Constitutional Authority to Attack Iran
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By Henry Mark Holzer
FrontPageMagazine.com | January 26, 2007
In President Bush’s recent speech announcing his troop buildup, he promised to interrupt the “flow of support” running from Iran to their surrogate killers in Iraq. Even though the president’s inner circle and speechwriters chose his words carefully, there is necessarily an unmistakable meaning to what he said.
American forces and intelligence agencies have long known that there is a pipeline of fighters, materiel, and money flowing from Iran to the killers on the ground throughout Iraq. This is what the president meant by “flow of support.” And it is this pipeline that he has vowed to “interrupt.” Predictably, those who want to see America’s nose bloodied in Iraq even more than it has been already reacted quickly. Senator Joseph Biden, for example, warned the Secretary of State that an attack on Iran would “generate a constitutional confrontation in the Senate,” whatever that obvious threat was supposed to mean. Members of both parties in the House of Representatives, who apparently don’t understand Article II of the Constitution, have started to push a joint resolution that would prohibit an attack on Iran unless Congress approved. While Article I of the Constitution provides that Congress has the power to “declare War,” to “raise and support Armies,” and to “provide and maintain a Navy,” Article II provides that the “executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States,” who “shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.” This constitutional architecture, federal court cases that have addressed presidential war powers, and custom and practice during this nation’s entire history, leave no doubt that President Bush can interrupt the flow of support from Iran into Iraq and, for good measure, destroy, or at least immobilize, Iran’s growing nuclear capability. The Constitution’s text is clear regarding the division of war powers: Congress can, if it wishes, declare war, and can fund or not fund, military operations. But it is the president who commands that military. It was President Franklin Roosevelt, as commander-in-chief, not some committee of Congress, who abandoned the Philippine Islands after Pearl Harbor, who declined to open the “second front” invasion of mainland Europe until he was ready, and who insisted on “unconditional surrender” of the German and Japanese armies. One would think from today’s struggle for power between Congress and the president, that the war powers delegated by the Constitution have produced serious conflicts between the two branches in the past. Not so. In nearly 200 years, from about 1798 to late last century, presidents have sent—at least 130 times—troops and materiel abroad absent Congressional approval. The last time Congress formally declared war was in December 1941, following the attack on Pearl Harbor more than a half-century ago. Yet in the ensuing 50 years, our country has fought three major conflicts—not counting President Eisenhower’s actions in the Formosa Straits and Suez, President Kennedy’s Cuba quarantine, President Johnson’s troop deployment to Santo Domingo, President Reagan’s attack on Grenada, and the first President Bush’s ousting of dictator Manual Noriega in Panama.
'fought three major conflicts'
Interesting how they are considered 'conflicts' and not Wars.