War and The American Presidency

This is a book that will forever contain, written with clutched pen and furrowed brow, some of the most annoyed annotations I have ever written. Beyond being boorish, repetitive, and for the most part not even well written, this book’s greatest fault was its inability to connect its scattered parts into any larger whole. I already have to read two other blogs for this class; I don’t need to be forced to stomach a third in printed form.  Rather than building much of a logical progression, the author just provides us with these segmented pieces of thoughts. And there are no sources! Some of the stuff is straightforwardly historical, so that’s fine or whatever, but what about the statement he makes on page 116 about how “the majority of the killing around the world is the consequence of religious disagreement”? That’s pretty bold. He says it because he wants to back up his statement that “terrorism…is the greatest current threat to civilization.” But…he just doesn’t prove that. As far as I can tell, the man just pulled that statement out of his ass, and I found it really off-putting. (Especially since I just went to this lecture by this Islamic studies scholar where he showed all these UN charts about how terrorism, religious and non-religious both, only accounted for 1/500 murders worldwide. And most of those were Iraq/Afghanistan [and thus war] related. Even accounting for religious persecution doesn’t make this statement any more viable. Is he counting every cultural conflict as a religious one? Look, I’ll stop harping on this now, but this statement is where he really lost me.)

            What is everyone else seeing in this thing that I’m missing? The New York Times, the Boston Globe, Washington Post Book World, the Chicago Tribune…everyone had these glowing things to say about it. *4/28/11 - remainder of paragraph edited out for politeness' sake.*

            K, well. I have to give this book a thesis. Now that I’m looking at it again, I guess he states one at the beginning. Or he at least states his purpose in writing this book. (which is…almost the same.) I just forgot about it as it went along because most of the stuff he talked about wasn’t relevant. Schlesinger Jr. wrote War and the American Presidency because American’s aren’t a tabula rasa, and he wanted to give a historical background for the US-led invasion of Iraq. But, as previously stated, it just provided him with a license to talk about whatever he wanted. Like that chapter about the Electoral College. (the majority of CH 5) Or that bit about how Truman and Roosevelt were sub-par historians. (P 124)

            So, Schlesinger’s goal was to “supply the historical background for current controviersies in the hope that history might throw some light on choices that are ours, or at least our masters’, to make.” Feeling that no light was shed? I personally assert that he failed. Look, I don’t really want to talk about this book anymore, especially after writing that seven-page revenge essay, so I’ll just end by saying something nice: it was quick and easy to read, and it gave me something to do on a really long plane ride besides watch an insipid romantic comedy.

            

Justice Jackson's Twilight Zone

According to Jackson, there are three varying levels of power that a president may possess in a given situation, and all are dependent upon his relationship with Congress. A president’s power is at its peak when it has the support of congressional authorization. It is in a “twilight zone” in the middle when congress neither approves nor denies, and it is “at its ebb” when the President takes measures that are in opposition to the will of congress. After he outlines these three levels of presidential power (in their relation to congressional approval) Jackson makes clear his belief that Truman was acting unconstitutionally in seizing the steel mills. He says that this wasn’t even in the twilight zone of ‘maybe it’s acceptable, maybe it’s not.’ This was an action Congress considered and purposefully chose not to give to the president, so he was acting in his power at it’s lowest ebb, and it was totally outside the boundaries of acceptability.

            Personally, I thought Justice Jackson’s train of thought was a little confusing. He said (I think) that since congress was so willing to authorize the president all kinds of emergency powers anyway, that there was really no strong argument for the president acting without their explicit approval. To quote, he said he was “quite unimpressed with the argument that we should affirm possession of [emergency powers] without statute. Such power either has no beginning or no end. If it exists, it need to submit to no legal restraint.” This is perplexing because it seems to run counter to Justice Jackson’s previous statement about the “twilight zone” of power. Is he just arguing that the idea of the ‘twilight zone’ is a bad one? Is he acknowledging it’s existence but castigating the president for engaging in it? Or is his disapproval relevant only for this specific incident? Because he seems darn disapproving in general…

            Compared to the time spent on congress, the space Justice Jackson devotes to talking about the Supreme Court’s relation with the president is very brief. In short, Jackson believes that the president is “relatively immune from judicial review.” I don’t know what his evidence is to back this up exactly? Truman didn’t keep the steel mills in possession of the US govt after the Supreme Court ruled against it, so they do seem to have some power. But Jackson, in this poetic but slightly martyred tone, sets down the main duty of the Supreme Court as ‘holding the line’ against Presidential encroachment upon the other branches. “Such institutions may be destined to pass away,” he says, “but it is the duty of the court to be last, not first, to give them up.” So basically, the growth of presidential power is this massive, unstoppable hurricane, but the Supreme Court just has to put up sandbags and hope for the best. Or something.

            Oh! Also: checks and balances. Jackson pretty much thinks the president is outside of them. He’s reached this meta-level beyond being bound by them anymore. Thanks to his “prestige as head of state and his influence on public opinion, he exerts a leverage upon those who are supposed to check and balance his power which often cancels out their effectiveness.” Jeez. This is a really depressing view of the situation. Apparently the US president is basically a demi-god who does as he wills, subservient to no man. And thanks to the rise of political parties, Jackson says the president has this whole new way to supplement executive power. Yet one more tool to subvert constitutional checks and balances and get his way!

            I think I actually agree with Justice Jackson? (Except for the fact that I’m slightly confused by him.) I just think he’s being a little hyperbolic here. I’m anxious to read your guys’ blogs, cuz I feel like I really missed the point of this one.

Libya vs. Kosovo: the Rationale of War

Doctrines are the province of ideologues and starry-eyed optimists. They’re grand, sweeping statements that inevitably and immediately beg to be broken.  Truman ‘s was “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation.” And then there’s Kennedy, who was willing to “pay any price, bear any burden… to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” Lovely words, great quotes.  But that’s all they are. No president has the resources, the political capital, or the ability to tackle every injustice going on in the world. They all have to pick their battles.  I mean, did Kennedy remove all the dictators from the world? Not exactly. I’m glad he supports liberty. Cool. He’s the President of the United States, after all. But that part about bearing any burden and paying any price just rings false. (Maybe people in the 60s hadn’t developed cynicism yet.)

It seems to me that Obama’s only problem here is that he was too honest. No, he doesn’t have a doctrine, because you can’t create very many useful guidelines for all the possible parameters of war. And making statements like Truman’s and Kennedy’s just makes everyone critical later when you can’t follow through on them. What Obama did instead was take into consideration three things: level of international support for the mission, need for humanitarian assistance, and level of threat to American values/interests. Having looked at all that, he determined that it was imperative we act in Libya. To me, these seem like the major things one would always have to weigh. (other than in the instance of a direct attack on us or a pressing national security thing. Those are more straightforward.)  It’s not a doctrine; it’s a careful examining of the situation and the key factors that make it up.

In addition to a careful examination of the present factors at play, presidential decision-making is also influenced by past foreign policy events. Obama made reference to “avoiding another Iraq,” and Clinton pressed for action to “prevent a situation like the one in Bosnia.” Past failures seem to rest heavily in decision-making, as leaders attempt to avoid the mistakes of the past.

Obama and Clinton, in addition to both being ‘doctrine free’, had a lot of similarities in the speeches they gave. Both noted their international mandates and broad coalitions of support. Both rested the need for action on humanitarian grounds- brutal dictators harming defenseless civilians. Both stressed the effect turmoil in this country would have in surrounding nations. In Obama’s case it was the “peaceful but fragile” transitions going on in Egypt and Tunisia, and in Clinton’s it was the newly independent eastern European democracies.  They did differ slightly on this argument: Clinton took it further, saying that the US needed to act now, so that they wouldn’t have to act to stop a much wider, worse conflict in the future. Clinton framed his argument as “action as a preventative measure.” Obama, on the other hand, admitted that our national security interests were not directly at stake. Rather, in allowing the situation in Libya to continue, it would be our values that were at stake.

So, to conclude. Since there’s no Obama or Clinton doctrine, it’s not easy to tell how they’d react to specific situations. Would the international community support their action? Because not being seen as the world’s sole policeman is important to both of them. Would direct US interests be at stake? I.E. Does this nation pose an imminent threat to the US? Is this nation harming American citizens in some fashion that calls for military action? Can we afford it/ do we have the resources for it? This is the major kicker, here. There may be conflicts in ten middle eastern countries right now, but we’ve still got troops who are pretty busy in Iraq and Afghanistan (and probably in Pakistan.) We don’t simply have the ability to go try and overthrow every world leader that we think is bad for his country. *shrug * Sorry guys, but I’m not really interested in pretending to moral high ground b.s. I don’t want us to sit idly by while tragedy occurs, but I don’t want us to bankrupt our country in a futile attempt to fix the world. (also, I still want our military budget to be MUCH SMALLER. But that’s another argument) And I think Obama agrees with me. He said in his speech that the well-being of the American people needs to be our north star, our guidance in what to do in cases like this. And well, he’s right. That’s how nation states work. They protect their own people, get their own houses in order first, and then they do what they can with the bounty they’ve been given.

Edit: final thought. I do think that obama as a president is willing to be bolder in acting internationally than Clinton was, but I don’t have a good explanation for that. Maybe just all the practice he already got with running two wars in the middle east? But, as he pointed out, it took Clinton over a year to act in Kosovo. The international community came together over Libya in a month.