Presidential Wars - the President's Blank Check on War!

By Andrew Bacevich, TomDispatch

06 April 16

 

---

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Here’s a special offer for you today.  A TD favorite, bestselling author Andrew Bacevich, has just published America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History, a stunning new book on Washington’s roiling set of conflicts in the Middle East from 1980 to late last night. I’ve been following the subject at TD for years and I still was repeatedly surprised by what he covers and makes sense of. For a limited period, in return for a $100 contribution ($125 if you live outside the United States), you can get a signed, personalized copy of the book and believe me, if you want to understand our screwed-up world, it’s one you’ll want to read. Check our donation page for the details. Tom]

It was a large banner and its message was clear.  It read: “Mission Accomplished,” and no, I don’t mean the classic “mission accomplished” banner on the USS Abraham Lincoln under which, on May 1, 2003, President George W. Bush proudly proclaimed (to the derision of critics ever since) that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended.”  I’m actually referring to a September 1982 banner with those same two words (and an added “farewell” below them) displayed on a landing craft picking up the last Marines sent ashore in Beirut, Lebanon, to be, as President Ronald Reagan put it when they arrived the previous August, “what Marines have been for more than 200 years -- peace-makers.”  Of course, when Bush co-piloted an S-3B Viking sub reconnaissance Naval jet onto the deck of the Abraham Lincoln and made his now-classic statement, major combat had barely begun in Iraq (and it has yet to end) -- nor was it peace that came to Beirut in September 1982: infamously, the following year 241 Marines would die there in a single day, thanks to a suicide bomber.

“Not for the last time,” writes Andrew Bacevich in his monumental new work, America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History, “the claim proved to be illusory.”  Indeed, one of the grim and eerie wonders of his book is the way in which just about every wrongheaded thing Washington did in that region in the 14-plus years since 9/11 had its surprising precursor in the two decades of American war there before the World Trade Center towers came down.  U.S. military trainers and advisers, for example, failed (as they later would in Iraq and Afghanistan) to successfully build armies, starting with the Lebanese one; Bush’s “preventive war” had its predecessor in a Reagan directive called (ominously enough given what was to come) “combating terrorism”; Washington’s obsessive belief of recent years that problems in the region could be solved by what Andrew Cockburn has called the “kingpin strategy” -- the urge to dismantle terror organizations by taking out their leadership via drones or special operations raids -- had its precursor in “decapitation” operations against Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, and Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid with similar resulting mayhem.  The belief that “an additional increment of combat power might turn around a failing endeavor” -- call it a “surge,” if you will -- had its Iraq and Afghan pretrial run in Somalia in 1993.  And above all, of course, there was Washington’s unquenchable post-1980 urge to intervene, military first, in a decisive way throughout the region, which, as Bacevich writes, only “produced conditions conducive to further violence and further disorder,” and if that isn’t the repetitive history of America’s failed post-2001 wars in a nutshell, what is?

As it happened, the effects of such actions from 1980 on were felt not just in the Greater Middle East and Africa, but in the United States, too.  There, as Bacevich writes today, war became a blank-check activity for a White House no longer either checked (in any sense) or balanced by Congress.  Think of it as another sad tale of a surge (or do I mean a decapitation?) that went wrong.

-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

---

Writing a Blank Check on War for the President
How the United States Became a Prisoner of War and Congress Went MIA

et’s face it: in times of war, the Constitution tends to take a beating. With the safety or survival of the nation said to be at risk, the basic law of the land -- otherwise considered sacrosanct -- becomes nonbinding, subject to being waived at the whim of government authorities who are impatient, scared, panicky, or just plain pissed off.

The examples are legion.  During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln arbitrarily suspended the writ of habeas corpus and ignored court orders that took issue with his authority to do so. After U.S. entry into World War I, the administration of Woodrow Wilson mounted a comprehensive effort to crush dissent, shutting down anti-war publications in complete disregard of the First Amendment. Amid the hysteria triggered by Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order consigning to concentration camps more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans, many of them native-born citizens. Asked in 1944 to review this gross violation of due process, the Supreme Court endorsed the government’s action by a 6-3 vote. 

More often than not, the passing of the emergency induces second thoughts and even remorse. The further into the past a particular war recedes, the more dubious the wartime arguments for violating the Constitution appear. Americans thereby take comfort in the “lessons learned” that will presumably prohibit any future recurrence of such folly.

Even so, the onset of the next war finds the Constitution once more being ill-treated.  We don’t repeat past transgressions, of course.  Instead, we devise new ones.  So it has been during the ongoing post-9/11 period of protracted war.

During the presidency of George W. Bush, the United States embraced torture as an instrument of policy in clear violation of the Eighth Amendment prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment.  Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, ordered the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen, a death by drone that was visibly in disregard of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.  Both administrations -- Bush’s with gusto, Obama’s with evident regret -- imprisoned individuals for years on end without charge and without anything remotely approximating the “speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury” guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment.  Should the present state of hostilities ever end, we can no doubt expect Guantánamo to become yet another source of “lessons learned” for future generations of rueful Americans.

Congress on the Sidelines

Yet one particular check-and-balance constitutional proviso now appears exempt from this recurring phenomenon of disregard followed by professions of dismay, embarrassment, and “never again-ism” once the military emergency passes.  I mean, of course, Article I, section 8 of the Constitution, which assigns to Congress the authority “to declare war” and still stands as testimony to the genius of those who drafted it.  There can be no question that the responsibility for deciding when and whether the United States should fight resides with the legislative branch, not the executive, and that this was manifestly the intent of the Framers.

On parchment at least, the division of labor appears straightforward.  The president’s designation as commander-in-chief of the armed forces in no way implies a blanket authorization to employ those forces however he sees fit or anything faintly like it.  Quite the contrary: legitimizing presidential command requires explicit congressional sanction.

Actual practice has evolved into something altogether different.  The portion of Article I, Section 8, cited above has become a dead letter, about as operative as blue laws still on the books in some American cities and towns that purport to regulate Sabbath day activities.  Superseding the written text is an unwritten counterpart that goes something like this: with legislators largely consigned to the status of observers, presidents pretty much wage war whenever, wherever, and however they see fit.  Whether the result qualifies as usurpation or forfeiture is one of those chicken-and-egg questions that’s interesting but practically speaking beside the point.

This is by no means a recent development.  It has a history.  In the summer of 1950, when President Harry Truman decided that a U.N. Security Council resolution provided sufficient warrant for him to order U.S. forces to fight in Korea, congressional war powers took a hit from which they would never recover.

Congress soon thereafter bought into the notion, fashionable during the Cold War, that formal declarations of hostilities had become passé.  Waging the “long twilight struggle” ostensibly required deference to the commander-in-chief on all matters related to national security.  To sustain the pretense that it still retained some relevance, Congress took to issuing what were essentially permission slips, granting presidents maximum freedom of action to do whatever they might decide needed to be done in response to the latest perceived crisis. 

The Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964 offers a notable example.  With near unanimity, legislators urged President Lyndon Johnson “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression” across the length and breadth of Southeast Asia.  Through the magic of presidential interpretation, a mandate to prevent aggression provided legal cover for an astonishingly brutal and aggressive war in Vietnam, as well as Cambodia and Laos.  Under the guise of repelling attacks on U.S. forces, Johnson and his successor, Richard Nixon, thrust millions of American troops into a war they could not win, even if more than 58,000 died trying.

To leap almost four decades ahead, think of the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) that was passed by Congress in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 as the grandchild of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.  This document required (directed, called upon, requested, invited, urged) President George W. Bush “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations, or persons.”  In plain language: here’s a blank check; feel free to fill it in any way you like.

Forever War

As a practical matter, one specific individual -- Osama bin Laden -- had hatched the 9/11 plot.  A single organization -- al-Qaeda -- had conspired to pull it off.  And just one nation -- backward, Taliban-controlled Afghanistan -- had provided assistance, offering sanctuary to bin Laden and his henchmen.  Yet nearly 15 years later, the AUMF remains operative and has become the basis for military actions against innumerable individuals, organizations, and nations with no involvement whatsoever in the murderous events of September 11, 2001.

Consider the following less than comprehensive list of four developments, all of which occurred just within the last month and a half:

*In Yemen, a U.S. airstrike killed at least 50 individuals, said to be members of an Islamist organization that did not exist on 9/11.

*In Somalia, another U.S. airstrike killed a reported 150 militants, reputedly members of al-Shabab, a very nasty outfit, even if one with no real agenda beyond Somalia itself.

*In Syria, pursuant to the campaign of assassination that is the latest spin-off of the Iraq War, U.S. special operations forces bumped off the reputed “finance minister” of the Islamic State, another terror group that didn’t even exist in September 2001.

*In Libya, according to press reports, the Pentagon is again gearing up for “decisive military action” -- that is, a new round of air strikes and special operations attacks to quell the disorder resulting from the U.S.-orchestrated air campaign that in 2011 destabilized that country. An airstrike conducted in late February gave a hint of what is to come: it killed approximately 50 Islamic State militants (and possibly two Serbian diplomatic captives).

Yemen, Somalia, Syria, and Libya share at least this in common: none of them, nor any of the groups targeted, had a hand in the 9/11 attacks.

Imagine if, within a matter of weeks, China were to launch raids into Vietnam, Thailand, and Taiwan, with punitive action against the Philippines in the offing.  Or if Russia, having given a swift kick to Ukraine, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, leaked its plans to teach Poland a lesson for mismanaging its internal affairs.  Were Chinese President Xi Jinping or Russian President Vladimir Putin to order such actions, the halls of Congress would ring with fierce denunciations.  Members of both houses would jostle for places in front of the TV cameras to condemn the perpetrators for recklessly violating international law and undermining the prospects for world peace.  Having no jurisdiction over the actions of other sovereign states, senators and representatives would break down the doors to seize the opportunity to get in their two cents worth.  No one would be able to stop them. Who does Xi think he is! How dare Putin!

Yet when an American president undertakes analogous actions over which the legislative branch does have jurisdiction, members of Congress either yawn or avert their eyes. 

In this regard, Republicans are especially egregious offenders.  On matters where President Obama is clearly acting in accordance with the Constitution -- for example, in nominating someone to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court -- they spare no effort to thwart him, concocting bizarre arguments nowhere found in the Constitution to justify their obstructionism. Yet when this same president cites the 2001 AUMF as the basis for initiating hostilities hither and yon, something that is on the face of it not legal but ludicrous, they passively assent.

Indeed, when Obama in 2015 went so far as to ask Congress to pass a new AUMF addressing the specific threat posed by the Islamic State -- that is, essentially rubberstamping the war he had already launched on his own in Syria and Iraq -- the Republican leadership took no action.  Looking forward to the day when Obama departs office, Senator Mitch McConnell with his trademark hypocrisy worried aloud that a new AUMF might constrain his successor.  The next president will “have to clean up this mess, created by all of this passivity over the last eight years,” the majority leader remarked.  In that regard, “an authorization to use military force that ties the president's hands behind his back is not something I would want to do.” The proper role of Congress was to get out of the way and give this commander-in-chief carte blanche so that the next one would enjoy comparably unlimited prerogatives.

Collaborating with a president they roundly despise -- implicitly concurring in Obama’s questionable claim that “existing statutes [already] provide me with the authority I need” to make war on ISIS -- the GOP-controlled Congress thereby transformed the post-9/11 AUMF into what has now become, in effect, a writ of permanent and limitless armed conflict.  In Iraq and Syria, for instance, what began as a limited but open-ended campaign of air strikes authorized by President Obama in August 2014 has expanded to include an ever-larger contingent of U.S. trainers and advisers for the Iraqi military, special operations forces conducting raids in both Iraq and Syria, the first new all-U.S. forward fire base in Iraq, and at least 5,000 U.S. military personnel now on the ground, a number that continues to grow incrementally.

Remember Barack Obama campaigning back in 2008 and solemnly pledging to end the Iraq War?  What he neglected to mention at the time was that he was retaining the prerogative to plunge the country into another Iraq War on his own ticket.  So has he now done, with members of Congress passively assenting and the country essentially a prisoner of war.

By now, through its inaction, the legislative branch has, in fact, surrendered the final remnant of authority it retained on matters relating to whether, when, against whom, and for what purpose the United States should go to war.  Nothing now remains but to pay the bills, which Congress routinely does, citing a solemn obligation to “support the troops.”  In this way does the performance of lesser duties provide an excuse for shirking far greater ones.

In military circles, there is a term to describe this type of behavior. It’s called cowardice.

1 in 11 US Gun Deaths Is at the Hands of Police. How Do We Stop the Killing?

By Arun Gupta, YES! Magazine

06 April 16

 

The documentary film “Peace Officer” explains the connection between the war on drugs and the militarization of police, and what it will take to reduce police violence in America.

n the documentary Peace Officer, Todd Blair brandishes a golf club as a SWAT team bursts into his Utah home in 2010. Despite being out of reach of gun-wielding cops in body armor, he is blasted by three deadly shots an instant later.

It wasn’t until 2015—the first time a full year of police killings had been tabulated—that America learned how unremarkable shootings like Blair’s were. According to The Guardian, 1,019 people were killed by police gunfire last year. That number is roughly 9 percent of all gun-related homicides annually in the United States.

It’s also one measure of how violent policing is. Peace Officer, directed by Brad Barber and Scott Christopherson, puts names and faces on the statistics starting with William “Dub” Lawrence. It follows his meticulous investigation of the heavy-handed police response to a domestic dispute that ends in the killing of his son-in-law, Brian Wood. It’s one of four police-related killings covered by the film; the other three involved attempted drug busts and aggressive “no-knock raids.” Through expert interviews, heartbreaking stories of lives lost, and police-procedural reconstructions of the killings, viewers follow the intertwined trends of the drug war and the militarization of police that began in the 1970s.

Wood’s death is a bitter irony for the 70-something Lawrence, who on screen tells a packed auditorium in a quivering voice, “The very SWAT team that I founded in the 1970s killed my son-in-law in my presence.” In 1975, Lawrence, then newly elected sheriff of Utah’s Davis County, set up one of the first Special Weapons and Tactics units in the state. Lawrence says the epidemic of police violence won’t be halted unless “they are shown that this is an error, this is wrong.”

Lawrence’s commitment to police reform is as deep as his anguish, but he’s on the wrong track. It’s useless to ask police to change their ways because the problem is police impunity. Real civilian control and oversight of police needs to be established, which would break new ground, not return to a mythologized past of the friendly officer on the beat. Police have long been a repressive force in America, from Colonial-era slave patrols to the police violence that sparked many urban rebellions in the 1960s to the Black Lives Matter movement against systemic racism in policing and criminal justice today.

Reducing police violence begins with changing the view that police are the guardians of the social order. A seemingly innocuous statement by Lawrence, explaining that SWAT teams are intended to “neutralize or defuse violent situations,” suggests why policing is so resistant to reform. It’s not that the deadly encounters just happen. One expert in the film says, “The police are creating these circumstances, they’re creating the volatility, they’re creating the violence.”

Lawrence’s use of “neutralize” is telling, as well. Despite his loss he still employs a euphemism that downplays police killings. This cuts to the heart of America’s epidemic of police violence, brutality, and profiling—the mindset of impunity seeps through society, from politicians and the media to courts and police forces and down to the beat cop.

That attitude is evidenced in the film’s most chilling moment, an interview with Salt Lake County Sheriff James Winder. He argues police forces should not train officers to take time to identify threats because once a cop pulls out a gun, “in their mind, the whole reason they’re using deadly force is you’re about to kill me.” He implies that police can kill, no questions asked, and this is not idle chatter as prosecutions of police have been extraordinarily rare in the thousands of cases of shootings over the last decade.

Alex Vitale, professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and author of City of Disorder: How the Quality of Life Campaign Transformed New York Politics, argues state violence begins with policing of minor infractions that fills jails with brown bodies and city coffers with greenbacks. He says it “is based on a mindset that people of color commit more crime and therefore must be subjected to harsher police tactics.” It’s complemented by a “warrior mentality” in which police see themselves at war with masses of the public. This was brought into relief by the 2014 unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, as police in full battle gear rumbled down the street on armored military vehicles, facing down rebellious but unarmed youth.

Simple and far-reaching policies could diminish police violence: decriminalizing drugs, ending for-profit policing and prisons, demilitarizing police, boosting services to treat mental illness and reduce domestic violence, shutting down the school-to-prison pipeline, stringent gun control, independent civilian review of police with subpoena power, and reducing the size and number of police forces. None of these is an easy task, however, as the main impediment is transforming the attitudes that portray children as “super-predators,” drug users as the scourge of society, and entire communities as criminals, illegals, or terrorists.

Social movements are on the cutting edge of transforming attitudes. In 2015, anti-racist activists pushed Seattle City Council members to pass a resolution calling for zero detention of youth and replacing incarceration with community-based alternatives to prison. Courts from Colorado to Connecticut have issued rulings voiding thousands of convictions for marijuana possession, building on the work of anti-prohibitionist campaigners. Critical Resistance is leading the movement to abolish prisons while immigrant-rights groups have convinced some media outlets to stop using the term “illegal aliens.”

That some police are finally being held accountable is thanks to the confluence of Black Lives Matter with digital technology. Of the many videoed killings—Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and John Crawford III—Walter Scott’s is the most telling. Based on cellphone footage, South Carolina cop Michael T. Slager is awaiting trial on murder charges for shooting a fleeing and unarmed Scott in the back. Slager seemed confident the summary execution would go unquestioned as he is seen on video apparently planting evidence on Scott’s body. He is also alleged to have falsified police reports to claim he felt threatened—the magic words—and a responding officer was also accused of falsifying a report.

This mindset is codified in Supreme Court cases such as Terry v. Ohio, which deferred to the “necessarily swift action predicated upon the on-the-spot observations of the officer on the beat,” and United States v. Cortez, which, in evaluating the constitutionality of search and seizures, ruled that “evidence collected must be weighed as understood by those versed in the field of law enforcement.”

Another mindset is possible, suggests Kristian Williams, in Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America: believing that police are obsolete. This idea provokes horror from many who believe society would collapse into anarchy without the thin blue line. That’s not to say policies to reduce policing are useless, but they should be implemented with the purpose of enhancing community life, support, control, and accountability so as to eliminate much of the need for policing.

Williams covers self-defense bodies, gang truces, feminist safety patrols, popular courts, and popular justice in examining “crime control without police.” In West Philadelphia, community patrols helped reduce crime by 33 percent in the 1970s. The truce between the Bloods and Crips after the 1992 L.A. riots reduced gang killings. Organizations from Brooklyn to Seattle have created safe spaces and courses in relationship skills to both prevent domestic violence and aid survivors. But many efforts lacked resources, were haphazard, or were overly ambitious, undermining grassroots crime control. When revolutionary movements handled crime control for entire communities, such as the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, there was a bias toward efficient methods like beatings, kneecappings, and executions, over due process and careful investigation.

Community-based alternatives to dialing 911 whenever there is a disturbance to order or public safety are possible. But making the necessary policy and social changes to make police as obsolete as possible, means transforming our mindset.