Another Presidential War

The Topic—The Imperial Presidency is meant to describe actions of the President that fit the dictionary definition of the imperium. Emperor, the word from which imperial stems, means to command. (Note imperative form of speech; "Do your homework!") Commander-in-Chief is a synonym for emperor. In our Constitutional form of government the Congress is given the war powers but the President is named Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. The Framers of the Constitution solved the problem of Presidential excess by abolishing the military after the Revolution, choosing to rely on the militias of the States to protect the nation from invasion or Indian uprisings. Commanding the military into action by Presidents, without Congressional approval has become more common after WW II, since we kept a large standing military to counter the Soviet threat, so the military is there to command.

President Bush has so far in his Presidency ordered the military into action twice. Once into Panama where President Noriega was apprehended and brought back to the United States to face drug charges and the second time when he ordered the deployment of U.S. forces to defend Saudi Arabia after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait Desert Storm. President Reagan ordered the invasion of Grenada. President Carter ordered Desert One to rescue hostages in the American Embassy in Teheran. President Nixon bombed Cambodia. President Johnson escalated our involvement in Vietnam, after he declared, in the campaign, that Asian boys could fight that Asian war. President Kennedy approved the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba; President Truman ordered the military to South Korea after it was invaded by North Korea.

It is not my intention to say that any or all of these actions were bad or good, but that they involved American presidents committing the American military to some form or another of war without a declaration of the Congress. These presidents employed what they thought was their Constitutional authority as Commander-in-Chief. In so doing they were acting out the imperium, the power to employ all the forces of the State in carrying out its laws.

The Persian Gulf War, in spite of the Congressional vote of approval, is another presidential war. Much has been said about public approval for the war, as if the President were following the will of the people, but all the facts surrounding the start of the war point to actions of the President acting alone. The President took the nation into war and Congress approved after the fact.

The Cold War had ended, much to the dismay of our cold warrior politicians who were using the Soviet threat to balloon the defense budget. The end of the Cold War meant that a significant peace dividend would be forthcoming and there might be a possibility that the Federal budget could be run without a deficit. This again was dismaying since the Federal deficit has a real role to play in the Reagan-Bush Anti-federalist program for making Federal taxes unavailable for Federal social welfare programs. The borrow and spend Anti-federalist Republicans were afraid that the tax and spend Federalist Democrats would seize control of the Federal budget.

The Federal budget negotiations had gone the summer long and things were going badly for the President's men. The budget negotiations ended with a compromise on the Federal budget that included new taxes, causing the President to renege on his campaign promise of no new taxes. This was widely viewed by Republicans as the President "caving in" to tax and spend Democrats. The Whitehouse position on the budget waffled, and the President was again described as a "wimp." There was free talk of the restoration of the graduated income tax, (progressive taxation), and talk was rife that the President could be beaten in the 1992 election.

In the background of the summer budget debacle another event took shape. In a State Department briefing, on July 24, 9 days before the invasion of Kuwait, Margaret Tutwiler the State Department spokesperson had this to say about our relationship with Kuwait, "We do not have any defense treaties with Kuwait, and there are no special defense or security commitments to Kuwait."

The New York Times for Sunday September 23, 1990, carried an article about a meeting between the US Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. The date of the meeting was July 25, eight days before the August 2, invasion of Kuwait and at the height of the criticism of the President's handling of the budget and his vulnerability in the next presidential election. The article covered most of a page of the NY Times Sunday edition and was in addition to a front page story which was headlined, "U.S. Gave Iraq Little Reason Not to Mount Kuwait Assault."

The crucial exchange in the conversation relates to the relationship between Kuwait and the United States. After President Saddam Hussein complains bitterly about the way his country was being treated by Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, accusing them of waging economic warfare against Iraq, he asks the Ambassador what kind of a relationship the United States has with Kuwait. She replied, "We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait. I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late 60's. The instruction we had during this period was that we should have no opinion on this issue and the issue is not associated with America." Any reasonable person would suppose that we had no interest in what Iraq's intention with Kuwait might be.

When Iraq invaded Kuwait, however, the tone of the United States shifted from amorality, to indignant morality and the President deployed 250 thousand troops to occupy the border between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia even though from the conversation with the Ambassador, Iraq's beef was with Kuwait not Saudi Arabia. The President's deployment of our troops in a defensive mode was widely interpreted as not going to war. If the troops had been deployed in such numbers and in such manner as would indicate they could recapture Kuwait from the Iraqis that would have been interpreted as offensive and would have violated the Congress' war powers authority. When questioned about the President's action, Secretary of State James Baker said essentially that when the Commander-in-Chief has a 70% approval rating in the polls he can do anything he wants to—not the President but the Commander-in-Chief.

The United Nations Security Council, of which we are a permanent member, called for Iraq to leave Kuwait under penalty of economic sanctions and a military embargo. The United States could participate in the embargo without a Congressional declaration because it again was not an offensive, shooting war.

Sam Nunn of Georgia, the Chairman of the Senate Armed Forces Committee called a hearing on the Gulf War, as it came to be called, inviting all the top, retired military, and State Department experts to testify on the course of the war. Included among the witnesses were James Sleshinger former Secretary of Defense, Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State, Zibgnew Brenzinski, former National Security Advisor, and Admiral Crowe and General David Jones, former Chairmen of the Joints Chiefs of Staff. To a person all these experts serving both former Republican and Democratic Presidents recommended that the deployment remain defensive and to continue the use of the embargo to obtain Iraq's compliance with the Security Council resolutions.

President Bush, in the meantime, doubled the number of troops in the Gulf and placed them in an offensive, non-rotational mode. At this point Congressional approval would have been required by the Constitution and the War Powers Act. Instead the President went to the United Nations and got approval from the Security Council to use "any means necessary" to evict Iraq from Kuwait if the Iraqis did not leave Kuwait by a specified time. After President Bush got a resolution from the UN to use force, he went to the Congress for a war vote. The President then set the deadline for withdrawal for June 15, 1990. He expressed reluctance for going to Congress sooner since he was afraid he might not have gotten a favorable vote earlier.

The President and his men had a terrible time trying to explain the war to the American people. The President's initial cut at justification was to counter naked aggression. James Sleshinger, former Secretary of Defense, ridiculed this concept on a TV program that included all former Secretaries of Defense discussing the Gulf War. His contention was that there was a great abundance of "naked aggression" in the world and then gave the statistics for the number of wars since World War II and the millions of casualties in those wars, places like Somalia, Indonesia, the Sudan, Ethiopia, Chad, Angola, and Namibia. We did not intervene in those wars yet in every case there was "naked aggression." Secretary of State James Baker's attempt at justification was "jobs." If jobs were the issue we should be invading Japan and West Germany. To the chants in the street of "No blood for oil," the President went before the religious broadcasters. and declared that it was a moral war.

Morality plays an important part in our individual lives and the life of the nation. Morality is the rule of life. Morality dictates behavior. Behaving according to a morality is ethical. Morality and ethics go together. In IdT we recognize three levels of morality that apply to three different aspects of our being. At the first level we have animal morality. We share an animal morality with all the higher creatures of the Earth. Contained with animal morality we find Lex talionis the law of the talon—dog eat dog, king on the hill, survival of the fittest. But within animal morality we also find altruism, perhaps the highest level of moral behavior we have, and self-defense, a justification for homicide. At a second level we have human morality, the morality that is governed by the concept of property—Thou shalt not steal," "Thou shalt not bear false witness," etc. The main function of human morality is the right of property, at any level. Finally we have humane morality, the level at which a free people exercise their unalienable rights. Question? When President Bush said he was pursuing a moral war, what kind of morality was he talking about?, It is obvious that he was invoking the animal morality that included Lex Talionis, the law of the talon. Saddam Hussein did something bad and Saddam Hussein had to be punished, preferably by killing him and his army and people.

At the embargo level, the morality was the human morality, involved with the rights of property and the embargo was punishing Iraq economically. There was no intention to cause a loss of life although in in embargo, some loss of life is inevitable, but none the less it is unintentional. With Lex Talionis the taking of life is deliberate, calculated and planned.

Did Saddam Hussein have a legitimate gripe about Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates? Iraq is a dictatorship, but the, dictator is called President. Saddam Hussein is known to have done bad things to his own countrymen, but he did carry out the Iran war successfully and we did support him in that effort because it was to our advantage. Was there something we could have done with Saddam Hussein when he was our ally that could have moved his country toward freedom and democracy? Had we done those things it would have been humane morality.

Once Commander-in-Chief Bush moved American troops to hazardous duty, it is only common decency for the American public to support them, whatever the cause. My country right or wrong, is post commitment axiom. Our Armed forces merit our support once they are committed rightly or wrongly by the President. This was not the case in Vietnam where our soldiers, sailors, and airmen were ridiculed and despised and the nation has to be described as debauched for its lack of concern. The President's men often cite the 80% approval rating President Bush has among the American people for the war, as justification for its morality and justice. The vote in the Congress was a squeaker. Only three Senators would have had to change their vote for Bush to have not received his permission to prosecute the war. In World War I, only one vote was cast against the war. This was also the case with World War II and the same person, Jeannette Rankin of Wyoming was the only negative vote in the two wars. That is orders of magnitude away from the vote on the Gulf war. There is another way to look at the Congressional vote. Consider the unlikely case that the Congress wanted the war but that the president did not, and he vetoed the vote. Could the Congress have overridden a Presidential veto and gone to war against his wishes. Not with that vote.

If we look at the 80% figure for support for Mr. Bush's war, that 80% hides a lot of variation in the population. For instance at the time the national poll was taken, a poll was taken in Washington, DC. In the Washington poll, 70% of the white population supported the President and 30% did not, among the African Americans the vote was 40% for the President and 60% against. These kinds of numbers are submerged in the 80% number. Getting back to the 80% number, it strikes the as low for a popular war. It means 1/5th of the nation did not support the war. I would expect President Bush to get 80% support from the American people for an invasion of Canada, Mexico, or Puerto Rico.

Vietnam was never a popular war since no one could really figure out why we were there in the first place. The joke in Washington was, "Don't knock it, its the only war we got." Vietnam did not become a despicable war until after President Johnson removed the educational deferments from the middle class men who then became eligible for the draft. I was in the November 1968 march on Washington where 750,000, mostly white, middle class Americans demonstrated for an end to the war. Mr. Bush's war is being fought by an all volunteer force, (whose enlistments have been extended to the end of the war) with about a 30%, African American compliment. Iraq seemed to have abandoned the field and the conflict came to a conclusion with scant loss of American life. What would public support have been like, had it been necessary to implement the draft and had college bound middle class youth had been drafted to go to the Middle East to restore an absolute monarch and protect another one, (and don't forget the oil)? Public support in that case would have been another thing.

It is also necessary to examine Mr. Bush's action in light of the form of our government. Mr. Bush is a minority president. He does not have a ruling majority in the Congress. Since the President does not have a ruling majority, he has to trick, cajole, bribe, threaten vetos, lobby, appeal to the American public to get what he wants. Such votes as the vote on the Persian Gulf War are highly political, since the proponents of the war will use the vote to further their political ambitions, especially since it was a highly successful war. Now that the war has ended in a splendid victory with very small loss of life, and with the President's popularity soaring, the urge to use the war for political purposes is quite great indeed. The simple fact is that a minority President can't start a, war, that is unpalatable to the majority party any other way than the way Mr. Bush did. Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia and Senator Phil Gramm of Texas have assumed the political point for the Republican Party on this issue, castigating Democrats who did not vote for the war. Yet without the Democrats the President couldn't have a war. That is to say, as the minority President, he has to have the support of some Democrats all the time for ordinary housekeeping let alone to declare a war. That's the way the system works with a minority president without a ruling majority in the congress. Had the President had Republican majorities in both houses of Congress the events leading up to the prosecution of the war would have been quite different. Undoubtedly, a "war party" would have formed within the ruling majority, possibly lead by Representative Gingrich and Senator Gramm, which would have demanded that we go to war and the majority President would have had all the necessary events under his control. He would not have had to improvise or manufacture a diplomatic strategy or, have our diplomats do somersaults before and after the declaration of war. The declaration would have become before he committed the nation to war, but because of the way our government works, minority President Bush committed the nation to war and got permission afterwards. In this we have another example in a long string of presidential wars.

© Copyright 1991
Institute for domestic Tranquility