USA Today 5/25/99 USA Today Editorial
Again, public gets bypassed
President Clinton faced a legal deadline Monday for ending U.S. military operations against Yugoslavia and withdrawing U.S. troops. But don't hold your breath waiting for him to comply - or for Congress to force him.
A post-Vietnam law intended to prevent presidents from stumbling into war without public support will be ignored once again.
It wasn't supposed to be this way. After the nine-year Vietnam adventure in military gradualism produced 211,000 casualties, including 58,000 dead, and left the nation bitterly divided, Congress set out to assure it wouldn't happen again. As the last U.S. troops left Vietnam, it set up a mechanism to force future presidents and Congresses to go to war together - presumably with a full-fledged national debate to build public approval - or not at all.
But it hasn't worked. Since passage of the War Powers Act, presidents of both parties have repeatedly waged unauthorized military actions on their own: in Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Libya, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and now Yugoslavia. And a supine Congress, whether led by Democrats or Republicans, has looked the other way.
Only in the 1991 campaign to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation did Congress exercise the role the Founding Fathers intended: voting to send the nation to war. But President George Bush, like Clinton and every other post-Vietnam president, claimed the deeply troubling authority to make war under any other name, with or without congressional or public approval.
Since NATO launched its air attacks on Kosovo, Clinton has ignored the 48-hour deadline for formally reporting to Congress and requesting approval to send U.S. forces into harm's way. Congress, choosing indecision over any decision that could backfire at the polls, has avoided for another 60 days either endorsing or repudiating what's going on.
Such inaction mocks the intent of the War Powers Act to make presidents and Congresses involve the public, whose lives would be spent.
Certainly, the task is not easy. And the law may be critically flawed. Presidents, as commanders in chief, need short-term flexibility in use of military force. But the issue is particularly pointed now. The Clinton administration sees its open-ended bombing in Kosovo and Iraq as the foundation of a broad new policy - one that would routinely employ the tools of war for long periods of time to attain U.S. objectives.
It's an exceedingly risky policy that ignores both the ugly lesson of Vietnam and the Founders' warnings about the ease with which unconstrained kings spend lives.
No president should drag the nation into war without properly building public support for it. And no Congress should fail to take a stand, yea or nay, on the issue.
Today, both are abdicating that duty.
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