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credit: Cameron Cardow, Ottawa Citizen
Wackydoodle sez: It fit when we issued it! |
The Current Occupant's speech to the nation about ISIS was so predictably reactionary that
US Person did not even bother to watch it. The proposed bombing campaign to be conducted on the soil of another sovereign nation without assent from Congress in accordance with the War Powers Act is both a violation of US and international law*. The use of US military power abroad is becoming so routine that our political leaders view any foreign situation that displeases them as a potential opportunity for "diplomacy by other means". The simple truth is that the POTUS does not have the power in law to protect Americans wherever they are. That is essentially the position taken by Russian President Putin who wants to protect ethnic Russians in Ukraine. The West is retaliating against Russia for his policy.
What the president has is a legal duty to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution". That document provides for cordinate control of war-making. POTUS is the "commander-in-chief" of US military forces, but Article I, Section 8 reserves the power to Congress to declare and finance wars which no amount of creative interpretation of the former term can alter. The War Powers Act was passed after Vietnam to correct the
degradation of this important constitutional provision. Incredibly, in his speech the former constitutional law professor told the American people, "I'm confident that I have the authorization that I need to protect the American people."
US Person asks about that bit of bravado: first, where was the vote* authorizing use of force as required by law, and two, how does attacking a international terrorist group abroad protect the American people? If anything, war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria will provoke an attempt to retaliate against the United States' homeland. Do our leaders really want that unintended consequence?
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| credit: Milt Priggee |
Nor is it redundant to mention that an overly broad, open-ended congressional authorization passed in the
hysterical aftermath of 9-11 substantially contributed to coaxing the ISIS jinn out of cauldron of post-Saddam political instability and Islamic extremism. Before the Charlatan's 2003 invasion and occupation there was no ISIS in Iraq. The murder of two American journalists by the jihadis is just that, two murders.
Brutal and
despicable surely, but
depraved murders happen everyday in America; they are hardly a sufficient justification for starting another war that will spread a sectarian conflict throughout the Middle East. America seems fatally prone to repeating its numerous mistakes trying to counteract international terrorism with military might. ISIS is not a threat to the United States until our
confused leadership makes it so by again inserting us into a foreign religious struggle. It is a mistake to take support for American re-involvement expressed by certain nations of the Islamic world as disinterested. These autocratic regimes all pursue their own regional agendas, and are willing to use our armed forces as proxies. American imperialists since the last world war have repeatedly looked for an excuse to apply military force because as a supposedly peace-loving democracy our country cannot do otherwise and still believe make its propaganda plausible. This attempt to reignite public anger over a single, spectacularly successful terror attack thirteen years ago is no coincidence.
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| credit: Daryl Cagle |
*Only the UN Security Council can authorize the use of military force against a member nation or on the territory of a member nation for mutual security reasons.