By DR. LARRY MOSES
No one asked me but… According to the U.S. Congress, American military leaders, the President, and the news media; President Biden has ended the longest war in American history. But I must disagree with them all. War was never declared in 2001which seems to be the generally accepted starting date for this conflict.
I would refer you to the Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 8, clause 1: “The Congress shall have power… To declare War…” and Congress did not declare war against Afghanistan.
The Founding Fathers named the President as Commander-In-Chief of the American military. However, they did not give him the power to declare war. In the Constitution, this power is reserved for Congress, and prior to the Korean Conflict (1950), Congress authorized a declaration of war eleven times in American history. The War of 1812, against Great Britain was the first. Thirty-four years later in 1846, America declared war on Mexico. And in 1898, when the Battleship USS Maine exploded in a Cuban harbor, America declared war on Spain. In April of 1917, in an 82-17 vote, the Senate declared war on Germany.
In December of the same year, Congress declared war on Germany’s ally Austria-Hungary. After the Japanese Imperial Navy carried out a carrier attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Congress accepted President Roosevelt’s request for a declaration of war in his famous “Day that will Live in Infamy” speech with only Montana’s Senator Rankin’s dissenting vote.
Rankin was the first woman elected to national office and voted no on the war resolution for World War I and World War II. She stated that, as a woman, she could not fight and she would not vote to send another into harm’s way.
Three days after declaring war on Japan, Congress declared war on Germany and Italy. On June 4, 1942, Congress declared war on Bulgaria, Hungary, and Rumania who they saw as allies to Germany.
This is the entirety of the Constitutionally declared American wars.
The Korean Conflict was fought under the flag of the United Nations as a “police action.” There was no Congressional declaration of war. I am reminded of an old Marine Sgt. Major, a Korean War veteran, who objected to the use of the term police action. He stated that anytime someone was shooting at him and he was shooting at them, it was war. A police action is when someone writes a traffic ticket. While I appreciated his statement, officially America cannot Constitutionally be at war without a formal declaration by Congress, and this has not taken place since 1942.
In 1964, Congress passed The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, authorizing President Lyndon Johnson to use military force in southeast Asia. When Congress repealed the resolution in 1977, President Richard Nixon cited his power as Commander-In-Chief under Article Two of the United States Constitution as his legal authority for ordering America’s combatants to Vietnam. In violation of the Constitution, American leadership, of both major parties, sent over 50,000 young Americans to die without a declaration of war.
In more recent years, the United States has conducted ground or air strikes in at least nine countries without a declaration of war from Congress. These countries include Iraq, Kenya, Libya, Mali, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, as well as the Dominican Republic. These strikes have been carried out under the authorization of the President of the United States in his role as the Commander-in-Chief. Congress has abdicated their Constitutional duty to determine when and where American troops should engage in what President Obama labeled “military contingencies.”
The founders of our country saw the military as a defensive mechanism to protect the sovereignty of our country. President George Washington warned about foreign entanglements and a large standing army. The men who wrote the Constitution and championed its passage agreed that the power to declare war was to be reserved for Congress.
Abe Lincoln in 1848 stated: “The provision of the Constitution giving war-making powers to Congress, was dictated as I understand it, by the following reasons: Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our Constitutional Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon on us.”
The major issue in the use of the American military since World War II is that America has not engaged the military in the defense of the country. It has been used attempting to mold foreign nations in a manner that our government felt was in America’s self-interest.
One must remember that the government that collapsed and allowed the Taliban to return to power in Afghanistan was a government the United States, under the shield of a United Nation’s action, established after they overthrew the Taliban government. This is the same Taliban that America supported in its efforts to defeat the Russians.
While you and I may find the Taliban government’s policies and treatment of its people apprehensible, we need to realize this is the very government that the majority of the Afghans support and crave.
If you wish to argue this point you are more than welcome. But I would ask you to explain two facts.
First, as soon as American support was withdrawn, 300,000 American-trained and equipped Afghan warriors threw down their arms and joined the Taliban. Secondly, if one reviews areas where there have been enclaves of Afghanistan refugees established in America, they demand the right to rule under the same Sharia law they supposedly were fleeing.
Among many other things that American intelligence has failed to understand is that the conflict in Afghanistan was a civil war and that war was not one of territory but one of ideology. Ideologues do not have to win, they merely have to hang on until their opponent realizes the fight is not worth the cost.
In Afghanistan that cost was 2,401 young American lives and another 20,752 maimed Americans. In dollars, the cost was over one trillion dollars. It took America 20 years to determine the cost was too high and quit. The Taliban is now 2-0 against two of the most powerful nations in the world.
Thought of the week… You can imprison a man, but not an idea. You can exile a man, but not an idea. You can kill a man, but not an idea.
– Benazir Bhutto
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