All power to the president! — In
1789, the U.S. Constitution gave Congress the power to declare war. In 2002,
Congress gave that power away, to George W. Bush.
Congress succumbed to the president's theory that it is appropriate for the
United States to mount a military attack on the government of another country,
provided only that the president believes that country is a threat to the United
States, and that the president need not explain to the American people, to
Congress, or to anyone at all why he believes the nation faces a foreign threat.
In the process, Congress also ceded to the president the power to take away the
inalienable rights of Americans, guaranteed by the Constitution, provided, again,
that the president believes the country is threatened.
On the face of it, George W. Bush is the most powerful president in American
history, with greater personal power than any other president, including Woodrow
Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, who presided during world wars, and even Abraham
Lincoln, who presided over the Civil War, the nation's most horrible calamity by
a wide margin.
He managed to get this power despite the fact that the United States faces no
serious military challenge from any other nation — in fact, when the United
States is by a wide margin the most powerful government in the world. No other
government can even challenge U.S. military superiority. The U.S. has fought
several "small" wars in the past two decades with hardly a casualty, imposing a
new government in Haiti, deposing a government in Yugoslavia, expelling an
occupying military force in Kuwait, working its will on most of Iraq, destroying
a government in Afghanistan and installing in its place a puppet state, kept in
power by an occupying U.S. military force. It has even invaded another nation and
kidnapped its head of state, hauling him to the United States and charging him
with breaking an American law while outside U.S. jurisdiction, then convicting
him and sentencing him to a long prison term.
George Bush has managed to do all this because a tiny handful of Islamic
terrorists discovered what sensible people have always known: that people who are
willing to give up their lives can kill other people. This has always been the
case and it always will be. The fact has been forgotten that the government,
through its inattention to airline security, its construction of a building
particularly susceptible to attack by air, and its fostering an ethic of giving
in to the demands of hijackers rather than challenging them, enabled this attack
to succeed.
And add to the list of forgotten facts the following: that attacks like those
on Sept. 11 could not succeed again because passengers and crews will not again
surrender control of an aircraft to a small number of lightly armed men, that
there is no evidence of any relationship between the Sept. 11 terrorists and the
three nations that comprise Bush's "axis of evil" and the fact that the three
nations are in no way an "axis" of anything.
All most Americans can think about, it seems, is that a handful of Muslim men
killed nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001. The threat of sudden, violent death
is mesmerizing. Any response seems reasonable.
If the president needs to do away with our constitutional rights . . . well,
that's a small price to pay. And if the president wants to attack another country
because he says he believes it is a credible threat to us . . . well, what the
hell, he ought to be allowed to do so, even if he won't tell us, or even the
people we've elected to Congress, what evidence he has for doing so. After all,
war isn't such a bad thing. Practically no Americans die in wars, and those that
do mostly die in accidents.
It's easy to see why Congress abandoned its responsibilities and converted the
president into an emperor. Most members of Congress are spineless people who are
concerned mainly with being re-elected. And they can all read the polls.
But I do not think the American Republic is dead. It is only sleeping. The
president's support is a mile wide but an inch deep. Congress can stop the war
any time it pleases, simply by refusing to appropriate the funds needed to
prosecute it. The courts can declare the president's usurpations unconstitutional
anytime they please. Of course, neither Congress nor the courts will intervene
until people change their views, and this will probably not happen until the
costs of the war become higher.
The French and British tolerated their governments' wars of empire, which
included some of the most brutal and hideous acts of terrorism in the history of
the world, so long as the costs were low, so long as the wars were fought by
professional soldiers and adventurers eager for spoils, so long as the people
subjugated could be robbed and exploited to pay for the cost of subjugating them.
Citizens of the Soviet Union tolerated their government's wars against their
neighbors until the costs began to include their sons and they began to realize
that their government was making their lives poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Americans were happy to prosecute the war in Vietnam until the costs got out of
control, until the war began to cost them their sons, conscripted into the
killing fields of southeast Asia, and began to cost them their money, through a
ten percent income tax surcharge.
One thing that governments do very well is obscure the relationship between
cause and effect. Like any magician, however amateur, governments are adept at
misdirection. Right now few Americans have any real idea of what the preparations
for war are costing them, either directly (through the taxes they pay and the
depreciation of their dollar-denominated assets) or indirectly (though the
depressing effect that higher taxes have on economic activity). Americans have
wasted hundreds of billions of dollars in their reaction to the events of Sept.
11, in millions of ways great and small, through taxes, through greater
regulation, through malinvestment of time and money.
Sadly, the most likely way that the American Empire will come undone and the
Republic restored will be the way in which other empires have come undone: it
will grow so corrupt that it cannot sustain itself. Power corrupts, as Lord Acton
observed, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
America has been a singularly fortunate land, thanks to the cussedness of its
people and its republican tradition. When its government has gotten out of
control, the traditions of republican government and individual rights have
reasserted themselves, in the wholesale dismantling of the state in the Gilded
Age that followed the Civil War, the tax cuts and inactivist government of
Harding and Coolidge after the Great War, the GOP's resurgence after the
depression-and-war imperialism of Franklin Roosevelt, and a similar resurgence
after the despotism of Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam War and "Great Society."
The question is when the next resurgence will happen, and how much will we
suffer before it does. — R.W. Bradford
