress, a divided nation and a disastrous strategic plan.
We owe it to our troops and their families to never let this happen again, and this Congress has a chance to help make sure it doesn’t. It can do so by laying out a framework that will govern how we go to war in the future – if not by force of law then by the power of firm principles etched into the conscience of a nation.
To understand just how haphazard the path to war has been, one only needs to look at the run-up to the two Iraq wars, a dozen years apart.
The first President Bush assembled a coalition that included 34 countries and gained the backing of the United Nations Security Council for forcibly expelling Iraq from Kuwait. But Bush 41 didn’t ask Congress to weigh in until after he had already moved more than 400,000 U.S. troops to the region. Just days before coalition forces launched Operation Desert Storm, the Senate gave Bush the power he sought by a slim 52-47 margin. With just a few more votes in opposition, war would have been put off indefinitely and the U.S. ability to hold together the coalition would have been severely tested.
The current President Bush didn’t want to wait until the eve of battle to lock up support from Congress. The October vote came five months before the invasion, near the beginning of our diplomatic efforts and war preparations. But by March 2003, the case for war was a harder one to make. By then, UNinspectors had been readmitted to Iraq to search for evidence of weapons programs; the UN Security Council had weighed in against the war; and questions had been raised both about the size of the U.S. force and the legitimacy of key pieces of intelligence.
There’s no telling how Congress would have voted in February or March of 2003, but there’s no question that the nation – and our troops – would have been better served by a full debate at that time. If nothing else, by reserving its Constitutional role of authorizing force, Congress would have had greater leverage to influence the administration’s war planning.
In retrospect, Bush 41’s diplomatic efforts and military preparations in the run-up to the first Gulf War are seen as masterful. And because the ground war lasted only 100 hours and casualties were limited, public support was never tested. But a single, eleventh-hour debate that demonstrated only narrow political support for the war produced a weak domestic posture for seeing through a difficult and prolonged conflict.
“There is no consensus in America for war and, therefore, theCongress should not vote to authorize war,” Sen. John Kerry said on the floor of the Senate in January 1991. Explaining his vote years later, Kerry said, “I was not against using force. I was against moving so precipitously that we didn’t have the consent . . . of the American people.”
While there’s no certainty it would have made a difference and produced a more robust political consensus, the nation would have been better prepared for a difficult fight if Congress had debated the case for war in the fall of 1990, before the administration deployed offensive forces to the region.
Congress can’t ensure that every war it authorizes will have broad political support, but it can lay out a framework for going to war that maximizes the chances the country will remain unified in wartime. What is called for is a two-step process.
First, Congress needs to determine that there is a legitimate case for threatening to use force, thereby supporting the deployment of offensive forces in preparationfor war. A second vote – a vote to authorize force – would deliver the judgment of Congress that war is necessary.
The framework I’m suggesting is different than the one offered by Sen. Carl Levin in October 2002. Levin’s resolution, which failed by a 75-24 vote, would have made theauthorization of force contingent upon support of the UnitedNations Security Council. Without UN support, Bush wouldhave had to come back to Congress for another vote.
While the backing of the UN is certainly desirable, there is no reason for Congress to outsource its authority to the UN in all circumstances. After all, when the nation goes to war, it’s even more critical to have the support of the American people than it is to have the support of the international community. A future Congress may decide that a war is necessary, with or without UN support. Or Congress may decide that war is not called for despite UN approval of force, as Levin and 46 other senators believed in 1991.
For this Congress to offer a framework that guides future decisions to go to war requires a simple construction that is adaptable to all circumstances but will maximize the chances that lawmakers will debate the issues thoroughly and that the president and Congress will be partners in readying the nation for war.
Here is my suggestion for the wording of The Unity in Wartime Act of 2007:
Congress shall debate and render its judgment of
support for or opposition to any proposed military
deployment of more than 20,000 troops to a conflict
zone for the purpose of threatening offensive operations,
but such a vote shall not constitute an authorization of
force. The authorization of force will require a separate
vote.
A conflict zone is defined as a zone where hostilities are
ongoing or a base for launching offensive operations in a
region.
This framework provides the president ample flexibility to respond rapidly for defensive purposes, such as the stationing of troops near Saudi Arabia’s border with Iraq in 1990 to deter further aggression. It also provides the latitude for the president to effect more limited deployments. But it insists on a role for Congress when large-scale mobilizations for offensive action are involved.
No president is likely to cede a central power of the executive branch to Congress, but it does not matter whether or not this resolution of Congress has the force of law. What matters is that future Congresses will have a clear framework to anchor them amidst a riptide of high emotion and political pressure.
Whether or not a president asks Congress to sign off on a large-scale deployment, lawmakers would understand it is their obligation to debate whether the threat of force is warranted. But the fact that this debate will take place should encourage a president to work closely with the Congress to ensure an affirmative vote.
For their part, members of Congress will understand their obligation to cast two separate votes: one on the need to mobilize our troops to threaten the use of force, and another to authorize the use of force. The first vote, in effect, says that we mean business. The second vote says that war is necessary and the nation is ready to begin carrying out its threat of force at the president’s discretion.
The framework doesn’t insist on any time lapse between the two votes. The nature of a conflict could call for immediate action. But the need for a second vote will encourage lawmakers to reflect on their most solemn duty and to make a determination as to whether or not it is premature to empower the president to take the nation to war.
Members of Congress – both those who support the war in Iraq and those calling to bring the troops – should all understand that the nation is paying a great price because the premature debate over authorizing force produced a fragile consensus that has become a deep fracture. Because they have learned from hard-won experience, they owe it the men and women of our military to make this lesson indelible, and out of this dark chapter in our nation’s history to find shared principles that will light a path for a future Congress to travel in their hour of uncertainty.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.