Muhammad Ali’s True Patriotism
Muhammad Ali angered much of America by declaring “I ain’t got no quarrel with
the Vietcong” and refusing to fight in Vietnam, but his principled stand was
vindicated by history and is a lesson for today, says Ivan Eland.
By Ivan Eland
Although it is customary to say nice things about a person who has died,
Muhammad Ali has been rightly commended for not only his superb boxing career
but also his principled opposition to the then-popular Vietnam War. Unlike later
chair-borne hawks, such as Bill Clinton and Dick Cheney, Ali did not try to
evade the draft or get numerous college deferments to avoid service. He declared
that because of his religion, he would not fight against people who had done
nothing to him and bluntly said, “just take me to jail.”
Therefore, it is difficult to argue that Ali avoided the war for selfish
reasons, because the costs of non-compliance with the draft were substantial. If
the Supreme Court had not nullified his conviction 8-0, he would have served
five years in prison. Although he ultimately avoided losing his liberty, he had
to give up his heavyweight boxing title and experienced financial hardship as a
result.
At the time, Ali’s was not a popular stand, but he turned out to be right about
many things, just as the then unpopular civil rights heroes Rosa Parks and
Martin Luther King were. The war — in a faraway, insignificant country — turned
out to be a non-strategic quagmire in the competition with the Soviet Union
during the Cold War.
Of course, then-President Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) privately predicted that at
the time, but escalated the conflict anyway, so as not to be seen as a wimp
politically with an eye toward winning the 1968 election. The war killed 58,000
Americans, a few million Vietnamese, and drained equipment and resources from
the U.S. military, which it hollowed out for more important missions.
Like George W. Bush during the Iraq War and many other American presidents when
conflict has been afoot, LBJ essentially lied the United States into war by
saying that the North Vietnamese patrol boats had twice attacked a U.S. warship
off the coast of Vietnam. Even if the North Vietnamese did attack once, it was
in retaliation for the ships supporting secret raids on North Vietnam’s coast,
which LBJ just forgot to mention.
He also forgot to tell the American people that the Americans fired first in the
dust-up with the patrol boats. And when LBJ ordered U.S. bombing in retaliation
for these attacks, he was in such a hurry to get on prime-time TV that he
announced that the U.S. air attacks on North Vietnam had occurred before they
had even started.
The North Vietnamese, realizing this amazing reality, had their air defenses
ready when U.S. aircraft came overhead and inflicted unneeded casualties on U.S.
air forces. Subsequently, Congress passed the open-ended Gulf of Tonkin
resolution, which essentially let LBJ do whatever he wanted in Southeast Asia.
He, and his successor Richard Nixon, did.
Yet the Vietnam War was popular for a long time in America before the North
Vietnamese Tet Offensive in 1968 exposed LBJ’s lie that the United States was
winning the war. Wars that drag on, result in mounting U.S. casualties, and do
not appear to be for a worthy objective often eventually become unpopular at
home, as the similar unending battles with guerrillas in Afghanistan and Iraq
have become.
But why don’t Americans spot these turkeys in advance and just say “no!”? Why do
they wait until large amounts of blood and treasure have been futilely wasted to
call it quits? (We still can’t seem to admit that Afghanistan, Iraq, and now
Syria have been lost.)
One reason is that the American people almost always think patriotism means
giving the benefit of the doubt to the president, so much so nowadays that the
if the president asks Congress to approve a war, he thinks he needs to do so
only out of courtesy. Lately, we have not had very good luck with this method,
which has led to perpetual war in many Third World hellholes simultaneously.
We should go back to the Founders’ now seemingly out-of-fashion constitutional
requirement for Congress to declare war. But members of Congress, to avoid
taking any responsibility for a conflict, run into the shadows, even when a
president, such as Barack Obama, says he would like an authorization for war.
Even by approving the war, the Congress could at least constrain the war on
terror (even though it is also out of fashion now to label it as such) within a
specific geographical area or against certain terror groups — like maybe those
that have actually attacked the United States.
But many times in American history, both the Congress and the people have agreed
with ill-advised wars. Perhaps citizens should remember that in America,
originally “patriots” were not people who reflexively supported their
government, but those who instead went against it in support of society and its
values. Patriots in the American Revolution were Englishmen fighting for their
rights against their English King and Parliament.
So the country was founded on a very different concept of patriotism than has
taken hold nowadays. Patriotism has been turned on its head and is now
synonymous with reflexive nationalism — support for your government, no matter
what.
Muhammad Ali was a true patriot of the original variety when he just said “hell
no” to meddling in another country’s business that was unneeded and was, from
the beginning, unlikely to turn out well.
Ivan Eland is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace &
Liberty at the Independent Institute. Dr. Eland is a graduate of Iowa
State University and received an M.B.A. in applied economics and Ph.D. in
national security policy from George Washington University. He spent 15
years working for Congress on national security issues, including stints
as an investigator for the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Principal
Defense Analyst at the Congressional Budget Office.
Giving Obama Even More War Powers
As much as Republicans hate President Obama, their love of war seems to be
winning out as they ratchet up his request for powers to attack the Islamic
State, another sign that the Founders’ vision of restraining armed conflicts is
being lost, as Independent Institute’s Ivan Eland notes.
By Ivan Eland
Barack Obama, after six months of fighting against the brutal group ISIS, has
finally decided to ask for congressional approval of his war. He, like the
Bushes before him, maintained that he already had the authority to go to war but
asked for Congress’s permission only out of courtesy. And despite their often
blind hatred of the President, his Republican opponents want to give him even
more power than he wants to run his war.
The Republican love of unconstitutionally excessive executive power is curious;
because of unfavorable national demographic shifts, Republicans have a tough
road to winning the presidency back anytime soon. One would think a primarily
congressional party, such as theirs, would want to enhance their own power as
the expense of the Executive, except that Congress rarely wants to take any
responsibility for war these days, because of the fear that members might not
get re-elected if the conflict goes south. And in Afghanistan, Iraq (the first
time), and Libya, things did go south.
The Founders of the nation, were they here to see such arrogant usurpation by
imperial presidents of Congress’s constitutional war power, and Congress’s
willing abdication of it, would simply pass out. A few gray areas of the U.S.
Constitution exist, but the war power isn’t one of them.
The document placed most of the war powers, including declaring of war, even the
approval of lesser military action, the raising of armies, the maintenance of a
navy, and the funding and regulation of the armed forces and militia, with the
people’s branches of governments. The American Founders intentionally created
this unusual arrangement, because they did not like the militarism of the
European monarchs of the day, who took their countries to war on a whim and let
the costs in blood and added taxes fall to common citizens.
In the Founders’ original conception of their system of government, the
Executive was the commander-in-chief of the armed forces only after war had been
decided by the people’s branches and under whatever restrictions they imposed.
As the debate in the Constitutional Convention indicated, only in the extreme
case of the country facing imminent attack and the Congress being adjourned
could the president take military action without congressional approval; even
then he should seek a prompt authorization when possible.
Furthermore, as a court case early in the Republic’s history during John Adams’s
administration confirmed, the Founders envisioned only a narrow role for the
president as commander-in-chief, he was commander of the armed forces on the
battlefield, not the commander-in-chief of the nation, as he seemingly has
purported to be during the Bush and Obama administrations and other recent
presidencies.
Oh how far we have come from the Founders’ vision! Now we have an imperial
presidency, which has usurped much power from what was supposed to be the
premier branch of the federal government, the Congress, instead making the
Executive Branch dominant.
Although congressional power over the all-important federal budget began being
lost to the Executive Branch in the 1920s, congressional war power, perhaps
because of the clear intent of the Constitution and debates in the
Constitutional Convention, lasted until 1950, when Harry Truman refused to ask
for a congressional declaration of war for the Korean War. For the first time in
American history, Congress did not declare war for a major military action.
Truman’s transgression set a bad precedent. The Congress has since run from
declaring war for big conflicts and small. The legal and political implications
of declaring “war” apparently have become too scary for the people’s
representatives to exercise their constitutional duties.
In the next big war, Lyndon B. Johnson forgot to tell the Congress about
secretive U.S. raids on North Vietnam’s coast, and then exaggerated the North’s
alleged retaliatory attacks on the U.S. destroyers supporting those raids, in
order to get Congress to pass the open-ended Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. LBJ then
ran with the resolution and used it to justify a massive escalation of a land
war in that country. The Congress eventually repealed the resolution, but the
damage had been done.
The elder Bush declared that he had the fiat power to wage a huge war against
Saddam Hussein in the early 1990s, but that as a courtesy, he would ask Congress
to approve it. His son took a similar tack for the 2001 Authorization of the Use
of Military Force (AUMF) for the war on terror and for the 2002 authorization
for his invasion of Iraq.
After Truman’s bad precedent, most presidents didn’t even bother getting any
congressional approval for small wars: for example, Eisenhower’s invasion of
Lebanon in 1958, Reagan’s invasion of Grenada in 1983, the elder Bush’s invasion
of Panama in 1989, Clinton’s air war against Serbia over Kosovo in 1999, and
Obama’s air campaign against Libya in 2011.
Bush and Obama have both run illegal drone wars in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia
by stretching the 2001 AUMF, which authorized military action only on those
nations, organizations or individuals who perpetrated or assisted with the 9/11
attacks or harbored the attackers, not loosely “affiliated groups” as the media
keeps reporting.
Now Obama surprisingly has sent a request to Congress to seemingly limit his
authority to wage war against ISIS and “associated persons and forces,” by
restricting its duration to only three years and ruling out “enduring offensive
ground combat operations.”
Yet the proposed authorization would be much less restrictive than meets the
eye, because no geographical limitation is envisioned, “enduring offensive
ground combat operations” is still too nebulous a term, and as the flagrant
abuse of the even more specific 2001 AUMF showed, any president is likely to run
wild with any “associated persons and forces” language.
Because of the success of ISIS, many groups are popping up around the world,
claiming allegiance to bask in the group’s reflected glory, without posing much
of a threat to the United States. It is even questionable whether the main ISIS
group, which is mainly a regional threat to the Middle East, is much of a threat
to the United States.
If Congress has the courage to pass any approval of this questionable American
use of force, it should at minimum take out the “associated persons and forces”
language, limit the geographical scope of the fight, and be very specific about
what limited ground operations are authorized. Congress should also repeal the
2001 AUMF and the 2002 Iraq War authorizations because they are out of date, and
Obama will continue to abuse them, especially if Congress fails to agree on any
new resolution for fighting ISIS.
Ivan Eland is Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent
Institute. Dr. Eland has spent 15 years working for Congress on national
security issues, including stints as an investigator for the House Foreign
Affairs Committee and Principal Defense Analyst at the Congressional Budget
Office. His books include Partitioning for Peace: An Exit Strategy for Iraq The
Empire Has No Clothes: U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed, and Putting “Defense” Back
into U.S. Defense Policy.
Ducking War Responsibilities
Conservatives insist that they revere the U.S. Constitution, but congressional
Republicans as well as Democrats hastily fled Washington to hit the campaign
trail rather than vote up or down on authorizing new wars in Syria and Iraq, an
abdication of duty, says Independent Institute’s Ivan Eland.
By Ivan Eland
U.S. government officials recently began hyping the threat from a very small and
little-known terrorist group called Khorasan and then striking it in Syria.
Several of President Barack Obama’s aides told the media that airstrikes were
launched to foil an “imminent” terrorist attack, possibly using hidden
explosives to blow up aircraft. Yet other government officials seemed to pour
cold water on that assessment.
According to the New York Times, one anonymous senior official described the
Khorasan plot as only “aspirational” and said that the group had not seemed to
have established a concrete plan. Other officials, at least one of who was a
senior counterterrorism official, said that the plot was far from mature and
that no sign existed that the group had decided on the method of attack or the
time and target of it.
These divergent stories should alert us to the possibility that the old saying,
the first casualty of war is truth, is operating again (remember all the
falsehoods surrounding then-President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq?).
The Times then cited some experts as explaining this divergence by saying that
the Obama administration may have developed specific intelligence about the
location of the group’s leader, Muhsin al-Fadhli, and was trying to take
advantage of it to kill him.
While this explanation may or may not be true, targeting the group also
conveniently provides a rather lame excuse under international law and the U.S.
Constitution for launching airstrikes in Syria without congressional approval.
The administration had a marginally better legal excuse for striking targets of
the Islamic State (IS) group, its main adversary, in Iraq than it did in Syria.
The legal reasoning for attacking in Syria has been thin indeed. Under
international law, several reasons can exist for legally taking military action
within another country’s borders a United Nations Security Council resolution
approving an attack on the country, a request for help by that country, or self
defense on the attacking country’s part.
No U.N. Security Council resolution approving the war exists, but the Iraqi
government has requested help in beating back the IS group. Syria, although
secretly loving that the powerful United States is attacking its armed
opposition, doesn’t get along with the United States and has not formally
requested that its territory be attacked.
One convoluted line of reasoning used by the administration is not accepted my
many international legal scholars, that the United States is responding to a
request to defend Iraq and that Syria is “unable or unwilling” to stanch the
threat of fighters flowing into Iraq, thus allowing U.S. air strikes against
Syria.
That’s where the third excuse comes in. The United States needs to find some
self-defense rationale to attack Syria. Yet no one is alleging that IS is about
ready to attack the United States. In fact, many experts note that IS, despite
its clever anti-U.S. bluster to lure the United States into attacking it, is
more of a threat to the Middle East and neighboring countries than it is to U.S.
territory.
IS is focused primarily on establishing an Islamic state in Iraq and Syria
rather than attacking the United States. That’s where Khorasan comes in. The
very small group, like the much larger IS, is an offshoot of al-Qaeda, but seems
to be more interested in attacking U.S. targets.
However, a self-defense justification would require an imminent threat to
justify a pre-emptive attack to thwart any such strike. If no imminent threat
existed, any U.S. attack would be “preventive”; preventive war can be abused
(for example, Bush’s unprovoked invasion of Iraq) and is frowned on by the
international community.
Many conservatives, who purport to defend the original meaning of the U.S.
Constitution (but often abandon that ship when “patriotic” military action is
afoot), might correctly say that international law is less important than
following America’s governing document. However, even here an imminent threat is
also needed for the president to attack Syria.
Although President Obama has cited the congressionally passed Authorization of
the Use of Military Force (AUMF) of 2001 to attack the perpetrators of the 9/11
attacks and the congressionally approved authorization to use military force
against Iraq in 2002 as justifications for its current attacks on IS in Iraq and
Syria, this argument at best could justify strikes in Iraq, but not Syria.
As it is, even those justifications are thin indeed. Contrary to what is rather
casually reported in the American media, the AUMF of 2001 does not authorize
military action against al-Qaeda affiliates or former affiliates, such as
Khorasan and IS, respectively. The resolution authorizes military attacks only
on the perpetrators, enablers and hosts of the executors of the 9/11 attacks,
that is, the main al-Qaeda group and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Most al-Qaeda
affiliates originated long after 9/11 and had nothing to do with those attacks.
Administration officials have alleged that Khorasan leader Muhsin al-Fadhli was
a confident of Osama bin Laden and probably knew about the 9/11 attacks in
advance. Thus, the administration could claim that it was trying to assassinate
an enabler of the 9/11 attacks, but attacking the entire Khorasan and IS groups
under that rationale is highly suspect. And the administration has said that its
revised policy on targeted assassinations, which allows such killings only if a
person poses a “continuing and imminent threat” of attacks on Americans, does
not apply to the conflict in Iraq and Syria.
As for attacks on IS in Iraq, using the long outdated congressional
authorization to attack Saddam Hussein’s government (passed in 2002) to again
attack Iraq for entirely different purposes 12 years later is very questionable.
The Constitution’s Framers would have frowned on the use of one congressional
vote to endorse perpetual war.
The debates at the American Constitutional convention in 1787 seem to indicate
only one exception to the requirement for congressional approval of any
presidential military action, large or small: an imminent attack on the United
States that the president must counter immediately. Even then, the intention was
that when it was possible for Congress to convene, they should approve continued
military action by the president.
Thus, the U. S. government has little legal justification to attack Syria (and
really Iraq too) without fresh congressional authorization, unless an imminent
threat is afoot. In Iraq, Obama might have been justified in very limited air
strikes to protect U.S. diplomatic facilities (technically they are U.S. soil),
but those American attacks have gone way beyond that and need congressional
approval.
Thus, we see the administration’s need to find an imminent threat in Syria to
bolster the thin legal case for attacking that country. However, according to
the Framers’ original intent, as indicated by the proceedings at the
Constitutional Convention, even after the alleged imminent threat, al-Fadhli and
Khorasan, was neutralized, Congress would need to authorize further strikes in
Syria.
But one cannot blame the legal and constitutional shenanigans of Obama, just the
latest in a long line of presidents since Harry Truman to usurp Congress’
constitutional war power, for the entire problem. Instead of doing their
constitutional duty and going on record with a dangerous vote on the latest war
before an election, the cowardly Congress left town to campaign.
This atrocious behavior on the most important function that the nation’s
Founders gave Congress, taking the nation to war, is typical and is an
indication that Congress’ war power has been severely eroded by abdication as
well as by presidential usurpation.
At a bare minimum, Congress needs to vote on this war after the election, and
hopefully stop what is an internationally illegal and counterproductive war,
which just fires more Islamic radicalism and causes that movement to put the
United States needlessly in its crosshairs.
Ivan Eland is Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent
Institute. Dr. Eland has spent 15 years working for Congress on national
security issues, including stints as an investigator for the House Foreign
Affairs Committee and Principal Defense Analyst at the Congressional Budget
Office. His books include The Empire Has No Clothes: U.S. Foreign Policy
Exposed, and Putting “Defense” Back into U.S. Defense Policy.