Americans, a litigious people, believe that rules for coping with messy reality can be written in tidy legal language. This belief will be tested by the debate that will resume when Congress returns from a recess it should not have taken, with a war to authorize. The debate concerns an Authorization for Use of Military Force against the Islamic State and also against …
Well. The debate’s difficulty defines its urgency: It is hard to say precisely against what (does the Islamic State’s name make it a state?), and therefore where, force should be authorized. This debate will demonstrate the limits of legalistic precision in war. Which is why, once war begins, limiting presidential war-making power is like lassoing a locomotive with a cobweb. So, this overdue debate — six months and approximately 2,000 U.S. airstrikes into the war on the Islamic State — properly should preoccupy Congress for weeks.
Consider a former authorization of force: “Congress approves and supports the determination of the president . . . to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.” The previous aggression was an attack, a few days earlier in August 1964, on the USS Maddox, a destroyer, in the Gulf of Tonkin. Of the 58,286 names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 57,988 are of Americans killed after passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which was the closest Congress came to declaring war.
The United States last declared war on June 5, 1942, against Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. Congress can perhaps be said to have “authorized” America’s first conflict after World War II by promptly funding it when North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel in June 1950. But merely post facto consent leaves presidents as no president should be: Completely unfettered. And vulnerable. It is bewildering that presidents often are reluctant to bring a collaborative Congress along when they step into the fog of war, where some things always go wrong.
