04-11-2017, 08:36 AM
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Trump’s Unlawful Attack in Syria
Trump’s Unlawful Attack in Syria
Trump launched an attack on Bashar al-Assad’s government without the legal authority to do so.....
Quote:
By Garrett Epps
April 10, 2017
“It should be more easy to get out of war than into it,” Oliver Ellsworth told the Philadelphia Convention on August 17, 1787. With the malignant political genius of the nuclear age, Americans have reversed that order of things. War now takes but a wave of the executive hand, but seems impossible to end. Congress authorized military action against Al Qaeda in 2001, and against the government of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in 2002. Hussein is long gone, and Al Qaeda may or may not still exist; legally, however, these wars grind on, the longest-running pair in American history. Thursday night, without a word to Congress or the public, the Trump Administration impulsively began a third conflict. Neither of the existing authorizations could even remotely be said to authorize Thursday’s attack on Syria. We have no way of knowing whether it was a brief executive whim or the beginning of a third nightmare that will outlast the other two. Here is President Trump’s statement of the aims of the missile strike: “I call on all civilized nations to join us in seeking to end the slaughter and bloodshed in Syria, and also to end terrorism of all kinds and all types.” His message to Congress is pure boilerplate: “I acted in the vital national security and foreign policy interests of the United States, pursuant to my constitutional authority as Commander-in-Chief and Chief Executive.”
In retrospect, America’s failure to intervene in Syria in 2013 was probably a historic mistake. It was not Barack Obama’s mistake alone, but one made by the entire nation. Obama announced his plans but then asked Congress to approve them—precisely as the Constitution requires. His critics portray this request—the one time when Obama actually refused to violate the war powers system of the Constitution—as his personal folly. But members of both his own and the opposition parties in Congress made it known that they would not back his request; many elder statesman opposed the intervention; and national polls showed a solid majority of the public opposed.
After the apparent nerve gas attack last week, the current president issued a grotesquely improper official statement blaming Obama for Assad’s recent crime. In 2013, however, private-citizen Trump had loudly and strenuously objected to Obama’s planned intervention and demanded the president seek the approval of Congress. However harshly history may judge the default of 2013, it was a failure not of one leader but of national will. Has the nation regained its will for a prolonged, bloody, and morally ambiguous struggle in Syria? Or will the United States drop the conflict after a few loud booms? That Donald Trump has, for the moment at least, changed his mind is not only of limited constitutional relevance—it also tells us less than nothing about whether the American people understand, accept, and embrace what may be needed for the intervention to succeed.
Harry S Truman was the first American president to commit to a major intervention—in Korea—without even the pretense of congressional approval. Because he had set forth no war aims, he could not resist Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s pressure to blunder into war with China. Because he had not obtained Congressional assent, he found himself alone when the war turned dangerous. If Truman were here to warn Trump, would he, or would anyone in 2017 Washington, even listen? They have not listened to Madison, or Gerry, or Ellsworth, or Mason.
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Related: On Trump's Syria Strategy, One Voice Is Missing: Trump's
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