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Never Learning from the Past The libraries of the world are filled with books devoted to history and new ones are published on any almost daily basis, but if their lessons are ignored, it condemns nations and the peoples of the world to horrors that increase with the evolving technology of death.
"If there was a single moment in the twentieth century when it might have been different, this was the moment." The gathering in Paris that followed the end of World War I and the defeat of Germany, the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires did not merely fail to insure peace; it set in motion the events leading to World War II, the conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, and the tinderbox that is today’s Middle East. Most Americans, if they know anything about the last century, may associate the event that brought together the United States, England, France, Japan, and representatives of colonial and emerging nations with President Woodrow Wilson’s dream of creating a League of Nations. It was his dream to create an organization that would enforce international laws. WWI was to be "the war to end all wars." With the exception of the hapless Herbert Hoover, the U.S. has not had such a dangerously naïve, arrogant, and failed presidency until Jimmy Carter. Following the end of World War II, another such effort was made with the establishment of the United Nations. It has proven to be every bit the failure as the League and infinitely more corrupt. It took only twenty years for Germany, joined by fascist Italy and imperial Japan, to plunge the world into war again. That is failure on a spectacular level. Specific to both the League and the UN is the fact that both were structured to insure that the world powers then and now, would hopefully control their own worst instincts and those of other nations. Just as the handful of men who shaped the Versailles Treaty sought to serve their nation’s self-interests and set the stage for their dominance of world affairs, the UN Security Council serves this same purpose today. Despite the UN, only the muscular U.S. determination to keep Korea from total Soviet domination insured its division between the insanely dangerous North and the astonishingly prosperous South, but it was the foolish U.S. assumption of France’s colonial control of Vietnam that would lead to the military and political defeat of the United States that still influences current foreign policy. In the early decades of the 1900s, the enemy was Bolshevism, the global ambitions of Marxist Communism that was being played out in the former czarist Russia by Lenin and Stalin. At the meeting in Paris, this threat to the West, combined with the desire to divvy up Germany’s colonial possessions and the Ottoman Empire, dominated the proceedings. Nations were created in Europe as a buffer against the emerging Soviet Russia. Men who knew little or nothing of its history or population created other nations in the Middle East. Today Soviet Russia is a failed state and many of its satellites in Eastern Europe have joined the European Union and even NATO. Even avowedly communist nations like China practice capitalism in recognition of the failure that communist and/or socialist economic policies invariably produce. Until that change, however, millions died. The new threat to the world is Islamofascism and, thanks to the decisions of 1919, its locus is in nations such as Iraq, Lebanon, the former Palestine protectorate, and Iran. It had been funded by Saudi Arabia and led by a former Saudi, Osama bin Laden, despite the threat it poses to their obscene wealth. The Saudis fund other fundamentalist organizations that have been identified as supporting terrorism. The gathering in Paris virtually ignored Feisal ibn Hussein, a Bedouin sheik who allied himself with the British in order to secure all of Arabia. His advisor, the famed Lawrence of Arabia, would betray Feisal to further Britain’s plans for the region and accommodate France’s intention to retain and expand its colonial interests there. Chaim Weizmann, who had devoted his life to the creation of Israel, also attended the Paris conference. Having secured the support of the British, a Palestinian protectorate based on the Balfour Declaration, became part of the conference’s legacy. With extraordinary prescience, Lord Peel noted that, "an irrepressible conflict has arisen between two national communities within the narrow bounds of one small country. There is no common ground between them. Their national aspirations are incompatible." To this day, Israel’s Jews have been unable to find peace with the descendents of the Palestine Mandate’s Arabs. Peoples of different ethnic, religious, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds were simply thrown together by the great powers of 1919. In the Depression that followed, the efforts to contain Communism, and the desire for self-determination by a polyglot of peoples in Europe, Russia, Asia, and the Middle East were put on a course that would erupt into World War II and the wars that have been fought since. Emerging out of both great wars, the United States became the acknowledged superpower, both economically and militarily. It is now engaged in a largely unilateral war in the Middle East to contain and destroy Muslim ambitions that rival those of the Communists.
The divisions between liberal and conservative political leaders in the United States oddly resemble those of the idealistic, but failed dreams of Wilson, and the vastly expanded federal government of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They compete with those of the Bush administration that favored military intervention, the expansion of FDR’s centralized government powers over those of the states, and the embrace of international organizations. Reality has intruded on both political factions, neither of which appears to have learned anything from the failures and horrors that proceeded from the Versailles Treaty. Diplomacy still does not hold much promise in the face of fanatically held beliefs. The brutality of war, however, does impose a peace of sorts, if only for a short while between new conflicts. As the year winds down, please consider making a donation to the Center to insure that we can keep you informed in 2008, a critical year in which a national election will be held. The stakes are very high, but your donation can be any size you can afford. Don’t forget to visit our daily blog and to tell your friends about it too.
The answer is that no President has that right. Article 1, Section 7 of the U.S. Constitution specifically states that Congress alone has the responsibility "to declare war." It further adds that Congress should "raise and support Armies" and "To provide and maintain a Navy." It limited the appropriation of funds for these purposes to two years, thus requiring Congress to evaluate whether to pursue further military action. That said, no Congress since the commencement of World War II has formally declared war. Instead, one Congress after another has declined this responsibility in favor of ceding greater powers to wage war to the Executive branch of government. That was not the intention of the men who wrote the Constitution, but it should also be said they could never have envisioned a world in which a group of terrorists flew commercial jets into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. In late October, four Congressmen announced the introduction of H.J. Res.53, the Constitutional War Powers Resolution. It would specifically prohibit the president from entering into future hostilities without congressional action with the exception to "repel and retaliate for an attack on the United States, repel an attack on U.S. troops, or protect and evacuate U.S. citizens." This goes beyond the War Powers Resolution of 1973 that requires the president to consult with Congress within 60 days of armed hostilities. If Congress does not authorize his action, he is required by law to remove U.S. forces from action. This seems more political than practical. The fact is presidents have been taking the nation into war with little more than a nod to Congress since the days of the Korean War. Throughout the 1990s, there were many military actions taken by the Clinton Administration that cited UN resolutions or NATO support. Based in part on the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act, President Bush asked for and received Congressional consent. Though a long and increasingly unpopular conflict, events in Iraq are tending toward achieving a stable situation. Instability is going to be a fairly constant situation for a very long time to come. Currently Pakistan is in turmoil. Turkey has troops on Iraq’s northern border with a view to invading to stop a Communist Kurdish organization. Afghanistan is still fighting the Taliban. Somalia remains unstable. Iran is seeking nuclear weapons and, in the Far East, Myanmar recently and brutally put down demands for an end to its military dictatorship. This list is a long one. In general, the present enemy is a loose, but seemingly vast group of militant Muslims seeking to impose that religion on the rest of the world. Recent reports suggest that al Qaeda is being weakened by not just our efforts, but by those in the nations where they exist. When Osama bin Laden can’t poke his nose out of the tent for fear of having his head blown off, I’d call that progress. Some of that progress has to be credited to the muscular approach that President Bush took after 9/11. Chasing the Taliban and al Qaeda out of Afghanistan had wide support. Many argued against invading Iraq and have since concluded that the reasons cited were specious. The result is an American public that is sharply divided and worried that the President will take military action against Iran that might prove to be as bad a situation as the U.S. encountered in Iraq. The real question is whether an even worse situation would exist if Iran’s nuclear ambitions are not thwarted? The result, also, are some astoundingly low popularity ratings—if one can call them that—for both the President and the Congress, with Congress barely receiving an 11% pat on the back. Much of this can be attributed to the intense partisanship that ignores many issues of importance to voters. Our system of government depends on compromise. The Constitution’s "checks and balances" are intended to slow the decision-making process so that all sides of an issue could be examined and that a general public consensus could be achieved. No consensus. No action. President Bush, with Vice President Cheney’s support, clearly intended to acquire as much power as possible for the presidency. He signs legislation and then issues "signing statements", letters to the effect that he does not feel bound by it and will not enforce it. That is unconstitutional. The 1973 War Powers Act will determine whether the President authorizes air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities. That nation certainly understands that it has been repeatedly warned in clear language. The critical factor will be whether, like Saddam Hussein, the ayatollahs who run Iran will underestimate American resolve. Despite Bush’s airy reference to World War III, neither this nation, nor any other wants to precipitate a global confrontation. What the great powers want is stability. If that means limited military action, then whether it’s Kosovo or Tehran, that’s what will occur. And what America needs is a larger armed force, not a failure of nerve.
©
2007 Alan Caruba. |
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A book that should be mandatory reading for all the current and aspiring leaders of the world is David A. Andelman’s "A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today." 
It is significant that a lot of Americans are worried that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are plotting to attack Iran. Is war the only way to deal with an evil regime that even many Iranians hate? And, more to the point, since when did the President of the United States have the constitutional right to declare a war?