By David Harsayi
Tuesday, October 08, 2019
If you want to stop Donald Trump from making unilateral
decisions regarding war and peace, then stop letting all presidents make
unilateral decisions about war and peace. It’s really quite simple. Trump can
abruptly pull back U.S. troops from northern Syria because Congress, having
abdicated its foreign policy responsibilities long ago, has no leverage to stop
him.
When Congress passed the War Powers Resolution as the
Vietnam War was winding down, it gave presidents the power to send troops
abroad for 60 days in response to any “national emergency created by attack
upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.”
If the president failed to gain congressional support for the deployment, he
would have another 30 days to pull back troops.
Congress is the institution vested with the power to
declare wars, to debate where we send troops, and decide which conflicts are
funded. Presidents have been ignoring this arrangement, abuse authorizations
for the use of military force (AUMFs), and imbue themselves with the power to
engage in conflicts wherever they like, without any coherent endgame, and
without any buy-in from Congress.
Congress, in turn, has shown no interest in genuinely
challenging executive power, because its members are far more concerned with
political self-preservation. Ignoring abuse shields them from tough choices and
ensuing criticism—even as they use war as a partisan cudgel.
Even if you don’t believe all these conflicts rise to an
Article I declaration, and I don’t, the more accountability there is in foreign
entanglements the better. Right now we have little genuine debate or consensus
building—in a nation that already exhibits exceptionally little interest in
foreign policy—regarding the deployment of our troops, almost always in
perpetuity, around the world.
It’s a bipartisan problem. Barack Obama, whose political
star rose due to his opposition to the Iraq war, was perhaps our worst
offender, circumventing Congress and relying on a decade-old AUMF, which he
invoked 19 times
during his presidency, to justify a half-hearted intervention against ISIS (not
al-Qaeda) in Syria (not Afghanistan.)
Trump could bomb Iran tomorrow, use Obama’s reasoning,
and have a far stronger legal defense for his actions.
It was also Obama who joined Europeans in the failed
intervention in Libya, where he worked under NATO goals rather than the United
States law. There was hardly a peep from Democrats fretting over the corrosion
of the Constitution.
Republicans too were given ample chance to sign-off on
Syrian intervention in 2013 when Obama, fully aware of congressional aversion
to accountability, asked for a new AUMF to get out of bombing Assad. It would
have been a great time for senators to dictate long-term goals in Syria. It’s not
too late. If they believe Trump’s strategy is wrong, they can still force his
hand by explaining the mission with a new AUMF. Let’s see if voters agree.
Right now, I imagine only a sliver of Americans fully
understand the situation in Syria. I’m definitely not one of them. Yes, Trump’s
haphazard abandonment of Syrian Kurds and empowering of Turkey seems like a bad
idea for a bunch of reasons. I’m hawkish about destroying the remnants of
JV-team ISIS and sympathetic towards the idea of protecting civilians from
Assad’s chemical attacks and shielding the Kurds from Turkish aggression. But
now we’re talking about an open-ended military commitment that keeps evolving.
And anyone who claims with any certitude to know how these events will shake
out is just lying to you.
The only thing we can be certain of is that there few
good options in the Syria mess, and that includes our allies. Although the
Kurds have endured much as a people, and deserve our support, the Kurdish PKK,
our allies in northern Syria, aren’t chaste freedom fighters but Maoists with
ties to terrorist organizations.
Or, in other words, we face few good options mired in
perhaps the most volatile situation in the world. Under these conditions, our
foreign policy shouldn’t be driven by the arbitrary “great and unmatched
wisdom” of any single person. This brand of unilateral power was problematic
when the well-mannered Obama sold out Syria to coddle the Iranian terror state,
and it’s problematic when an impulsive Trump acquiesces to the wishes of Erdogan.
(Although Washington only seems to freak out when the word “withdrawal” is
mentioned.)
Whoever is president, the founders clearly foresaw
Congress taking far more responsibility for conflicts we enter. So who knows,
maybe next intervention it will?
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