The New York Times argues that Congress has a duty to authorize war–rather than a responsibility to determine whether war should be fought.
As reports come in detailing the degree to which Donald Trump has escalated the “War on ISIS”—and killed hundreds more civilians in the process—this would seem like a good time for the country to sit back and examine the United States’ approach to fighting “terrorism” and its recent iteration, the so-called Islamic State.
Not for the New York Times editorial board, which didn’t take the wave of civilians deaths as a reason to question the wisdom of America’s various “counter-terror,” nation-building and regime-change projects in the Middle East, but instead chose to browbeat Congress into rubber-stamping a war that’s been going on for almost three years.
The editorial, “Congress’s Duty in the War With ISIS” (3/26/17), began with a false premise:
But as the American military is doing its job, Congress is refusing to do its duty. Nearly three years into the war against ISIS, lawmakers have ducked their constitutional responsibility for making war by not passing legislation authorizing the anti-ISIS fight.
Congress does not have a “constitutional responsibility for making war”; it has a constitutional right to make war, which is to say it can authorize it or not authorize it. Congress is under no obligation—legal, moral or otherwise—to rubber-stamp existing wars started without its consent.
Presidents, on the other hand, do have a duty under the Constitution to get Congress’s approval before waging war.
Originally launched in August 2014 under the auspices of “targeted,” “limited” airstrikes to stop an impending genocide, the war on ISIS has since expanded to include four countries, 50,000+ bombs, 1,000 attacks on civilians and over $11 billion handed out to defense contractors.
The New York Times chose not to editorialize about the US killing hundreds of civilians, but rather about getting a congressional seal of approval on the war that killed them.
The Times correctly notes that the one-page “War on Terror” AUMF used to justify the original launching of the war in 2001 is on thin legal ground. But instead of then interrogating the legality or wisdom of this initial act—or whether or not the public would have gone along with it had they known it would eventually spiral into a global, never-ending war—it simply uses this initial bait-and-switch as further reason for Congress to validate it:
The Pentagon has operated under the 2001 authorization for the use of military force that was passed after Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks. But that justification is of questionable legality because ISIS did not exist when the authorization was approved.
The United States can claim a legal basis for its involvement in Iraq because Baghdad sought American help…. But there has been no such request from the Syrian government, which believes that a US-led attack on Raqqa would be illegitimate unless it were coordinated with Damascus, the chief Syrian negotiator to peace talks in Geneva, Bashar Ja’afari, said on Friday. Such coordination is unlikely, given how little the Pentagon thinks of President Bashar al-Assad and his Russian backers.
It’s not clear why the Times is bringing up Iraq and Syria’s differing stances on the US bombing their country; the approval of Iraqi government—which was ranked “not free” by the US-funded Freedom House at the time it green-lighted the US to bomb it—does not make a war unsanctioned by Congress any more constitutional. And a congressional OK would not make bombing a country’s territory against its government’s will any more legal under international law. But perhaps the key phrase here is “can claim a legal basis”; if an appearance of legality is more important than actually following the law, then any kind of official-looking action would be better than nothing.
And the Times (8/7/14) had no apparent problem with President Obama using the 2001 AUMF to launch the war in the first place. It did not then mention what it now calls the ”questionable legality” of the authorization, instead playing up the ticking time bomb nature of the war effort, and even going out of its way to chide Obama for not following through on veiled threats to bomb the Assad regime the previous year.
The New York Times editorial board, as FAIR (2/9/17) has noted before, consistently protects and advances US national security orthodoxy. In the past 30 years—from the Persian Gulf to Bosnia to Kosovo to Iraq to Libya—the New York Times editorial board has never once opposed a US war. The Times’ power-serving function was starkly evidenced when in January 2016, it opposed the US bombing Libya to fight ISIS without congressional approval, only to do a 180 and endorse the war effort the day after President Obama began bombing in August 2016.
To the extent the Times is concerned with legality, it is only so in a very narrow, domestic way. What international law says about the US-led bombing of Syria is hardly broached, much less explored. Like the scores of US drone bombings and special forces deployments, it just is.
The whole point of granting war-making powers to Congress, it should be noted, was so that Congress could serve as a barrier to war. Somehow for the paper of record, this task has morphed into a “duty” to approve wars that are already taking place, lest the self-evidently good and noble war effort be undermined.
Adam Johnson is a contributing analyst for FAIR.org. You can find him on Twitter at @AdamJohnsonNYC.
You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com (Twitter:@NYTimes). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
A “liberal” dose of bloodlust
By any means, all things Neocon.
Indeed Doug.
Do the majority of NYT employees and management actually believe the political nonsense that they’re “reporting” and advocating in the OPED section, or is cynicism now pandemic inside the Gray Lady?
The New York Times in complying with being a lapdog of the national security state certainly has a vested interest in compelling Congress to make war and not love. War is the health of the state and makes good copy. Not that love does not also. Uncritical reporting by the NYT guarantees some tabloid news scraps being thrown to it. Other more critical news remains secretive within the deep state for the public’s own good. Public opinion can be fickle.
If we don’t like terrorism get out of “their” countries!
Try that for a while and see if it helps.
The USA is a bully nation. Try a different approach.
Great reporting. I don’t know why the layperson would read the Slimes. This is typical of the slant they put on fundamental issues. Which doesn’t even speak to the Slimes’s syndicating hacks like Thomas Friedman and David Brooks. Indeed Donald. I had occasion in the Chicago subway recently to approach two k-9 officers. Under the auspices that the revolution, to be successful, is ultimately going to have to co-opt law enforcement. I queried them whether it would be more expedient for the safety they were allegedly there to protect if the US government were to cease bombing countries across the globe. It dawned on me, then, of course. That wouldn’t be good for the k-9’s job. But under terms of the revolution, the welfare the savings would enable would be more off-setting. Unless the authorities prefer tyranny. As you can imagine, or maybe not, the cops were silent.
The Dims Don Gul are beyond redemption. Until we revolutionaries bury that ghost once and for all there will be no positive redress to the crises we face.
The leading liberals love Trump’s policies ultimately. Sometime’s its useful to have a hated figure do the unpopular things you want to do but haven’t got the nerve to. Then its a win-win: you win by grandstanding against Trump, and you win by getting your unpopular policies passed.
Does anyone really think Hillary Clinton is upset to see a cabinet full of billionaires and Goldman Sachs employees? Does anyone really think that President Obama, who appointed Arne Duncan, is upset by Betsy Devos?
Put away you pink hats and strap on your thinking caps.
It’s time to take on the whole establishment – like people did in the 1960s. Trump, the shady cretins in the GOP and their policies are the number one target but the “Liberal” press, the Democratic Party – until they prove otherwise, they’re the enemy too.
And a great Democrat, he is! https://sputniknews.com/us/201703281052021099-russian-hack-elections-war-cheney/
On the heels of the massacres in Raqqa and Mosul I called all of my federal representatives last Friday. As to whether they were holding TentHead accountable for his wanton blood-letting. That makes the average United Stateseans less, not more secure. About these massacres. That pall in comparison to London granted. Mass murder nonetheless. Durbin and Gutierrez couldn’t be bothered to answer the phone. A woman identifying herself as Diana suggested Duckworth had not formulated a statement yet. But I could check back Monday to see. When I did Monday there was no Diana at Duckworth’s office. Nor Adrienne, whom the alleged Diana had referred me to as the person to talk with on the issue of wanton war crimes. In all seriousness. Who’s the bigger fool to believe any kind of solution to our crises is going to come from the Dims?
Well, perhaps the NYT should go to war instead of telling everyone else to go .If you want to sell papers, then perhaps, the NYT could make war a romantic, manly and valiant thing—–and if you won’t go—have Congress go to war for us.
Each Congress person who votes for war—gets to go. Remember Richard the 3rd died in war—–and just think , Congress, in several centuries, you too, like Richard the 3rd could be found buried in someone’s car park!
Listen up, Lindsey Graham, or gosh any of the Cabinet Heads could go too. Take John McCain and he could show you all how to crash a jet, as he has done so many times before. Besides, Congress, if you don’t declare war, why would any of the People fall for this charade again.? Sadly it seems that much of the media and even our own government are the true WMDs.
US warmongering and destabilising scheming all over the world; neglecting or even stiffling basic human rights (employment,education, health care, housing, due process, free speech, to name just a few) of its own population; most Congress men/women alledgedly spending more time fundraising than legislating; and mainstream press supporting this wholeheartedly and covering up it’s various crimes, add up to a prime example of a ‘failed state’. Or a ‘rogue’ one, or any other one of the contemptuous monikers used by the US when designating foreign governments they want to get rid of and countries whose natural resources or strategic geo-political location they covet.
In other words – and by the US government’s own standards – it is high time for a ‘nation-building regime change’. The question is, who could do this? The US in such cases invariably claim that they were invited to do so by the invaded country or even had UN approval.
I suppose any other country militarily strong enough could apply the same stratagem. Except that there is no such country, as the US has more military than several of the next ones combined and a rogue president (Bannon) if I ever saw one, who might well have his stooge press the red button at the slightest provocation.
Any suggestion how to solve this conundrum – forget about elections, as parliamentary democracy increasingly is a thing of the past and ‘proving’ Russian involvement in leaked Dem mails apparently is more important than the fact the the Dems themselves were falsifying their own primaries to favour their establishment candidate over Bernie who would have pursued real change for the better (of the nation and the world as opposed to the establishment).