Drift

bring this country to war?

CHENEY: Senator, I would argue, as has every president to my knowledge, certainly in modern times, that the president, as commander in chief, under Title II [sic], Section 2 of the US Constitution, has the authority to commit US forces.

Despite Kennedy’s disbelieving challenge to Cheney in that hearing room, despite Dellums’s lawsuit, Congress as an institution—and congressional leadership in particular—didn’t exactly get up on their hind legs and make a full-on fight with the president. The truth was, it looked like the leaders stepped back and prayed the crisis would resolve itself before they had to show up again for work in January 1991. By then, they hoped, Saddam would have summoned the sense to get out of Kuwait before the shooting started, relieving them of the need to be counted for war or against it.

With Congress in a state of strategic deferral, the White House’s real political energy was spent convincing the rest of the world. The Bush administration was busy shepherding a new UN resolution giving Saddam a drop- dead date for leaving Kuwait: January 15, 1991. If he was still in Kuwait on that day, according to UN resolution 678, the US-led military coalition was free to use “all necessary means” to remove him.

It was only once that resolution was passed—once that international path to war had been cleared—that the president decided he ought to at least make some gesture in the direction of caring about Congress. They’d be back in session—a new Congress convened—before the January 15 deadline, after all. He couldn’t tell the people that the United Nations had more sway over our military than did the elected representatives of the American people. “The Security Council,” Bush wrote, “had voted to go to war… but the carefully negotiated UN vote also called attention to whether, having asked the United Nations, we were obliged to seek similar authority from Congress. Once again we were faced with weighing the president’s inherent power to use force against the political benefits of explicit support from Congress.”

The political benefits! Had President Ronald Reagan believed that the decision to wage war (or not to) resided solely in the executive branch, and not in Congress—that the legislature’s role was just to cheer a president on and give a little political cover—he would never have waged his Contra adventure in secret. He did do it in secret—in violation of federal statute—and he got caught for it. To defend Reagan once he got caught, his administration cooked up the ad hoc, backfilling defense that no crime had been committed, that the legal constraint the president had taken such great secretive pains to elude didn’t really exist. Congress, their argument went, actually had no power over war making—pro or con; the president could wage any war he wanted, on his own terms. It was an absurd argument. But it spewed enough of a smokescreen to save Reagan from impeachment, and after he was gone, it was convenient enough to successor presidents that it survived. It didn’t have to—but it did.

And by 1990, it was this bizarre political inheritance that allowed old small-c conservative patrician George H. W. Bush—a man with no Fum-Poo flair at all, a man who grew up in a town where the country-club locker room was filled with men railing against the unconstitutional presidential overreach of Franklin Delano Roosevelt—to claim for himself and all presidents “inherent powers to use force” for which Congress’s explicit support was useful only as a “political benefit.” We had come a long way in a short time, and the strain showed on George H. W. Bush.

Ignoring the founders’ loud and explicit warning that we should not allow one person to unilaterally take us to war has been demonstrably bad for this country. Turns out it’s not so great for that one person, either. For all his hard-line “I’m the commander in chief” talk, Bush was tied in knots about the whole war powers business. A bracing little tour of President George H. W. Bush’s private diaries and letters from his months of captivity in the Should-I-Make-War-on-Saddam hall of mirrors is instructive:

I feel tension in the stomach and in the neck. I feel great pressure…. I worry, worry, worry about eroded support…. Some wanted me to deliver fireside chats to explain things, as Franklin Roosevelt had done. I am not good at that…. I think this week has been the most unpleasant, or tension filled of the Presidency…. If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog…. Nobody is particularly happy with me…. But some way I have got to convey to the American people that I will try my hardest, and [am] doing my best.

The president was aware of the political risks in going to war without some show of congressional support. His best ally in the Senate, Bob Dole, had publicly said that this was “make or break time” for the Bush presidency. But Dole hadn’t exactly been clamoring for Congress to take any of the burden of decision on themselves. “If we in Congress want to participate, then we owe our boys and the president support for policy.” If we want to participate? There’s a choice? Bush hoped not. “Is there a way for the president to fulfill all his responsibilities to Congress by saying, a few days before any fighting was to begin, ‘hostilities are imminent—period!’ ” Bush asked his White House counsel. “Is there something short of ‘declaring’ war that satisfies Congress yet doesn’t risk tying the president’s hands?… Please hand carry your reply to Brent for ‘Eyes Only’ transmission to me.”

Bush did take the time to write a personal and private letter asking for advice from Sen. Bob Byrd, a Democrat, but a fair one, Bush thought, and a stickler for constitutional correctness. When Byrd told the president he was obligated to ask for a declaration of war, Bush waved it off. The president was in a muddle. He was concerned enough about Congress to ask the counsel of one of the wisest solons of the Senate, then miffed by the idea that the Senate had something to say.

Bush wrote about his war decision in his diary over and over again, in tones halfway between confession and pep talk. “I’m getting older but does that make it easier to send someone’s son to die, or does that make it more difficult? All I know is that it’s right… and I know what will happen if we let the 15th slide by and we look wimpish, or unwilling to do what we must… and I keep thinking of the… Marines and the Army guys—young, young, so very young…. They say I don’t concentrate on domestic affairs, and I expect that charge is true: but how can you when you hold the life and death of a lot of young troops in your hand?”

As Bush psyched himself up for what he had decided was his grave and lone responsibility, he talked himself well beyond a president’s normal resentment of congressional meddling and toward a real emotional rage that the Congress might insinuate themselves into this at all. This was getting personal. Even years later, he could still work himself into a state remembering it. “They had none of the responsibility or the worries that go with a decision to take military action yet they felt free to attack us,” Bush wrote in his 1998 book, A World Transformed. “They did not have to contend with the morale of the forces, the difficulty of holding the coalition together, or the fact that time was running out. Above all, they had no responsibility for the lives of our soldiers, sailors, and airmen.”

No responsibility? Only a president had that responsibility? To the president’s mind, a war was not the country’s or even the government’s, but the president’s alone. And woe be unto that lonely man.

It is my decision. My decision to send these kids into battle, my decision that may affect the lives of innocence [sic]. It is my decision to step back and let sanctions work. Or to move forward. And in my view, help establish the New World Order. It is my decision to stand, and take the heat, or fall back and wait and hope. It is my decision that affects [the] husband, the girlfriend, or the wife that is waiting, or the mother that writes, “Take care of my son.” And yet I know what I have to do.

I have never felt a day like this in my life. I am very tired. I didn’t sleep well and this troubles me because I must go to the nation at 9 o’clock. My lower gut hurts, nothing like when I had the bleeding ulcer. But I am aware of it, and I take a couple of Mylantas. I come over to the house about twenty of four to lie down. Before I make my calls at 5, the old shoulders tighten up. My mind is a thousand miles away. I simply can’t sleep. I think of what other Presidents went through. The agony of war.

In mid-December, at the orders of the president and his secretary of defense, the United States military was conducting an air- and sea-lift operation larger and more costly than the one at the height of the Vietnam War. Nearly two hundred freighters were hauling men and materiel—trucks, jeeps, tanks, and bombs—into the Gulf in preparation for something big. And that was when Federal District Judge Harold H. Greene weighed in with his ruling in the case of Dellums v. Bush.