We Are a War-Making People

From Esquire

The most basic thing to remember is that the air strikes ordered by the president* on Syria on Friday night are preposterously contrary to the Constitution and almost certainly illegal on their face. That Great Britain and France joined in doesn’t matter. They don’t have a Constitution that has an Article I with a Section 8 in which you will find that the power to make war resides in the Congress of the United States. (When Secretary of Defense James Mattis said that the president*’s actions were lawful under Article II, he was blowing smoke. There is nothing in Article II that says anything about “defending vital American interests,” even if there were any at risk in the Syrian civil war.) Of course, that horse was out of the barn, over the hill, farmed out to stud, declared dead, and reincarnated as a muskrat decades ago.

By degrees, Congress surrendered its constitutional obligation to decide when and where the United States would make war almost ever since the ink dried in Philadelphia. In August, 1787, Pierce Butler, a delegate to the constitutional convention from South Carolina, proposed that the national executive be allowed to start a war on its own. Every other delegate in the hall jumped down his throat. (Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts pronounced himself “dumbfounded.”)

In 1793, James Madison famously argued that the war powers were “the true nurse of executive aggrandizement.” Then, of course, the government was up and running and, very quickly, the actions taken by Presidents John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and, yes, President James Madison his own self, against the Barbary pirates showed that the national Executive’s sweet-tooth for military adventurism transcended the nascent political parties of the founding generation. So, let’s leave the poor old Constitution aside for a moment because it’s rarely been relevant when the country decides to make war some place.

We are a war-making people. We try to find a way to mitigate this most basic fact. We try to gussy it up with humanitarian gloss and a thick coat of euphemism. But, today, from our armchairs and recliners, we love the boom-boom. On Friday night, you could almost see the entirely justified skepticism with which the TV reporters have approached this administration* drain away at the first cool video of a missile coursing through the darkened Syrian sky. The echoes of how gleefully TV got onboard with the Iraq adventure were quite distinct; Brian Williams was positively giddy reading out the list of Naval vessels involved in the action. God, TV loves itself a good war.

Later, at the Pentagon briefing, we heard a lot about how “limited” the strike was, and yet how substantial it was, too. We were making sure we weren’t killing civilians but not so careful that we did not “significantly degrade” the Syrian regime’s capacity to make war on its people. When I was a kid, I went to school not far from a factory where they made the engines for the B-52 bombers. If the Soviets had decided to significantly degrade the ability of the United States to make long-range bombers, I would have been killed right along with the guys on the assembly line. I guarantee you that Syrian civilians were killed Friday night and all of them have extended families who are not going to be impressed with our forbearance.

We are making war in Syria. We are not “intervening.” We are not engaging “pinpricks.” We are not “sending a message” or, worse, “holding Assad responsible” for what he has done to his own people. (This latter bit seems to have been the banality of choice for Democratic politicians.) We are making war in Syria and we are killing Syrians, and perhaps Kurds and Russians, too. Not as many as Assad has killed, but we now have a body count in that country, too. This was kicking the hornet’s nest. Again. Let us at least be honest about that as subsequent events unfold.

And, of course, there’s also the fact that we are being led at the moment by a corrupt and incompetent president* who has law-enforcement coming at him from all sides and who, only a week ago, was saying that he wasn’t going to do what he just did. He then announced his intention to attack a day in advance.

Then, on Friday night, the incoherence was staggering. The president* said this could be the start of a “sustained” campaign while Mattis told the Pentagon press that the raid was a “one-shot deal.” Mattis left open the possibility of additional strikes if Assad goes to his chemical stockpile again but what the hell does that mean? Will another attack with chlorine gas, which Assad has used regularly since the war began, occasion another sortie? Are we copasetic with it all if the Syrian military simply goes back to slaughtering people with high explosives? Does anyone know who’s in charge?

True small-d-democrats for years have been wary of the executive aggrandizement about which Mr. Madison warned us, especially in the area of military operations. (Republicans tend to see this problem through the lens of, say, the Endangered Species Act. Ah, well.) Sooner or later, we were warned, this increasingly muscular office was going to be in the hands of someone morally and intellectually unworthy of its power.

None of us anticipated a half-paranoid reality TV star but that’s because we all lacked imagination. After all, the citizens of this country abandoned their duties to the Republic as thoroughly as the Congress has abandoned its war powers. We were too easily convinced that The Government was some alien entity to be resisted, and not the only peaceful vehicle through which we can govern ourselves. We were too easily convinced to dilute the power of our own votes because they “didn’t matter.” We were too easily convinced to abandon our obligations to hold our elected officials accountable because “they’re all the same/crooks/fools.” Once those habits of being settled in, we were prime suckers for the first real con-man to come along and, on Friday night, this grifter made war in another part of the world.

We all should have been prepared for the day on which the imperial presidency would fall into the hands of Louis The Simple. In fact, in terms of petulance, ignorance, and arrogance in combination, the current president* is probably the closest we’ve come to being ruled by George III since we were ruled by, well, George III.

In 1952, during the Korean War, the nation’s steelworkers threatened to go on strike. In response, President Harry Truman ordered his secretary of commerce to seize the nation’s steel mill and force them into operation. In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court kicked ol’ Harry’s ass around the block, which is proof that the other branches of government can push back if they want to do so, and if they feel sufficient pressure from an engaged citizenry to do so. In his concurrence, Justice Robert Jackson wrote:

War is being made in our name again. Every decision about the war being made in our names is our responsibility whether we want it to be or not, just as every decision, large and small, that produced the current presidency* is our responsibility whether we want it to be or not. The correction of this profound mistake, and the reconstruction of the institutions and norms smashed by this administration* will be our responsibility whether we want it to be or not. As Jackson wrote in another decision, his dissent in Korematsu v. U.S., the misbegotten case that led to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II,

There are far too many loaded weapons lying around these days. One may have gone off Friday night.

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