Declaring War Is More Than a Formality

With hundreds of American sailors dead in a disaster of uncertain origin, the president of the United States submitted a letter to Congress. "I now recommend the adoption of a joint resolution declaring that a state of war exists . . . [and] that the definition of the international status of the United States as a belligerent power may be made known and the assertion of all its rights in the conduct of a public war may be assured," he wrote.

The letter was dated April 25. That is, April 25, 1898, as President William McKinley went to war with Spain, resulting ultimately in U.S. forces being sent to Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines.

More than a century later, a letter to Congress requesting a declaration of war -- or even inviting debate and consultation -- seems to be viewed by recent occupants of the White House as a quaint anachronism. Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Lebanon, Panama, Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan -- the list of American military interventions launched without an act of Congress grows long. Formal declarations of war appear to have gone out of style, even though the United States is projecting military force around the world as it rarely has before, with U.S. troops fighting in at least two countries and acting as combat advisers in three others.

Now, Bush administration officials are openly discussing the prospect of another military venture: an invasion of Iraq sometime between September and next January by anywhere from 70,000 to 250,000 American troops -- not only without a declaration of war but also without any provocation against the United States or its citizens. It is almost as if the Monroe Doctrine validating U.S. intervention in the Western hemisphere is being applied around the globe. Or as if President Theodore Roosevelt's vision of the United States exercising "international police power" to stop "chronic wrongdoing" or a "general loosening of the ties of civilized society" is being extended to the banks of the Euphrates. Or as if the Bush administration is reviving a Cold War-style belief in an overriding cause -- this time fighting terrorism -- to justify a vast range of actions to change foreign regimes.

"A great free people owes it to itself and to all mankind not to sink into helplessness before the powers of evil," TR said, predating Bush's invocation of the dark forces.

Despite the clarity of Bush's rallying cry to defeat evil and stop terrorism, an invasion of Iraq would bring a new set of confusing policy questions -- and dangers -- that merit vigorous and public debate. Would an attack be rewarded with quick success? Would opposition from Arab friends and European allies be sustained and costly? Would an invasion result in greater instability in Iraq and the region than American planners foresee? And what are the wider diplomatic implications of the United States taking preemptive action against another government, without any direct act of belligerence by that government against our nation?

Given these uncertainties, is there a sure-fire way for the administration to make wise decisions on what is to be done? Past experience suggests not. In foreign policy planning, no one has a monopoly on wisdom, and calculations are usually little more than sophisticated guesswork. But our history shows that some leaders have been more successful than others in making sound policy and charting the future.

They are the ones who engaged the Congress and nation in discussions that clarified U.S. goals and interests. Franklin Roosevelt had the wisdom to combat the isolationism of the 1930s and recognize the threat that Hitler and the Nazis posed to America's national interest. He did this by debating isolationists in Congress and the nation -- and artfully maneuvering through Congress to build up American forces and finance arms supplies for Britain under the lend-lease program even before Pearl Harbor. By contrast, historians criticize Lyndon Johnson for embroiling us in Vietnam, which proved to be the greatest foreign policy disaster in American history. Perhaps the outcome was preordained by Johnson's decision to wage that war without a broad consensus.

Some leading Republicans appear to have a tenuous grasp on the virtue of public debates about American wars. Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay attacked Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and Sen. Robert Byrd for raising questions about administration planning on Iraq. It is unpatriotic, they complained, to challenge the president's judgments in time of war. Critics ofBush's security measures "only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve," Attorney General John Ashcroft has declared.

Yet if history is any guide to what serves the national interest, Daschle and Byrd are right to want to air arguments about our goals in Iraq. More than two years of vigorous public discussion about American policy preceded our all-out involvement in World Wars I and II, America's two most successful foreign wars in the last century. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, an advocate of strict neutrality, resigned in protest in 1915 against President Woodrow Wilson's tough stance toward Germany (before joining the war) and "America First" isolationists disputed all of FDR's efforts to help Britain and Russia ward off defeat. In each case, debates about what participation or non-involvement might mean for the country's well-being forced Americans to think hard about going to war. By the time we joined the Allies in April 1917, most Americans were convinced that the sacrifice of thousands of lives was essential for the defense of global democracy and national institutions. Though it took the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to solidify American resolve, the months of arguments before Dec. 7, 1941, had gone a long way toward assuring a stable consensus for fighting the Axis powers during the next four years.

The Cold War changed the way in which we went to war. Congressional declarations seemed like horse and buggy vehicles in a jet-propelled age. Faced with communist challenges around the globe, presidents made congressional backing, as required by the Constitution, into an historical relic. Harry Truman answered North Korea's surprise attack on the South in June 1950 with an executive decision to enter the fighting. When American forces crossed the 38th Parallel, took heavy casualties from Chinese communist forces and got bogged down, the broad support from Congress and the country evaporated. The war became a source of painful division at home and abroad. This was the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time, critics complained, without having to share any responsibility for, or commitment to, the initial decision.

Similarly, Lyndon Johnson's executive decisions in 1965 to bomb North Vietnam and send the first of more than 500,000 combat troops to Southeast Asia were preludes to stalemate in Vietnam, political and social turmoil in the United States, and international opposition denouncing Washington as a neo-imperialist power. True, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in August 1964 gave Johnson a limited grant of approval for action in Vietnam, but it was not, as LBJ characterized it, like grandma's nightshirt covering everything. Between 1965 and 1968, the Congress bristled at Johnson's unilateral escalations of the fighting in an undeclared war.

In both these cases, imperious presidents acting with little regard for democratic debate about national security issues sacrificed blood and treasure in losing causes, destroyed their domestic agendas and compromised America's international moral authority.

Elsewhere, the United States used the Cold War to justify bringing down foreign governments without the massive commitment of U.S. troops. Our not-so-secret interventions in Iran to topple the Mossadegh government in 1953 and Guatemala's democratically elected Arbenz regime in 1954 added to our reputation as an international bully, who worried more about exaggerated Cold War threats than genuine national self-determination.

President Bush and administration advocates of a prompt attack on Iraq by executive fiat should think carefully about this past. A war on Iraq without a full-scale debate on what will serve the national well-being could be a terrible mistake. Even if we were to win a quick "victory" in initial fighting, we might find ourselves bogged down in trying to find political solutions. The violent divisions in Afghanistan might look like child's play alongside fierce Iraqi infighting between religious and ethnic factions. Nor can we be sanguine about the response of Arab friends and European allies to a unilateral invasion of a relatively weak, impoverished country. We should not forget Winston Churchill's observation during World War II: The only thing worse than having allies is not having them.

Foreign policymakers intent on initiating war without a concrete act of provocation are taking risks with allies. In other instances, America went to war after linking its decision to prior hostilities, whether it was the sinking of the USS Maine in Cuba under McKinley, raids across the border from Mexico under Woodrow Wilson (who sent U.S. troops in a futile effort to oust the government there), or the invasion of Kuwait under the first President Bush.

The Kennedy administration was mindful of this need. During the Cuban missile crisis, arguably the most dangerous moment in modern U.S. history, JFK and Robert Kennedy resisted pressure from military chiefs for an unannounced attack on Cuba. The president and attorney general worried that such an assault, even if effective, would be compared to Pearl Harbor and would blacken America's name. JFK understood that a blockade was a wiser course of action, which got the missiles out of the island without the bloodshed or loss of international prestige that a direct assault would have produced.

Kennedy also paid attention to the unforeseen consequences even an initially successful invasion could have, unlike many current advocates who assert without hard evidence that toppling Saddam Hussein would lead to a more democratic Iraq. A week after the Cuban missile crisis had apparently ended, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara put an updated invasion plan before the president. Though he encouraged continuing discussions of an invasion on the off chance that Khrushchev might renege on a deal to remove the missiles, Kennedy drew on history to caution McNamara. "We could end up bogged down," JFK told McNamara. "I think we should keep constantly in mind the British in the Boer War, the Russians in the last war with the Finnish and our own experience with the North Koreans."

In the aftermath of the Cold War, the first George Bush, understanding that unilateral decisions for war were out of fashion, won a congressional resolution to fight Iraq that was the closest thing to a declaration of war since Dec. 8, 1941. Though it was a narrow victory, it helped consolidate support for the Persian Gulf War.

After Sept. 11, the fight against terrorism has taken on characteristics of the fight against communism, one in which countries are either for or against us. But Bush and his advisers should not take 9/11 as a license to ignore democratic preludes to foreign action or the potential backlash from using military might without clear evidence of genuine threats to the United States. A rational domestic debate, including, above all, convincing proof of Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction, and extensive consultations with allies, will be needed to persuade people at home and abroad that this is a war worth the expenditure of blood, treasure and moral capital that such a conflict is likely to cost the United States.

Robert Dallek is the author of several books on U.S. foreign policy and history, including a two-volume study of Lyndon B. Johnson. His biography of John F. Kennedy will be published by Little, Brown in 2003.