Clogging the War Machine - David Cole

[ashling]

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/sep/19/syria-clogging-war-machine/

Over the last few days, critics have called President Barack Obama weak, indecisive, rudderless, and even a threat to the presidency for not ordering an immediate military strike on Syria. By seeking congressional approval for a strike, they claim, he risked a debilitating political defeat at home. And now, by allowing the UN a chance to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons program, he has given a victory to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. He should have just launched the missiles. That’s what a real American president would have done.

These claims are made not only by such persistent Obama naysayers as Michael Gerson and Charles Krauthammer. Obama’s own former defense secretary, Robert Gates, recently argued that going to Congress was a mistake because if Congress had said no, “it would weaken him. It would weaken our country. It would weaken us in the eyes of our allies, as well as our adversaries around the world.”

In fact, what Obama did was adhere to the Constitution—and by doing so, he has now opened the way for a much better resolution of the issue. The Constitution’s framers gave the power to declare war to Congress rather than to the president precisely because they knew that legislators would be less prone to go to war. George Mason, one of the framers, explained that he was against giving the president the power to go to war without Congress because he “was for clogging rather than facilitating war; but for facilitating peace.”

Going to Congress did clog war. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee took up the matter, and approved a resolution permitting military force, but authorization would have required separate debates and votes in both houses of Congress. In the breathing space created by this process, a possible diplomatic solution was forged. A proposal by Russia to bring Syria’s chemical weapons under international control—one that would not have occurred had the administration gone ahead with strikes without waiting for Congress—has now led to an agreement between Russia and the US to identify and eliminate Assad’s chemical weapons without military force. That agreement in turn has led to an effort to secure a UN Security Council resolution. Meanwhile, as an initial step, the Syrian regime has agreed to bring its chemical weapons program under the Chemical Weapons Convention.