RON PAUL: "Before We Bomb Baghdad....."

With our military actions waning in Afghanistan, the administration appears to be gearing up for a second phase in the Middle East. Although the Al-Queda threat has not yet been fully neutralized, political and popular support for a full-scale war against Iraq is growing. The President explicitly named Iraq as a target in his State of the Union address, and British Prime Minister Blair recently stated his backing for such an invasion.

Yet I remain convinced we should be very cautious before we send troops and bombs into Iraq. It's simple to point out that Saddam Hussein is a ruthless dictator, but it's not so easy to demonstrate that he poses a threat to us. We should also remember that the congressional resolution passed immediately after September 11th, which I supported, authorized military force only against those directly responsible for the attacks- and there is no evidence whatsoever that Iraq played a role in those attacks. This leaves me with two serious concerns: first, the near-certainty that this coming war will be undeclared, and hence unconstitutional; and second, that such a war does not serve our best interests.

First and foremost, we must follow the Constitution and require that the President secure a congressional declaration of war before he proceeds against Iraq. Undeclared wars represent one of the greatest threats to our constitutional separation of powers over the last 50 years, beginning with our "police action" in Korea. This most sacred legislative function- the power to send our young people into harm's way- must be exercised by Congress alone, the body most directly connected to the electorate.

The undeclared wars waged by various Presidents during the last century represent a very serious usurpation of the legislative function, adding greatly to the rise of the "imperial Presidency" that we witnessed so clearly during the Clinton years. I'm always amazed that Congress is quite willing to simply give away one of its greatest powers, especially when it spends so much time otherwise trying to expand its powers by passing extra-constitutional legislation. The reason for this, I'm afraid, is Congress learned in Vietnam that wars sometimes go very badly, and few want to be on record as having voted for a war if they can avoid it. So despite all the talk in Congress of "supporting the President," nobody wants to really support him by doing the obvious and passing a declaration of war.

Constitutional questions aside, we have to ask ourselves quite simply whether it serves any national interest to invade Iraq. So often we lose sight of the true purpose of our military, which is to defend our borders against attack. Remember, Iraq has not initiated aggression against us. We, on the other hand, have bombed them, taunted them by flying military jets in their airspace, and starved them with economic sanctions- all for more than a decade. We haven't done these things out of humanitarian concern for Kuwait, we've done them because we want to protect our oil interests. Yet these actions have harmed the people of Iraq, not the Hussein regime. If anything, our policies serve to generate support for Hussein, who uses American aggression as a convenient scapegoat to deflect attention from his own oppression. Sadly, we've made him a martyr in Iraq and much of the wider Muslim world, alienating many otherwise pro-Western Iraqi moderates in the process. I question the wisdom, and the necessity, of once again traveling 6000 miles to pick a fight with a third-world Muslim nation that is simply not threatening us.

Congress should not allow any administration to take our nation to war without the consent of the people. I fear that we are about to embark on an undeclared, unconstitutional war in Iraq that is exceedingly unwise and fraught with unforeseen consequences. This war will have nothing to do with US national security or Iraqi aggression. It will, however, make us all less secure by antagonizing millions of Muslims who understand the necessity of our actions against Al-Queda, but who will object to an invasion of Iraq.

It has been a settled principle of constitutional law from very early times that the President does not need a Declaration of War to respond to an attack on the United States. I documented this in this post some time ago. A Declaration of War is a specific kind of thing; it is the public announcement that a government is required by the law of nations to make when it goes from being at peace to being at war. Declaring war is the alternative to making a sneak attack. When the country is attacked, however, someone else has already initiated war by attacking - the country is by that very fact at war and does not need to declare war before defending itself.

The real protection against "Kings' Wars" in the Constitution is exactly what you refer to, the necessity of Congressional approval for military spending. The "King" can't have a war on his own if the elected representatives of the people won't give him the money, and he isn't allowed to get money anywhere else. The English Whigs had already figured that one out.

The terror network is not simply one organization. It is in fact a network of states and international organizations which are deeply interconnected with one another, and which collectively constitute a standing danger to the United States. The real breadth of the Congressional Resolution is contained in the language that covers all those who "aided" the 9-11 attacks, or anyone who has harbored such parties, that is, any party who has aided the attacks, to the end of preventing any future terrorist attacks.

The language is far broader than Rep. Paul's statement acknowledges. It does not say that the Administration needs grand-jury-ready proof of a direct link to 9-11 in order take action. It is language that was intended to cover the entire international terror network. It was clearly known to everyone on September 14 that the Administration was not asking simply for authority to attack Al-Qaeda, but for authority to eliminate the threat of global terrorism altogether. Any conservative original-intent reading of the bill would come to that conclusion. If Rep. Paul, who voted for the authorization, claims now that he did not know what he was voting for, then I'd say he's a liar.

The bottom line here is that Rep. Paul hates government as such, and regards weakening the government as so urgently desirable that a few dirty nukes from Iraq in major American cities killing a few hundred thousand people a few years down the road is a small price to pay.

Paul's foreign policy views are pretty much indistinguishable from Chomsky's or Nader's, i.e. hard Leftist. He is, of course, not any kind of conservative, but a libertarian. That means that like the hard Left he is a Utopian seeking a "revolution of doctrine and of theoretic dogma" (Burke) and really doesn't care about the real-world consequences of his utopian fervor. He gets lumped on the Right because his Utopia doesn't include state-planned social justice, and the Left lumps together everyone who rejects their Utopia as "the Right." If conservatives were assigning the labels, Paul would be considered an unusual variety of Left-wing Utopian.

Fortunately, he is totally insignificant in the real world, a man completely without influence, a curio in the great museum of Congressional oddballs, whose political career probably will last as long as his constituents don't figure out what he really believes. He had to hide his ideology in the Republican Party to get elected to anything in the first place, a wholly cynical move.

I have to add one more observation. Those of us who generally support the President are frequently defamed on FR as unprincipled hero-worshippers who want to shut down free discussion. But I have never seen any supporter of the President on any thread positively screech out direct orders never, ever to criticize George Bush, as several Pauliacs on this thread have done.

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