Who Decides If We Go to War?

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In my post on Fred Fleitz’ Iran propaganda the other day, merciless asked how we can stop the Iran War. Which got me thinking of a different question–who decides if we go to war? There are a couple of factors playing into this that I think we’d all do well to suss out–because if we’re going to prevent this, we need to start working.

Chief among the factors is one I’ve been thinking about–and that Glenn Greenwald raises today. Does Bush believe he needs Congress’ agreement to go to war?

A somewhat overlooked part of President Bush’s Press Conferencethis week was his comments strongly suggesting that he believes only he– and not the Congress — has the power to decide when the war in Iraqends, as well as whether we will begin a new war with Iran. All of thedebates we are having about what to do about Iran and Iraq aremeaningless if the President believes (as he seems to) that all powerto decide these matters rests with him.

I agree with Greenwald. The Cheney Administration has probably already worked out the logic by which they go to war under the AUMF voted for Afghanistan. After all, going to war in Iran is just connecting the dots between war in Afghanistan and war in Iraq.

I’ve got a sliver of hope that Congress would take proactive action if they foresaw Bush doing this. Just a sliver, mind you. But if John Warner, Chair of the Armed Services Committee in the Senate, starts pushing the notion that we need a new authorization to use force if our troops are to stay in Iraq in the middle of civil war, then it’s clear they have at least begun thinking about these things.

How Many Terrorists Does One F-16 Get You?

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Fred Kaplan tries to teach BushCo a lesson about cooperating with unsavory regimes by pointing out the central role Pakistan played in yesterday’s big terrorist bust.

There’s a broader lesson here, and it speaks to the Bushadministration’s present jam throughout the Middle East and in otherdanger zones. If the British had adopted the same policy toward dealingwith Pakistan that Bush has adopted toward dealing with, say, Syria orIran (namely, it’s an evil regime, and we don’t speak with evilregimes), then a lot of passenger planes would have shattered andspilled into the ocean, hundreds or thousands of people would havedied, and the world would have suddenly been plunged into very scaryterritory.

This is not one of Kaplan’s strongest articles. He makes an important point about our relationship with Syria and Iran, sure. But to play up BushCo’s short-sightedness on Syria and Iran, Kaplan pretends that only Britain cooperated with Pakistan’s ISI on this terrorist bust. Kaplan thereby ignores that the US–in both this bust and the war on terror more generally–has precisely the kind of relationship he would advocate, one cognizant of the fact that, "the concept of morality in international relations is more complex than President Bush sometimes seems to recognize." Indeed, I have a suspicion that Pakistan’s involvement here may raise some very challenging questions about our cooperation with them on the war on terror.

Consider how Pakistan itself describes its involvement in this terrorist bust.

More Fog about the Fog of War

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I feel like I’m watching a ping pong game being played over this giant monster, about to raise its head and knock over the entire ping pong table.

On Wednesday, the WaPo broke the news (a mere two years old now) that the 9/11 Commission strongly suspected that Pentagon officials lied about their actions on 9/11.

Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concludedthat the Pentagon’s initial story of how it reacted to the 2001terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to misleadthe commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog ofevents on that day, according to sources involved in the debate.

Suspicionof wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secretmeeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring thematter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, accordingto several commission sources. Staff members and some commissionersthought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable causeto believe that military and aviation officials violated the law bymaking false statements to Congress and to the commission, hoping tohide the bungled response to the hijackings, these sources said.

Perhaps that scoop was tied to the imminent publication of a much more extensive Vanity Fair article, based on the tapes from NORAD. Perhaps both scoops are tied to the imminent publication of a book by Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, which will describe the discrepancy.

The tapes, the author of the Vanity Fair article, Michael Bronner, says, make NORAD look pretty good.