revisiting the classics

[Brad DeLong]

>...Good democrats are wont to feel the crucial difference between a 
>State in which the popular Parliament or Congress declares war, and 
>the State in which an absolute monarch or ruling class declares war. 
>But, put to the stern pragmatic test, the difference is not 
>striking. In the freest of republics as well as in the most 
>tyrannical of empires, all foreign policy, the diplomatic 
>negotiations which produce or forestall war, are equally the private 
>property of the Executive part of the Government, and are equally 
>exposed to no check whatever from popular bodies, or the people 
>voting as a mass themselves...

Oh, but there is one respect in which the difference is striking: a 
war begun by Act of the Legislature is then ended by Act of the 
Legislature--and a lot of the things done during the war are then 
undone as a state of "peace" is restored.

This is why I am at one level profoundly upset and distressed by the 
Bushies' refusal to ask Congress for a Declaration of War against 
"Al-Qaeda, the Taliban de facto government of southern Afghanistan, 
and Others Yet Unknown allied with them." It means that the U.S. 
domestic and international security apparatuses will never return to 
their state as of September 10.

Brad DeLong