George Effing Will

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

19 September 14

o be completely faithful to history, George Effing Will, Ken Burns's favorite student of the achievements of Clan Roosevelt, lost any credibility more than 30 years ago, when he went in the tank for the Reagan campaign and didn't dry off until the inauguration of Poppy Bush in 1989. So his development in his golden years into a simple and obvious hack -- climate change Truther, Fox News talking head, elderly male equivalent of Elizabeth Hasselbeck -- is not something that should surprise anyone. It was inevitable from the very first moment he had his research assistant crack open Bartlett's to hang some plastic erudition on the same old act.

Some days, however, it pays to read him because, some days, he doesn't even try, and the essential hackery shines through so brightly that the reader must gaze in awe at how complete his transformation has become. Today, for example, Will is very, terribly concerned that the president is violating the Constitution in contemplating unilateral military action against the Hitlers du jour in the Levant. Mercy me, is he concerned.

The United States last declared war many wars ago, on June 5, 1942, when, to clarify legal ambiguities during a world conflagration, it declared war on Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. Today's issue is not whether to declare war but only whether the president should even seek congressional authorization for the protracted use of force against the Islamic State.

Note the neat historical triple jump there. Is Will forgetting Korea? Vietnam? The Mayaguez? Grenada? Panama? Gulf War I, The Balkans? If not, why bother to remind us that Congress has steadily chickened out on its clearly designated constitutional war powers on every occasion that a president has asked it to do so since the close of World War II? Because Will is very, terribly concerned that this particular president is acting like all the others, and it has been the conservative case all along that Barack Obama cannot be allowed to act like an actual president. Your mileage may vary as to why that is the case.

(Let us leave aside for the moment that what has given Will a case of agita is something the president merely asserted in a speech. In fact, yesterday, he actually did go to Congress and ask for money to make war on ISIS and Congress, as has been its wont for more than half a century whenever a president wants to make war, rolled over like a happy spaniel.)

That argument is refined to a lovely clear flagon of snake oil as the column rolls along.

Goldsmith says Obama has become "a matchless war-powers unilateralist" who "removed all practical limits" on presidential war-making when exercised, as in Libya, for proclaimed "humanitarian ends." Goldsmith notes that although the Obama administration said last month that his inherent powers as commander in chief are sufficient to authorize airstrikes in Syria, it has subsequently said that he also is empowered to strike the Islamic State by the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force that President George W. Bush sought before attacking the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Well, I'd argue that Obama's "war-powers unilateralism" is pretty fairly matched by Lyndon Johnson's commitment of ground troops to Vietnam in 1965, which was "justified" by the phony Tonkin Gulf resolution, and pretty fairly matched by Richard Nixon's bombing and invasion of neutral Cambodia, and, of course, by C-Plus Augustus's excellent adventure in Iraq. I would argue that all three of those examples had more serious longterm consequences than what this president did in Libya. But I didn't come here to argue with Jack Goldsmith. The basic hackery goes on.

The AUMF says: "The president is authorized 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 Sept. 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."

Shame on any Democrat who voted for that pile of swill, including the nominal Democratic frontrunner in 2016. But that's beside the point. The previous administration, using ginned-up public outrage and an incredible boatload of lies and cooked intelligence, invaded Iraq, which had not planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, 2011, or harbored such persons or organizations etc. etc. etc. A lot of people -- 150,000 of them in the streets at one point -- made the case at the time that this was a bad idea, and that the AUMF was a blank check for whatever stupidity that administration had in mind in the Middle East. I don't recall George Will's tender concern for constitutional niceties when the stage was being set by the Avignon Presidency for the disaster that this president is currently trying to unfk. Ah, but George has that covered, too.

Such as the argument from John Yoo - a Berkeley law professor who served in Bush's administration - that because presidents are "vested with all of the executive power of the federal government," they are empowered "to initiate military hostilities to protect the national security," even if there is no danger of "an imminent attack." This is extravagant. The Constitution's text, illuminated by the ratification debates, surely does not empower presidents to wage wars, preventive as well as preemptive, against any nation or other entity whenever he thinks doing so might enhance national security.

Again, because war is being waged by this president, George Will takes a firm position against every military action since 1942.

Yoo also argues that the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq authorized force "against the continuing threat posed by Iraq." So, the Islamic State is now Iraq? Obama insists that he ended the war in Iraq in 2011. But his fight against another entity occupying a portion of Iraq cannot be authorized by a 12-year-old congressional action pertaining to "the continuing threat" - the elusive weapons of mass destruction? - from a long-gone Iraqi regime.

Suddenly, George Will discovers that John Yoo is as full of shit as the Christmas goose? Will also neatly elides the demonstrable fact that, even at the time of the AUMF's passage, there was no "continuing threat posed by Iraq." That was a mirage cooked up by the people in the previous administration who wanted to monger a little war and needed lies to do it. Is Will's basic premise that all this president needs is a poodle like John Yoo to concoct elaborate legal mendacity to support a case for making war? Statecraft as soulcraft, indeed.

Is it necessary to point out that, when the AUMF passed, and the administration at the time was lying the country into a war against a country to which the conditions of the AUMF did not in any way apply any more than they apply to a campaign against ISIS today, Will was not among those of us who'd been arguing against the whole enterprise? No, it's not necessary, but it certainly is fun. Hell, even real wingnuts thought it was fun.

In an October 8, 2002, interview with PBS's Charlie Rose, for example, Will said: I think the answer is that we believe, with reason, that democracy's infectious. We've seen it. We saw it happen in Eastern Europe. It's just - people reached a critical mass of mendacity under those regimes of the East block, and it exploded. And I do believe that you will see [in the Middle East] a ripple effect, a happy domino effect, if you will, of democracy knocking over these medieval tyrannies . . . Condoleezza Rice is quite right. She says there is an enormous condescension in saying that somehow the Arab world is just not up to democracy. And there's an enormous ahistorical error when people say, "Well, we can't go into war with Iraq until we know what postwar Iraq's going to look like." In 1942, a year after Pearl Harbor, did we have a clear idea what we were going to do with postwar Germany? With postwar Japan? Of course not. We made it up as we went along, and we did a very good job...

That interview took place in 2002. The article to which I linked used the interview as an example of Will's reversal on Iraq and was published in 2009. What possibly could have happened in 2009 that changed Will's mind?

Hack.