.
Are you telling us now, that your ‘possibilities’ were intended to be ‘motives’ and there are more than the either/or possibilities you offered us?
Many supported it because it logically reigned in Bush more than other options for killing and maiming Iraqis would do. See what TonyS explains below to Ravenman. There is merit to the concept that Bush would start a war sooner and without a UN last try at inspections, and that it was just as important if not more important to tie Bush to inspections.
The UAMF that passed tied Bush to diplomatic efforts although I doubt that you expect that it did.
I can’t help you on that, because the Commander in Chief’s word means little to you when we ask to apply it to a document that gives the president the authority to decide whether use of force is necessary. And there is the pass you give the president that you also deny.
Clearly they weren’t correct, were they? Given the outcome, and that Bush was clearly spoiling for a war; and tellingly, citing reasons that went far beyond compliance with WMD inspections.
Agreed.
It’s not like we have 8 oz. of blame to go around and have to be stingy. Let’s blame everyone who’s blameworthy, which includes Bush AND much of Congress.
What was Bush’s motive, in your opinion, for ordering the invasion?
Which means not minimizing the background to that decision.
The U.S. isn’t party to the International Criminal Court, and even if it was, Bush’s acts wouldn’t fall under their jurisdiction. The crime of aggression doesn’t come under ICC jurisdiction until 2017, and:
That ratification by 30 states still hasn’t come, so Bush’s acts are too long ago to qualify.
As for an Iraqi court, hell no.
I’m saying that there were two motives to vote yes on the war resolution: either the Congressperson thought it was the best way available to solve the Iraq WMD problem, OR they thought it wasn’t and voted yes anyway.
Given that we’re speaking about over a hundred individuals, it could be that someone voted yes accidentally, or sold their vote for cash, or was drunk. I think the more likely explanation is the one neatly summarized by Kepler1571:
Someone who voted yes because they believed in the merit of the resolution erred. Someone who voted yes when they didn’t believe the resolution had merit is a scoundrel. I don’t care which Congressman was in which category, because either way they must face their share of blame for the war.
Are you aware of the UN inspections that took place after the Democrats you call spineless voted to authorize war if that diplomatic effort failed?
With all due respect to TonySinclair, I don’t find the War Powers Act argument credible. There was no chance Bush would invade on that basis. The war resolution gave his invasion legitimacy. Unless a U.S. aircraft was actually shot down, and probably not even then, Bush invading over some potshots would have led to a massive outcry, and quite possibly impeachment.
I’m familiar with the document. The problem is that it gave sole power to determine whether diplomatic efforts had failed to…George W. Bush.
Anyone’s word should mean little in such circumstances; again, that’s part of why we have separation of powers. Government doesn’t run on trust, it runs on statutes and powers.
I don’t know what that means.
Drama. Bush was conflicted having many oddball reasons personally for confronting SH including some variation of being on a messianic mission to save the world from terrorism.
But what made him pull the trigger when the prospect of peaceful disarmament was clear was drama. The glory of tanks rolling into Baghdad to free oppressed people in a military action that last a month or two and be over.
The threat of WMD was not really on his mind by March 2003. Disarming Iraq peacefully was flat wine of which Great War Presidents do not imbibe.
Anybody’s guess really. Thats my take.
Indeed. A good & succinct explanation of the state of affairs at the time.
Though I repeat, there wasn’t much need for hindsight since it was pretty much all out in the open. Barring the so-called “super-doooper-for-some-eyes-only-under-penalty of death for disclosing,” Intelligence secrets. Which, of course, was also a bunch of Bushshit.
The point is that he would not have invaded over the potshots; as far as the public and press was concerned, he would have invaded over the horrifying threat of the WMDs that Iraq was preparing to unleash on the US (or smuggle to al Qaeda), before the smoking gun could become a mushroom cloud. The potshots would just have been his legal cover, and would have been more than enough to prevent impeachment.
Besides, any talk of impeachment is ludicrous, when the Republicans controlled both houses. Depending on how much cover the vote on the October AUMF gave to Democrats, Bush might have had an even stronger majority by November than he actually ended up with, if more Dems had voted “no.”
I honestly don’t understand how anyone can think that a public, press, and Congress who didn’t raise a massive outcry/call for impeachment over his actual legal figleaf for invasion (that nothing short of war could protect the US, which was patently false), would do so over a reason for invasion that was probably true (albeit IMO insufficient).
In fact, Congress has historically been so spineless that I doubt he would have even needed to invoke the War Powers Resolution. It was passed in 1973 (over Nixon’s veto), and although the US has taken military action many times since then without a declaration of war, the WPR has never been invoked. Not because it is tough to meet its conditions, but because Presidents see it as a restriction on their powers, not an unleashing. They don’t want to set a precedent of relinquishing one iota of the war-making power that they see as their constitutional right as Commander-In-Chief.
Given the shameful lack of fact-checking by the “liberal” media during 2002, I think it’s entirely likely that had the AUMF failed, Bush would merely have amped up the WMD publicity campaign, and without UN inspectors to prove that Iraq was no danger, he could easily have exploited, provoked, or faked an incident that would have resulted in broad support of an invasion. And once the troops are under fire, the public, press, and Congress almost always fall in line.
That was the intent. Colin Powell worked for Bush. Bush was the one, not a bazillion Congress members, who would diplomatically drive the push to get the UN to act. Bush demanded the AUMF prior to going full out to the UN. Powell gave Bush credibility that Bush did not deserve - we found out later.
But in the mind of many Dem Senators that UN push with Powell involved had merit. I’m talking at the time with what was known.
You can disagree, but there is nothing that makes you right at the moment in time when people had to. Your advantage if 20+20 hindsight to criticize a difficult vote does not cut it with my review of all factors involved.
Tony: So why did Bush bother seeking the AUMF? This is not something Congress cooked up. Why did he need the AUMF to threaten SH with in the first place?
TonySinclair: I started to type an in-depth response, and then decided it wasn’t worth it. No, I do not believe that George Bush would have invaded on the basis of attacks on planes over the NFZ. Why? Because Bush asked for an authorization for war based upon WMD, and the mention in that resolution of attacks on our pilots barely rates seven words.
Plus, one has got to be the biggest pushover in the world to react thusly:
Alternate World Bush: “I want to invade Iraq. Authorize it or I’ll do it on my own under flimsy legal circumstances!”
Pushover Congress: “Wow, if he invades on his own we’ll be in a mess of trouble! We will authorize anything he wants!”
There is no way on earth that I will ever agree that Pushover Congress is acting prudently in that scenario.
The principal problem with the “Inspections were working until Bush lied about them not working” argument is that the law authorized Bush, and him alone, to exercise his own, independent, unfettered judgment as to whether they were working. Personally, I think Bush really did think there was WMD in Iraq: in essence, he was caught up in his own echo-chamber. The war resolution specifically empowered Bush to come up with his own assessment of the situation, no matter how divorced from reality, and made his opinion alone the dispositive decision on whether war was necessary. You may not like Bush’s decision, but he was exercising the precise power that you are happy that Congress gave to him.
The difference between dealing with a Bush decision to invade on the pretext of stopping attacks on US aircraft and the Congress giving Bush the full legal and constitutional authority to invade if Bush simply felt it was necessary is not quite night and day, but it is a difference between noon and twilight.
If Bush proposed to invade on March 19 on the basis of a hypothetical attack on a US airplane on March 18, Congress could reach its own conclusion as to whether that was a proportional response to the threat. (Regardless of the War Powers Resolution, the US is still subject to the law of war in that actions in self-defense must be proportional to the threat, see the Caroline Affair.) But as it happened, Congress authorized Bush to issue his own personal opinion on whether to attack without knowledge of whether there would be inspections, what those inspections might find, and whatever other developments may have occurred.
That’s as stupid an action as Congress passing a use of force resolution today so that some future President to attack Iran to stop a nuclear weapons program, and then hoping and praying that (a) we learn something about the program and (b) that future presidents – not just Obama, but any future president – won’t have a hard-on for attacking Iran. That is stupid, and any legislator who may be convinced that voting today for war at some point in the indefinite future, without actual information for the actual need for war, is either being a total fool or is looking for reasons to take a politically easy vote. There is no moral or intellectual justification for passing the buck on an important constitutional power to someone else in such a way.
Are you saying that you are/were more concerned about the electoral outcome if Democrats had voted no on war; rather than the outcome of supporting a totally unjustified war?
Because that’s what I’m saying most Democrats did, and that they should apologize for it.
Perhaps; it’s unknowable, and depends on when in your scenario Bush invades.
Because Congress has to protect its powers from the Executive. Such considerations trump party allegiance. Since the legal figleaf came from Congress itself, they weren’t in a strong position to contest it. If it was Bush asking alone, it’s a very different situation.
So, we can agree that without the authorization, Bush’s task of getting soldiers on the ground becomes substantially more difficult, though not impossible.
I argue that that increase in difficulty, and lack of legitimacy, would have been enough to stay Bush’s hand.
And Congress should have said “no” to that demand.
Then they should have passed the Levin Amendment and tied the invasion to the UN’s rulings.
This sort of logic can justify anything:
You can disagree, but there is nothing that makes you right when Bush had to make the tough call to invade. You have 20/20 hindsight, but Bush had to rely on his intelligence sources, including highly-placed Iraqi defectors, not the UN team, which was thought to be unreliable and easily tricked by cat-and-mouse games by Hussein. It’s not fair to blame Bush for being mistaken, he was acting in good faith using the information he had at the time. Heck, even Hillary Clinton said in 2004:
So, it’s wildly unfair to criticize Bush, just because you have hindsight.
God Bless America! I hope you understand what I wrote and don’t back out on your agreement.
BTW, I’ve linked to polls before and I’m not going to drag them in here again, but Americans were not eager to go to war in Oct 2002, and most wanted UN Authority before doing so. I don’t think Democratic Senators really needed to worry about re-election, certainly not HRC and Kerry. And, of course, I hope that wasn’t what they based their vore on!
Ravenman, that’s a good summary. The difference is between criticizing an outcome; a decision one didn’t agree with, versus criticizing a process, the systemic factors that enabled the decision to occur at all.
I’ve never deviated from that position. If Bush hadn’t made the decision to invade, the Iraqi WMD affair would almost certainly have been peacefully concluded, leaving Hussein in power but without open warfare.
However, it’s wrong to ignore what led to Bush making the decision; and being legally able to make it, which was the war resolution.
He didn’t, but he was portraying himself, in one speech after another, as someone who wanted to find a peaceful solution, and for whom war was a last resort.
And the bill he asked for was a far cry from the bill he got. Bush is not a stupid man, and he could usually play Congress like a violin, but this one got away from him. The version the White House proposed was much, much weaker than the resolution Congress passed.
Here’s what the first version of the bill, based on the White House proposal, says:
It had a long list of “whereas this” and “whereas that” about UN resolutions, but as you can see, the action part of the bill (which I quoted in full) had no requirement to even attempt to go through the UN; it just gave Bush carte blanche to do whatever he saw fit to “defend the national security interests of the United States against the threat posed by Iraq.” I don’t know how you can have a weaker premise for war than that, unless it’s the lack of international peace and security in the Middle East.
The final bill, which I’ve quoted several times already, had much tougher conditions, and required Bush to sign his name to a document wherein he was obviously lying.
But the outcome would have been exactly the same. He could have amassed troops in Kuwait while proclaiming up and down that it was only to force SH’s hand. But that he was prepared to use force as a last resort.
Why would SH act any differently just because, according to you, Bush had a note from Congress that he didn’t need in the first place?
But that just supports the proposition that Bush shouldn’t have asked for the AUMF if he didn’t think he needed it.
What difference does it make if he had sign a piece of paper? And how do you know he was lying? He probably really thought he was doing the right thing.
Attacks on our troops are explicitly mentioned as a trigger in the action section of the WPR. WMDs are not explicitly mentioned in the action section of the AUMF; they are just one of many subjects listed in the “whereas” section reviewing UN resolutions.
As for the rest, I’ll just agree to disagree. It seems inconsistent to me that you think that Bush was so transparently evil that everyone in Congress should have known that he would invade no matter what happened after the AUMF was passed (and I can’t imagine a better outcome than what actually transpired, namely Saddam allowing the inspectors in, and the inspectors reporting (eventual) full cooperation and an apparent lack of WMDs), and yet you can’t believe that he would have found another way to invade if it hadn’t passed. But since neither of us can prove what would have happened in that case, I’m content to leave it there.