john's thoughts

I was planning to do a blog like this even before the US and Israel struck Iran about week and a half ago. Now it is imperative to me that I must do it and do it as soon as possible.

First, some basics–1) The power to declare war belongs to Congress–this is not an ambiguity, it is clearly stated–see Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution–2) The President is the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forced(these two may be but are not necessarily contradictory) 3)The Power of the Purse–i.e. to provide money–belongs to Congress, who therefore could presumably stop any war eventually simply by refusing to vote funds to pay for it–this resulted in some discussion, but next to no action, during the Viet Nam War

In addition to these, there is one other big fact–since the Declaration of War Power was last used during World War II, American troops have gone to war–or at least been placed in positions where they will be or might be attacked by other forces, at least 14 times(you could say a lot more than that depending on how you count these matters and how you define issues). No one has ever been impeached because of this or seriously threatened with impeachment, though it has often been mentioned in this connection and is being so mentioned now. I do have some thoughts on this and here are the main ones–

There are some good reasons for why some of these things have happened. Not evrery President who has so committed troops was a bad guy who did it in bad faith or just for his own glory and/or reputation. Nonetheless this is always a possibility and needs to be taken seriously and so discussed by poitical leaders and commentators

The first instance was in Korea . The country had been overtaken by Japan who ruled it until they lost the war. Then it was divided into 2 more or less mutually agreed upon zones. The North would be dominated by the USSR, the South by the US(similar arrangements also appeared in Viet Nam). Not surprisingly the USSR worked to set up a Leninist-Stalinist military dictatorship in the north. The US tired to set up a more or less constitutional and at least partly democratic government in the south. It was, of course, oriented toward the US and the West in the Cold War.

In June, 1950, with the support, but not direct military assistance of the USSR, North Korea invaded South Korea. It was dominated then by its borderline-psychotic leader Kim Il Sung, grandfather of the current (borderline??)leader, Kim Jung Un. The attack took the South and the US, largely and incomprehensibly, by surprise and the North Koreans advanced quickly. President Harry Truman took the issue to the UN which passed a resolution calling for resistance to this out and out aggression. The resolution escaped a Soviet veto because the Soviets, in a fit of pique, were boycotting the UN, a mistake they never made again, as far as I know!

HST referred to this as a “police action” rather than as a war and felt this way he could get support from other UN members(he did get a lot)and avoid the constitutional demand of a Congressional Declaration of War. This never got to the Supreme Court and in the court of public opinion Truman clearly won at least at the beginning. The US resisted and although it supplied around 80%-90% of the personnel and equipment, it did so with a lot of at least nominal allies, some of whom were actually there in person if not in large number.

This action likely saved South Korea from being absorbed by Communism and preserved individual freedom for the South Korean people(It did not prevent lousy government and corruption at times, but this was less of a price than the North Koreans were paying).

HST felt that he did not have time to go to Congress. The North Korean advance was very fast and it would take days, maybe more to get any Congressional action. He also felt that the League of Nations had proved irrelevant in the end because it failed to provide serious resistance to the Japanese militarists, the Italian Fascists and the German Nazis later. He did not want to make the same mistake.

I do not condemn what Harry Truman did. But I regret the precedent it set. I shall now delve into two of the more important of the later interventions and attempt to describe each one and its effect on the US and history, though the first one involved very little intervention. The other led to the biggest lat 20th century US war.

It is tempting to skip the Bay of Pigs, but I will touch upon it. No American troops were directly involved but the US itself surely was. Fidel Castro had been in power for a little more than a year when John F Kennedy became President. Despite his denials of being a communist it was clear that he leaned in that direction and that he was getting help from the USSR and Nikita Khruschev, the most significant of the Stalin clones to replace the wartime dictator. He showed a slight(but only slight)tendency to be a bit more rational in dealing with the West. And it should be said that the US broke diplomatic relations with Cuba before the Soviet-Cuban alliance became full.

A lot of Cubans fled Cuba and for good reason. (Many settled in FL and largely guaranteed its becoming a Republican State later as the Dems lost their hold on the South). Some went to other countries. There quickly arose a wide spread anti-Castro movement in the US and elsewhere who felt they could put together enough anti-Castro fighters to topple the new dictator.

The international group assembled was a rather motley mix of people who despised Castro, ranging from near Nazis through non-Fascist right wingers and more or less normal conservatives, to democratic socialists to genuine liberals who detested the totalitarian, thought controlling Castro dictatorship. This group was encouraged by the Eisenhower Administration, though Ike was careful not to get too close it. A lot of people, both Americans and coalition members believed that with US air support this would work.

JFK knew next to nothing of this until he was in ofice and had it dropped in his lap. Perhaps after some thought and consideration, he decided to go along with it. At first this included the aforementioned air support. But when the attempt was actually made in April, 1961 there were two big deficits. First, the promised uprising against Castro of the Cuban people, expected and predicted by a number of observers, including the CIA, did not happen. Second, the US air support did not materialize in any significant way. JFK provided some but withdrew it early. The whole thing was over in a couple of days and many of the would-be rebels died in the attempt or wound up in Castro’s jails. Congress was hardly involved at all in this at all and the Executive branch dominated though it did not succeed in its objective. I draw no conclusion at this point but I leave it to be pondered.

I certainly will not take time to analyze many more of these, but one, now no longer remembered by almost anyone short of 60, should be mentioned in that it has affected the American conscience and consciousness for 2 to 3 generations. That, of course, is Viet Nam.

Like Korea, Vietnam ended up with a north-south split after WWII. Almost immediately American leaders began making mistakes and kept it up for 3 or 4 Administrations and about an equal number of decades. Harry Truman made one of his very few White House blunders when he chose to make an enemy, not an ally out of Ho Chi Min. Ho was the leader the radical anti-colonialists and anti-Westerners. But while he was unquestionably a communist he was also a Vietnamese nationalist. When he was a 20ish busboy in 1919 he managed to get to the Paris Peace conference to plead, unsuccessfully, for freedom for his country. (Imagine what might have happened if he had succeeded)

But Truman, not an easy man to intimidate, was apparently taken with the idea that the right wing Republicans, not just conservative but hysterically anti Communist would ruin his Presidency if he allied the US with HO. So an opportunity was missed. There were good reasons for being anti-USSR and anti-communist. The former was a brutal, expansionist totalitarian dictatorship and communism gave it a “logical” and “moral” reason that made some some radicals to support the Soviets. Comparisons of USSR to Nazi Germany were not entirely wrong. But there grew an insane right wing Anti- communism during the war which emerged ,full blown when the war ended. It would poison American political discourse(see “McCarthyism”) for years and ironically served as an unintending boost to the Soviets and their goals by often making their opponents look ridiculous.

The Eisenhower Administration kept up the fairly low level military and financial support to the pro-US South Vietnamese government. But in 1956 Eisenhower refused to allow participation in an election in which all of Vietnam would vote. He later said he did it because everyone he talked to about this said the communists would win. That was likely true and would appear to have been better than what did happen, and furthermore must have somewhat tarnished the US reputation for supporting democracy. Of course this was not as obvious to President Ike as it is now. Nonetheless, i think her made a serious mistake here.

This was based upon an historical assumption known as the Domino Theory about which more shortly. Like the Bay of Pigs, JFK inherited the Vietnam issue, but in some ways it was the more difficult. It needed not a quick decision but a long term commitment to a shaky government, not very popular with its own people and not apparently able to defend itself against its more more powerful neighbor(North Vietnam) and its dangerous domestic insurgents, allies of the North Vietnamese, the Communist dominated Viet Cong.

JFK had plenty of other things to worry about in foreign affairs, mainly Cuba and Khrushchev. After the anxiety-inducing Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, this was even more or a concern. JFK’s only meeting with Mr K had been in Vienna in 1961 and rumor had it that the older and(maybe)tougher Khrushchev intimidated the young American leader. If so, JFK bounced back fairly quickly. He seems to have made a vow, to himself at least, that he would be pushed around no more and Mr K would not intimidate him again. So in 1963 he was very Cuban/Khrushchev oriented.

Still, all this may well have affected his attitude toward Vietnam. He had increased slightly the amount of military/economic/advice aid given to the South Vietnamese. He decided to continue with the increases.

After JFK’s assassination ,LBJ found the mess of Vietnam in his lap. He was quite liberal for a southerner in domestic policy and his Great Society Legislation revived the spirt of the New Deal and gave Americans Medicare and the Civil Rights Act among other things. In foreign affairs he was by no means a Neanderthal as he was sometimes portrayed, but likely a little more conservative and perhaps less subtle than JFK.

He decided to continue to back the South Vietnamese which most possible Presidents at that time I think would have done. But in 1964 the crunch came when the US Navy reported that one of its ships had been attacked by members of the North Vietnamese Navy, near North Vietnam, but in clearly international waters and therefore in a place where they had a legal right to be.

There appeared to have been two strikes in two days and this is the way it was reported to LBJ. It now appears that the first strike was real, the second one not–possibly it was a the result of a misreading of the ships computer info. Possibly it was intentional. It could have been both. The infuriated Johnson told the Navy to extract revenge. He addressed the nation and asked Congress to back him with a resolution which became know as the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. It granted to the President the right to strike back at the North Vietnamese for any attack upon American ships in neutral waters. It did not define or even mention any kind of time limit.

No one paid much attention to this issue at the time, but a year later, after a commitment of over 100,000 American troops many Congress Members felt betrayed(Practically all of them voted for it–the entire House of Representatives and all but 2 Senators). This became a strong matter of contention for more or less the rest of the war. Note that the matter of a War Declaration hardly was mentioned, but Congressional cooperation with the Executive was, to some degree, assumed.

A lot of its initial support was likely because a lot of people still believed in the Domino Theory, the idea that if one Southeastern Asia nation “went Communist” the others would follow like a row of dominoes. Although it seems very unlikely now(and we know it turned out to be be untrue)it was not an entirely ridiculous thing to think at the time. After World War II, which to some extent could be blamed on Western Appeasement(particularly at the Munich Conference), there appeared in the consciousness and the subconsciousness of Western Diplomats and other leaders a sort of motto for the future– “No More Munichs.”

Veteran TV newsman Dan Schorr pointed out in his one of his autobiographical books that this made sense–at the time. But the world had gone round many times since Munich and by the mid-1960’s some important things, Schorr noted, had changed. Some of them called into question LBJ’s nearly all out commitment to South Vietnam. (Dan also stated that this mistake led to a new motto for diplomats-“No More Vietnams” and opined that that one, justifiable enough at its beginning, might also not be true for a limitless amount of time.)

I have gone into this is some detail because Vietnam is an example of a foreign policy issue which the President dominated and which he tried, to some degree, to share with Congress. And Congress responded, but the response was ineffective because of its lack of specificity about time and the fact that few were ready to defend it’s ideas for sometime after its passage. This shows us the complexities of this, particularly the delicacies of Presidential-Congressional cooperation or even communication.

I start with these three instances because they are important in the beginning of this idea of combat without “war” declaration and because of the importance of the issues with which they dealt–naked aggression in Korea, an attempt to get rid of a likely serious threat in Cuba, and the beginning of the biggest US troop commitment since Japan surrendered to the allies, the US Vietnam commitment.

There are many other times US combat personnel have been put in positions of danger and some in which there were casualties. You may find a recitation of these easily on the internet so I will say little specific about them in the rest of this article. But I have some thoughts to share with you.

The first thing I want to note is that not all of these commitments were more than a very temporary invasion(the elder Bush’s intervention in Nicaragua is an example) and could not be reasonably defined as “wars.” Others were of greater length and/or violence. The current one against Iran is more like the traditional idea of a “war” than most, maybe all of the others.

The point here is simply this. On a lot of these occasions Congressional action was likely to be late(HST and Korea)or to seem too inconsequential to get a war declaration from Congress. Now I am perfectly aware that the Constitution makes no such distinctions.. Read literally it could be logically argued that it requires Congressional approval for ANY commitment of American forces. I do not think that is a really reasonable interpretation, but I can see the possibilities here.

The thing is that after Korea and especially after Vietnam, the idea of fighting a war without a Declaration of War was getting to be a part of American political assumptions. It happened so many times that it got to be accepted as something close to a fact by many, though by no means all, historians, politicians and media.

The commitment of US troops went on. If you want to know how many times, check out US troop commitments in the 1980’s and since on line. I think you’ll be surprised by how many there are. If your memory goes back far enough you will surely remember some of them. They included

–trying to bring stability to civil war-torn Lebanon

–rescuing American students in Grenada(in the Caribbean in case you don’t know it–most Americans don’t)

–getting rid of “Strongman” Noreiga in Panama–

–air power supporting the UN effort to stop Serbian atrocities in the civil wars in the Balkans in the 1990’s-

And there many more. None of these , of course, included a Declaration of War and the role of Congress was often small if not miniscule. So this became almost a way of being for US foreign policy and little was said about it(not nothing, little). This means that by the time of Trump is was more or less accepted de facto by a lot of people in America including many of our leaders, The Administration could argue this was so much a part of our foreign policy stance that it is unreasonable to talk about it now.

We shall see shortly that I do not think this a very good argument, but it is one that has a certain amount of history and logic(if not much common sense)to it. The Administration, as far as I’m able to tell, has not made it. Well, they don’t like complexities.

But I need to mention at this point that while this happened many, many times there is a difference this time and an important one. Of course all of these commitments were made

BUT–these were mostly small time in that they lasted but a short time and cost little in number of casualties or money. This is clearly NOT true of our Bush-Obama-Trump era conflicts in the Middle East, but it is true of a lot of others before then and some during that time and they cannot, I think, have been of no influence in the way people, particularly American leaders, thought. Of course I am talking about an overall trend here and there clearly are exceptions, but the trend is important.

This time, however, we have a couple of differences. The biggest is that this looks like a long contest against an implacable and well dug-in(literally and psychologically)foe. We also are not very well supported by our allies. Some are with us(and some stupidity by the Iranians may give us more) but some are lukewarm or less. The Brits, The French and the Germans seem to all have their doubts, though not opposing us so far.

So this could be a long one and it could cost a lot of lives and pain and a huge amount of money. It could mess up our economy and other economies. It could be a serious event in world history, perhaps the most serious one of the time.

In the puerile and tiresome argument about whether it’s a “war” I would say that it surely is. This is way more than a “Police Action” or “Military Action.” I would say this more and more suggests Congressional involvement is necessary and needed. Possibly this would include a Declaration against Iran.

But the Administration’s own policy is making this harder. They have bombarded their public and the world with unconnected or contradictory explanations of why we are doing this thing

–because they were getting ready to use nukes on us–no evidence has been provided to this effect

–because Israel was going to hit them and when they hit back they would include the US–this one is possibly true, but I think the US is still strong enough to lean on Israel sufficiently to cause a delay–and our striking first does not to seem to have stopped their ability to respond militarily–just asked someone from Beirut

–that we wanted “regime change”–if this is true it was surely one of their sillier ideas–it appears that we got the same regime with a new younger and possibly even more bitter and angry leader

–concurrent with “regime change” there was an idea that a lot of people who hated the regime would rise up and kick it out(remember the Bay of Pigs?)–then the US could move in and take over or at least have influence. Trump even went from talking about democracy to demanding the right to choose the next Iranian leader, a possibility that Iran took away from him when they chose one

So we have a chaotic situation which my be becoming slightly less chaotic because a tough enemy of the US is taking over as Supreme Leader. And we have ongoing US and Israeli attacks on Lebanon (to get Hezbollah)and all over Iran. And we have bombed buildings falling down, and large numbers of killed or injured, mostly in Iran, but many elsewhere too. And we have no idea of when or how this is going to end.

There’s also this–I think that, as my wife pointed out to me recently, peoples, civilizations, etc have a sort of collective memory. This is sort of like Jung’s collective subconscious, only I’m talking about it as it relates to nations or other groups of people. We are dealing here with a people who have been around for centuries longer that the US, indeed longer than most European peoples. We know that we are ahead of them(though not by as much as we thought, perhaps)in some things, mostly technological. We also know that they have the inheritance of the wisdom of the ages when it comes to conflict, believing and not believing, fighting, enduring and the uses of and defenses against evil. I hope we–the US, the rest of the West, and all who believe in individual freedom willl learn enough and intuit enough to be a match for them. I do not expect the current administration to be up to that, but maybe somebody will be.

I wish I had some other finish to this blog, but I guess I’ll stop here. I wish our forces well and I salute their courage and skill. But military power alone will not settle this. I despise the Iranian regime which is dictatorial and fanatic, but which still has large amounts of support which the Administration either ignored or didn’t understand. And there is no easy way out of any of this.

But to return–I hope–to my original questions, yes, I do think the US Congress needs to get involved. We need as much collective wisdom as we can get out of our leaders. And we need some new leaders, too. But the election is not until late this year, and we need intelligence, understanding and a willingness to listen to others first. Let’s hope it’s there somewhere. Let’s hope the Congress and the Administration will reach wisdom, share it and act upon it. Let’s hope.