main author of the minority’s 145-page written dissent from the congressional investigation of Iran-Contra, Wyoming Representative Dick Cheney insisted, radically, that Iran-Contra was no crime, that Reagan was right to defy Congress, because there was nothing in Congress, nothing anywhere in America’s political structure, that could constrain a president from waging any war he wanted, however he wanted. It was an extreme view of executive power, a minority view when written, but it quickly became a blueprint for the next generation of Republican thinking about war and its limits. “The President was expected to have the primary role of conducting the foreign policy of the United States,” Cheney argued in his minority report on Iran-Contra. “Congressional actions to limit the President in this area therefore should be reviewed with a considerable degree of skepticism. If they interfere with core presidential foreign policy functions, they should be struck down. Moreover, the lesson of our constitutional history is that doubtful cases should be decided in favor of the President.”
And who won this argument? The answer is kind of surprising, but sadly obvious today, when we find ourselves in a succession of indefinite hot wars the country does not really want.
Remember the words of James Madison: “The Constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the Legislature.” The “studied care” Madison describes behind that “vesting” has not been matched by any equal and opposite studied care in recent decades, as we’ve divested that same power. It’s not a conspiracy. Rational political actors, acting rationally to achieve rational (if sometimes dumb) political goals, have attacked and undermined our constitutional inheritance from men like Madison. For the most part, though, they’ve not done it to fundamentally alter the country’s course but just to get around understandably frustrating impediments to their political goals. The ropes we had used to lash down presidential war-making capacity, bindings that by design made it hard for an American president to use military force without the nation’s full and considered buy-in, have been hacked at with very little appreciation about why they were put there in the first place.
When Ronald Reagan extricated himself from the Iran-Contra scandal by cutting one of those crucial mooring lines—without considered forethought or specific course headings in mind—it set the country adrift and heading into a dangerous tide.
Congress has never since effectively asserted itself to stop a president with a bead on war. It was true of George Herbert Walker Bush. It was true of Bill Clinton. And by September 11, 2001, even if there had been real resistance to Vice President Cheney and President George W. Bush starting the next war (or two), there were no institutional barriers strong enough to have realistically stopped them. By 9/11, the war-making authority in the United States had become, for all intents and purposes, uncontested and unilateral: one man’s decision to make.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
CHAPTER 6
Mylanta, ’Tis of Thee
TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND ADDITIONAL TROOPS MINIMUM, nearly double what the president of the United States had already ordered into the hot desert of Saudi Arabia, was what it would take. According to the presentation his top military adviser made at the White House Situation Room meeting of October 30, 1990, that was the minimum manpower price George Herbert Walker Bush would have to pay to forcibly remove Saddam Hussein and his Iraqi Army from Kuwait. This was decision day. If Bush couldn’t bear the size of that call-up and he stoppered the military spigot pouring our soldiers into the Persian Gulf, he could do no more than sit his army in the desert and wait for the UN sanctions to pressure Saddam out of Kuwait. If he kept the flow open, he’d leave himself the option of launching a punishing offensive attack on Saddam’s army. He’d have the wherewithal to make the biggest war Americans had seen in a generation.
It had been three months since the Iraqi dictator had invaded Kuwait, jettisoned its ruling royal family, and claimed its oil fields, which gave Saddam, the Bush administration claimed, something near to 20 percent of the world’s oil reserves. And worse than that, Saddam was now within arm’s reach of Saudi oil, which might give him close to half of the planet’s most consumed necessity.
In the first days after the invasion, President Bush had made it clear: “This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait.” He said later, “That’s not a threat, not a boast. That’s just the way it’s going to be.” Within a week of the Iraqi Army’s invasion of Kuwait, the president had deployed a large contingent of American soldiers, sailors, and Marines to the Persian Gulf to make sure Saddam knew the United States was serious about defending Saudi Arabia—and to stand by for further orders. And he had convinced the reluctant Saudi king to play host to this huge American army. (The Saudi king, incidentally, had chosen Bush’s offer of military assistance over the offer made by a certain Saudi national who boasted he could defend the kingdom’s oil fields with his army of mujahedeen fighters, who had distinguished themselves in battle against the Soviets in Afghanistan. King Fahd’s decision to go with the American military instead turned Osama bin Laden against the Saudi royal family forever, and it didn’t exactly enhance his feelings toward America, either.)
Bush had been masterful at building international support and a broad coalition of allies. The UN Security Council and almost every nation in the civilized world had agreed to impose strangling economic sanctions meant to bring the Iraqi dictator and his army to heel. And the United States was leading the way. “Recent events have surely proven that there is no substitute for American leadership,” Bush reassured Congress and the country. “In the face of tyranny, let no one doubt American credibility and reliability. Let no one doubt our staying power. We will stand by our friends. One way or another, the leader of Iraq must learn this fundamental truth.” At Bush’s insistent urging, every one of Saddam’s Arab neighbors had signed up on our side. Even the Soviet Union was with us.
But still, three months in, George Herbert Walker Bush was not a happy man.
The day before that fish-or-cut-bait National Security Council meeting, Saddam had appeared on television—
When President Bush met with his national security team the next day, his patience was wearing thin, and he was not, as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Colin Powell, knew, a patient man to begin with. The president had been agitating the chairman for weeks about launching air strikes on Baghdad; he’d also been confiding in British prime minister Margaret Thatcher as well as his own advisers that he’d really appreciate it if Saddam did something sufficiently provocative—like, say, abusing some of his Western hostages (whom the Iraqi dictator insisted on calling his “guests”)—to justify a US-led attack. The longer this stalemate went on, the more nervous Bush seemed to grow. “Dealing with the president,” Powell said years later, “was like playing Scheherazade, trying to keep the king calm for a thousand and one nights.”
Besides being a man of preternatural impatience—sitting still without a fishing rod in his hand drove him batty—the president had whipped up for himself a furious and frothy head of contempt for Saddam and his invasion of Kuwait. What had started as a strategic national imperative to keep energy prices in check, maintain a balance of power among the oil-producing nations of the Middle East, and show that as the world’s lone remaining superpower after the slow-motion dissolution of the Soviet Union, America would remain an active force in the world, had blossomed for Bush into a bigger idea, a vision thing. “As I look at the countries that are chipping in here now, I think we do have a chance at a new world order,” he’d said at one formal news conference. “And I’d like to think that out of this dreary performance by Saddam Hussein there could be now an opportunity for peace all through the Middle East.” And he got downright poetic in an address to the nation: “A hundred generations have searched for this elusive path to peace while a thousand wars raged across the span of human endeavor. And today, that new world is struggling to be born. A world quite different from the one we’ve known. A world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle. A world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for
